Scott Adams died today. I want to acknowledge something complicated.
He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.
His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.
You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.
For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.
Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.
The point of many of those comments isn't to fight hate, they're to be seen making comments openly against what their social group considers to be hate. It's performative, which is why they jumped on the opportunity so stridently. They get internet and social points for conforming to their group in a very visible way.
> He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.
Same to me when it comes his comics. There is an ugly part I did not like about Scott Adams but, that doesn't mean I will like his work (Dilbert) less. I have to admit it felt disappointing to find out about his vitriol online. Best wishes to his family and rest in peace for Scott. alway
Learning to appreciate someone's art while disagreeing with their politics is a rite of passage in the age of the internet.
There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though. (Note: I'm not talking about Scott Adams. I'm honestly not that familiar with his later life social media)
> There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though.
Thank you for at least acknowledging this. It's valid to appreciate someone's art while disagreeing with their behavior, but it's also valid if someone's behavior sours you on their art and makes it difficult to appreciate what they've accomplished - especially if you start to recognize some of their inner ugliness in their artistic endeavors.
Personally, I found that I connected with his early work a lot more than his latter work, as I found Dlibert's "nerd slice of life" arc a lot more compelling than his "Office microaggression of the week" arc. Scott revealing his inner ugliness did not make me eager to return, but I still keep a well-worn Dlibert mouse pad on my desk that my Dad gave me as a teenager; the one that says "Technology: No place for whimps."
Wherever Scott is now, I hope he's found peace.
EDIT: A few strips that live rent-free in my head.
- https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-quest-for-randomness
- https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/hzws/dilbert_condescending_unix_user/
- https://www.facebook.com/groups/423326463636282/posts/581619887806938/ (The Optimist vs The Pessimist)
I'm glad you brought up "in the age of the internet" because there's a part of "separate the art from the artist" that I don't see discussed enough:
In the internet age, simply consuming an artists media funds the artist. Get as philosophical as you'd like while separating the art from the artist, but you're still basically saying "look you're a piece of shit but here's a couple of bucks anyways".
There’s also a lot of artistic creepers, which predate the internet but the internet shone a light on their creepiness.
I would, for instance, watch The Ninth Gate a couple times a year if Polanski hadn’t directed it, or had directed it post jail instead of hiding from justice for 25 years. Instead I watch it about twice a decade. Luke Beson is almost as problematic, and I have a hard time reconciling just how brilliant Gary Oldman is as Stansfield with how creepy the overall tone is, especially the European cut. I enjoyed that movie when I was young and had seen the American version. Trying to show it to other people (especially the Leon version) and seeing their less enthusiastic reactions made me see the balance of that story less affectionately. As well as seeing it through the lens of an adult responsible for children instead of being the child. Now I watch The Fifth Element and that’s about it.
Meh. I liked Dilbert and it was a part of my childhood. I don't watch it anymore. Much like I np longer listen to Kanye.
There's enough good content out there that I can selectively disregard content from individuals who have gone to great lengths to make their worst opinions known. It doesn't mean their content was bad, it just means that juice isn't worth the squeeze.
"Can art be separated from the artist?" is an age-old debate.
> There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though.
I think this is common. Everyone separates art from the artist based on their own personal measurements on 1) how much they liked the art and 2) how much they dislike the artist's actions/beliefs. I'm sure a lot of people lambasting the GP for not completely rejecting Dilbert due to its creator still listen to Michael Jackson, or play Blizzard games, or watch UFC. There are musicians I listen to who have been accused of SA, but there are musicians I enjoyed but stop listening to because I found out they were neo-Nazis (not in the Bluesky sense, but in the "swastika tattoo" sense).
I was never a Dilbert fan, but know it spoke to people like the GP commenter and completely understand why they'd be conflicted.
IMO Dilbert was always at its best when it focused more on absurdity, and less on rage, cynicism, or ego. I still occasionally think about Dogbert's airliners that can't handle direct sunlight, the RNG troll that kept repeating "Nine", Wally's minty-fresh toothpaste-saturated shirt, and Asok's misadventures.
I do think there was another formula he gravitated towards, though. Maybe one in every four strips, it seemed to me like he would have a canonically "stupid" character present a popular belief or a common behavior, and then have his author self-insert character dunk on them... And that was it, that was the entire comic. Those strips weren't very witty or funny to me, they just felt like contrived fantasies about putting down an opponent.
Once I noticed that, it became harder to enjoy the rest of his comics. And easier to imagine how he might have fallen down the grievance politics rabbit hole.
I've always been a Dilbert fan, didn't get to any of his books until later. I think Scott was someone unafraid to share his thoughts, unfiltered.
They were valuable to me because it gave me perspective on a way of thinking I would never have considered. I disagreed with the majority, but some had the subtle beginnings of truth that helped to expand my world view.
I'm grateful he was part of the world, and will miss his comedy.
This comment reminds me of when I talked to a few Chinese friends about their thoughts on Mao. They all acknowledged the failed policies which led to famine, yet they also admired that he basically gave Chinese people their pride back.
They related him to an uncle figure who became a mean drunk.
I used to say the same thing about Ronald Reagan -- a president who did many questionable/bad things, but he lifted the U.S. out of the doldrums we experienced in the late '70s.
Over time I've learned context about how those doldrums occurred, and more about what Reagan actually did, and the trade seems much less worthwhile. :-/
The famine stuff I could write off as honest mistakes by a misguided but well meaning leader. Mao's role in kicking off the Cultural Revolution as part of his internal power struggle with the CCP can hardly be excused the same way, it was profoundly evil. The CCP today can recognize some of the faults with Mao, and even acknowledge that the Cultural Revolution was a disaster, but shy away from acknowledging Mao's causal role in that.
I’ve met too many (mostly martial) artists who have stories of their lineage having to hide their art during Mao or a similar dark period in other parts of East Asia to see these people as an uncle. More like the kid in high school you found out is serving two consecutive life sentences and saying, yeah that tracks.
Well that’s the kicker right? Mao gave way for later leaders who lifted China out of poverty. The normalization of all this craziness is what led the USA to where it is today. Two quite different trajectories.
> If anything, the US is still far away from as bad as China
That is a matter of opinion
I am unsure about social conditions within the countries ( freedom Vs. economic security -hard to compare)
But in international relations the USA has been a rouge state for many decades (e.g. tjr Gulf of Tonkin deception). The USA pretends to care about "values", but does not, it cares about it's own interests
China is plain speaking and cares, openly and transparently, about its interests
The USA has institutionalised hypocrisy. China sins her own sins in the open
It is very important to understand where the Chinese have just come from. British Imperialism and Japan's occupation were pretty much civilizational trauma events.
Opium Wars, Rape of Nanking. Things had been pretty hardcore for the Chinese for quite some time when Mao took power.
Having married a Chinese person. Yes. Despite the massive issues with the cultural revolution and communism in general, they are taught to be aware that it was Mao who threw off imperialism. Chinese are self governing because of him. Right or wrong, that is how they feel.
>Far more Chinese think that their country is a democracy and the government serves the people than in the US.
>Whether this is objectively true is another question, but from their perspective, that's what it is.
Correct, as a general rule, slaves think more highly of their slave owners, compared to people about their politicians/leaders who were elected by them.
( what happens behind the scenes is this: the slaves/dissidents who are rebellious are killed off by the dictator - only the most ardent supporters survive)
I can hear the argument that the Chinese government serves their people better than the US gov. Not necessarily agree with it but it's worth discussing.
However I don't know by what definition of democracy a country with a unique party, with so little freedom of press, can be considered as one.
>I can hear the argument that the Chinese government serves their people better than the US gov. Not necessarily agree with it but it's worth discussing.
Correct, as a general rule (true) slaves think more highly of their slave owners, compared to people about their politicians/leaders who were elected by them.
(what happens behind the scenes is this: the slaves/dissidents who are rebellious are killed off by the dictator - only the most ardent supporters survive)
I don’t think so. I haven’t seen a successful example of that, not in a country are large as China.
Even the US - after independence one imperialism was replaced by another - a committee of the wealthy. It was a slow march to the democracy and universal suffrage that exists today.
Unfortunately the rest of the world has no real example of that. Which is more of an issue with imperialism itself than the people trying to escape it.
The persona he presented in social media was very angry and smug. I always liked reading dilbert growing up, but it’s difficult for me to read Scott Adams comics now without the echo of his angry rants in the back of my mind.
Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not? I think most people could actually "choose family" (or not, if it's better for you as individual). Why stick with people if they're mostly negative and have a negative impact on you? Just because you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human on the planet?
Not to take away from the rest of what you say, it's a highly personal experience, and I thank you for sharing that heartfelt message to give people more perspectives, something usually missing when "divisive" (maybe not the right word) people end up in the news. Thank you for being honest, and thank you for sharing it here.
> Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not?
I'm sorry you had that experience.
There are very good reasons to leave / avoid family. I have an extended family and I've seen it all: One cousin recently had to kick her husband out for being an alcoholic; a different cousin was kicked out for being an alcoholic and met his 2nd wife in AA. Fortunately, my ultra-conservative aunt and uncle tolerate their transgender grandchild, but it creates a lot of friction between them and my cousin (transgender child's parent).
For most of us, our families are a positive experience. As we get older, we also learn that families are an exercise in learning to accept people as they are, and not as we wish they would be. We just can't go through life changing our people whenever they don't live up to what we want them to be.
As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.
> As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.
Protip: the love has to be reciprocated. Never, ever unconditionally love an abuser in the name of family. Set boundaries, when they are crossed, leave. There may be a cost, but it may be lighter than the cost of staying. We may not choose family, but we continually choose whose company we keep.
I’ve cut out most of my family when I was a teen and am middle aged now. The way I always say it is “my family is the one I built”. The one I was born into will pull you down with them. The family I built, is not without issues. But they are an order of magnitude better and generally aren’t trying to actively ruin each others life’s. In general, we work towards improving our lives and supporting each other; whatever that may mean. There might be some drama along the ways but it’s mostly forgotten and inconsequential.
My brother has a substance abuse problem. When he gets out of prison, he’s clean. Them a cousin or uncle that hasn’t seen him in a while will stop by with a party favor (an 8 ball of coke or something) and then before you know it my brother is in jail again. They all are alcoholics and drama often escalates to fist fight type drama. Or the women will start throwing stuff around someone’s house and trash the place. It’s just like normal to them. Sometimes they make up and help clean up and sometimes they don’t. But the few times I’ve been around them on the decades since I made a decision to cut them out, it’s always just the same ole shit. They’re in a cycle of “dependence on family” while also “destroying family” from my perspective. It’s so volatile I can put up with it at all. My kid has only met these people a couple times and it’s always for brief time because once the booze get flowing or the other substances get passed around anything can happen. When I was a kid my mom was arguing with her then boyfriend and he ran her over and she was in a full body cast for like 6 months. My dad was always normal ish, from a more stable family, then in my mid 20s he was caught in a pedophile sting situation. And that’s just the beginning.
Like, who tf are these people. I have no time for this shit, Is my take on it.
My experience has been that "chosen family" is a thing that works when you're young, but almost always falls apart when you get older. This has happened to countless people I know. Life throws all kinds of curveballs, incentives change, conflicts arise, sometimes very intense conflicts. Empirically, chosen family is a structure that works in a particular place and time, then disintegrates when conditions change. Real family isn't like that; there is a very strong anthropological connection wired into us that doesn't go away when the situation changes.
Of course it's different for everyone, some families are so tragic they may not be worth preserving, etc. But that's an outlier-- the modal experience is that the power of family is precisely in the fact that you don't get to choose it.
Modern western societies kind of broken that. A culture of Kicking your kids as soon as they are 18 years old is not very conducive to a culture of strong familiar links like, let's say, the culture of early 20th century Sicily.
I moved out at 18 (like most of my peers) and my extended family lives far away to begin with. I think I have an alright family situation compared to some friends, but it's not like I see any of them more than once or twice a year?
If you can get friends who live nearby and come over once a month that's probably closer than the modern us family structure tbh
And I have seen multiple counterfactuals. Even people who are descended from the one who was part of the "chosen family" continue to visit and treat them as family.
An adopted child is also a form of chosen family. As is a spouse.
I think the point that's being made is-- it's a lot easier to stick together over the long term when you spend the first 20 years of your life together in a family unit. It's possible to build long term, stable bonds under other circumstances-- just less likely. It's also possible to screw the former up.
I'm getting off-topic with this, but a quick aside:
In my teens I began to learn that most of the people on my father's side of the family were horrifically broken people with severe issues. There's at least one town in New Mexico where I wouldn't want to use my last name because an uncle of mine has run it deeply through the mud and 20' underground so to speak.
I've actively cut those people out of my life. I've decided that blood isn't the only thing that makes family, and that I can choose who I want to treat as family.
The infighting bastards who happen to share my last name are not my family.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but I would point out that "happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human" is probably not the best mental model of how to quantify this sort of relationship. Due to combinatorial explosion, these numbers are kind of misleading. It is similar to saying that it is trivial to crack a 1 million bits of entropy password because we already know 99% of the bits. This leaves out that you still have 2^(10000) possible passwords.
Your immediately family shares hundreds of thousands more variable sites in your genome than a 'random' individual. Which is to say there would need to be something like a 2^(100000) population of humans before someone 'random' would be as close to you in terms of variable sites.
I guess my point being "you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA" is just not trivial or a small coincidence that can be waved away with "we are more similar to each other than not". Whether any genetic similarity means that one's biological family deserves one's attention, I have no comment.
My interpretation is that there are two different senses of “family” at play here:
- The people with whom we share close bonds, stronger than ordinary friendship; we absolutely can (and should) choose them, and choose them wisely.
- The people who've disproportionately shaped our development into who we are as persons today; barring sci-fi technologies like time machines or false memory implantation, that's pretty hard to change.
GP's comment seems to be more about the latter, and of Scott Adams being in that category. I agree with that in my case, too; both the Dilbert comics and The Dilbert Principle were formative for me both personally and professionally — which amplified the pain I felt when Adams started to “go off the deep end” and reveal himself to be less of a Dilbert and more of a PHB.
> I think most people could actually "choose family"
It's all fun and games until grandma passes with a $10M net worth without a will, and the 5 children and 20 grandchildren start a real life session of battle royale
What gets me is how much energy some families put into fighting each other over something that is really not worth that much, be it money or otherwise. I know it can be relative but the instances I witnessed, the actual parties could have made more money just even doing gigs in the hours they spent fighting, not to mention money spent on legal fees. It boggles the mind
Richard Bach in his book Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah: “The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.”
I first read those words many years ago. They were a comfort and a revelation then, and they still resonate today, when I have very much chosen my own family.
You can choose family and still choose wrong, you can have family assigned at birth and it could be the best. You get what you get in life and eventually it ends anyway.
But here is used in a way of "Yes, I know his views hurt other people, and are more despicable than not, but he's family, what am I supposed to do? I can't ignore them", which is what I'm feeling a bit icky about.
I think art is a lot like family - you don’t get to pick which works really resonated with you and influenced you, even if the artist turns out to be a “bad person.”
And back in the day, Adams was a pretty crunchy California guy. Remember the Dilburrito?
Interesting that you literally chose him as family (albeit parasocially) when he's not actually family, and then somehow justify it by saying that one cannot choose their family. Pick a lane.
I think he means that it was like family in the sense that he was there. You didn't choose him, Dilbert was just everywhere. And back in the day everyone loved Scott Adams, but then thing started to go bad over time and we all realized what was happening. It's similar to what a lot of families face - you love someone when you're younger but realize how messed up things are later. Or the person changes in negative ways. I don't see this as justifying anything.
My thoughts exactly! The "You can pick your friends, but you cannot pick your family" mantra is a good one, but this guy is talking about a cartoonist he likes. Scott Adams isn't your friend or a family member; he just draws Dilbert comics!
"So I realized, as you know I've been identifying as Black for a while, years now, because I like to be on the winning team"
"But as of today I'm going to re-identify as White, because I don't want to be a member of a hate group, I'd accidentally joined a hate group."
"The best advice I would give to White people is to get away hell away from Black people, just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this, this can't be fixed, you just have to escape. So that's what I did, I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population"
The first is a (totally legitimate) dig to DEI policies, has nothing to do with racism; the other two need to be put in context, as he was reacting to a poll according to which a sizeable proportion of black people disagreed with the statement "it's ok to be white".
Now, someone who disagree with the statement "it's ok to belong to <ethnic group>" is usually called a racist. That's if we stick to the default meaning of words, without second and third guessing what people really mean to say when they deny it's ok to belong to an ethnic group. I think it's legitimate to be upset in this context and at the normalisation of such a thought, even to the point of reacting offensively.
Adams: "I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off. I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying. I'm not saying start a war or do anything bad. Nothing like that. I'm just saying get away. Just get away."
"So I realized, as you know I've been identifying as Black for a while, years now, because I like to be on the winning team"
"But as of today I'm going to re-identify as White, because I don't want to be a member of a hate group, I'd accidentally joined a hate group."
"The best advice I would give to White people is to get away hell away from Black people, just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this, this can't be fixed, you just have to escape. So that's what I did, I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population"
Casting helping black people as a lost cause is not him deciding not to be an ally. It's him literally spreading racist rhetoric about black people as a whole
I'm not sure I would describe this as "deciding to not actively ally":
"So I realized, as you know I've been identifying as Black for a while, years now, because I like to be on the winning team"
"But as of today I'm going to re-identify as White, because I don't want to be a member of a hate group, I'd accidentally joined a hate group."
"The best advice I would give to White people is to get away hell away from Black people, just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this, this can't be fixed, you just have to escape. So that's what I did, I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population"
I am always genuinely curious when someone interprets something that is blatantly racist to me as something not. What about what Scott said was not racist? How do you define racism?
From what I understood (and I might be misinterpreting or applying a too sympathetic filter) Scott was upset because of the spread of a political ideology (identity politics) and because of its tangible impacts on society (for example DEI policies). For example, the entire tirade against black people starts from commenting an opinion poll according to which a sizable proportion of black interviewees disagrees with the statement "it's OK to be white"- which, applied to any other ethnic group, would be pure and blatant racism. Then, what should be your reaction when you learn that a certain group of people thinks that something in your group is inherently wrong? Stay away from them.
It starts by believing that there are distinct human races (which there are not). That alone makes most US Americans racist based on language alone. No (sane) German would nowadays speak of "Rasse" to describe someone with a different skin color.
Then, of course, racism consists of the believe that some races are intrinsically less valuable (in whatever sense) than others. I didn't see Scott Adams voice that part. But I might have missed it or it might have been implied.
But it's important to note that US identity politics of the last couple of decades looks increasingly weird to me as an outsider in any case.
>What did the guy say that has everyone stumbling over themselves to vaguely allude to it?
The funny thing is that most people do not know what exactly he said, their stand is everyone else says that he is a racist so he must be one. Very similar to people calling the author of a book as bigoted - a book that they have never read.
I have difficulty reconciling this with the other side of the picture. It seems to me like true clarity of thought wouldn't have ended up in the places he did.
Sigh. Men, especially white men, seem to have the luxury of not rejecting white supremacists in total. While his art resonated, so did his hate.
Shouldn't we reject these people entirely? We have a fascist regime running the USA right now, with a gestapo running around killing and kidnapping people, in no small part due to people like Adams making his point of view acceptable and palatable over time.
Adams claimed Black Americans were a hate group and that white people should "get the hell away".
As to ICE deporting criminal aliens, that's not what they're doing. They're kidnapping people off the street and out of their homes and cars, with no warrants. They're literally doing "Papers, please" style stops of anybody they even suspect could be an immigrant, including Native Americans. Just a few days ago in Minneapolis they abducted four homeless men who are members of the Oglala Nation. This all sounds pretty Gestapo like to me.
That's not what he said, that's his take being presented through a media filter.
His comments were in response to a Rasmussen Reports poll that asked people if they agreed with the statement "It's OK to be white". Around 26% of Black respondents disagreed (with some unsure), which Adams interpreted as meaning nearly half of Black Americans were not OK with white people.
Is it reductive? Sure. Is it racist? Of course not. You're allowed to have opinions on the Internet as long as you treat others with respect.
Was Obama’s use of ICE also kidnapping, in your eyes? For reference material, please read the ACLUs papers on their site.
No ICE agent has been indicted for kidnapping. Can you explain why? ( Remember, they have been doing this for many years, under presidents of both parties ).
It takes a lot of privilege to ignore a person's overt racism and only remember a person's more agreeable qualities. Whitewashing a person's legacy in this way is a disservice to all of the people that person directed hatred at, as if it didn't really happen.
He was a racist person, and the people he was racist towards would prefer that people not forget that, even in death, because the problems that Scott Adams embodied at the end of his life did not die with him.
I'm black, and I can ignore Adams' "overt racism", because I understood the context of his words, and I can empathize with him. Please don't speak for an entire group of people.
(It really takes a low IQ person to takes things out of content and call him a racist. I'm no fan of SA, but I did appreciate what he had to say about the race thing, somebody has to speak up against the politically correct nonsense out there. Not surprisingly many people who call him racist - haven't even heard him on the topic. Very similar to people calling the author of a book as bigoted - a book that they have never read)
Scott Adams said that Black people are inherently dangerous, and that white people should move to enclaves to get away from them.
While you're out here conducting pseudoscientific IQ readings of internet commenters you disagree with, some of us are actually aware of what overt racism looks like.
I'm not sure the comment is saying to ignore the racism.
"...you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous."
Whitewashing literally means applying a wash (which is white, typically being lime or chalk) over a surface. The wash covers whatever was underneath with a uniform coating that hides what's underneath. It's like paint, but ancient.
Whitewashing has been a thing since before races (which are biologically meaningless) were called colors.
As a metaphor, it means exactly the same thing -- hiding the parts underneath with something that covers them.
Whitewashing is not sanitizing. Sanitizing something actually fixes it. A whitewashed surface is not implied to be sanitary. Lime is basic (high pH) so it also discourages (eg) mold growth, but it's not sanitary.
More generally, not every word that includes the substring "white" is a part of the conspiracy. Whichever conspiracy you are demonstratively opposing here.
Then everyone should embrace blacklisting, and master-slave system architecture. But they don't, and it's time to extend that sentiment all the way. We need to stamp out all hint of racism, lest we all be bigots.
The term isn't racist. Whitewash is a lime-based "paint" often used to conceal faults, and is literally the most direct a metaphor could be for glossing over a person's faults. Please educate yourself.
I will probably be downvoted for posting something that “doesn’t add value” but I have to say that is a beautiful post about a difficult topic. I could never put into words my feelings as well as you just did. I loved his art. I did not love the man.
I find it really sad that I lost respect for him because of his political views. When someone you admire dies, it happens once. When you lose respect for someone, that person you admired dies over and over again, on every new disappointment.
To me, he died many times in the past few years. Dilbert of the 1990s is dear to me and I really enjoyed the animated series. My sons tell me it prepared them for corporate life. I'm sad he left us this way. I wish I could admire him again.
Or "if you take away my ability to hug women I will become a suicide bomber and I won't apologize for it. I like hugging more than I like killing, but I will kill." especially coupled with "Learning hypnotism has been my Jedi mind trick into sleeping with women".
Yes, placing your political views into the realm of moral views places them beyond contestation. For many people, most of their political views boil down to core moral views, including ideas about taxation and carbon.
That’s why it’s not productive to just point at people and say they’re bad because they have bad ideas.
> I could never put into words my feelings as well as you just did. I loved his art. I did not love the man.
There is a lot of this in the modern era, and probably will only get "worse". People need to sooner than later be able to reconcile this whole idea of "not liking the person yet can't help but like their art". Back in the day it was easy to ignore, and probably most of the bad stuff was easily hidden, not so much these days.
Yet he did a lot of good leaving his money to academia and medical research.
I think the Egyptians had it right. Ultimately your heart will be weighted against the feather of Ma'at, and it is up to the goddess to decide. We mere mortals don't know the true intentions and circumstances of other people and their lives to judge, nor to throw the first stone.
This reads like a Speaker for the Dead moment (from Ender’s Game): neither eulogy nor denunciation, but an honest accounting. Acknowledging the real impact without excusing the real harm.
Please give more positive ways to interpret these things he has said:
> So I think it makes no sense whatsoever, as a white citizen of America, to try to help Black citizens anymore
And:
> So if you are wondering how men become cold-blooded killers, it isn’t religion that is doing it. If you put me in that situation, I can say with confidence I would sign up for suicide bomb duty. And I’m not even a believer. Men like hugging better than they like killing. But if you take away my access to hugging, I will probably start killing, just to feel something. I’m designed that way. I’m a normal boy. And I make no apology for it.
I'd particularly love to hear how I should interpret this second one in a manner that isn’t just me being an “intolerant leftist”.
Oh, and this one:
> Learning hypnotism has been my greatest Jedi mind trick to get women to sleep with me.
How are these not “deeply troubling” attitudes towards females and not “reader intolerance”?
Bypassing the accuracy of this statement, it is extra hilarious because his Trump-era snake oil was persuasion. He apparently failed at the thing he valued most.
> His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.
I’m sorry, are you also racist or do you mean a different family?
Scott Adams undoubtedly “won at life” but also somehow remained angry at the world. More of an example of things we shouldn’t do and things we should try to eradicate.
Many people have belligerent, racist older family members who only became more belligerent and racist over time. They're practically a stock character in jokes about Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Scott Adams did me a considerable and unsolicited kindness almost 20 years ago, back in 2007. One day my site traffic logs showed an unexpected uptick in traffic, and recent referrals overwhelmingly pointed to his blog. Of course I recognized him from Dilbert fame, both the comic strip and The Dilbert Principle.
I sent him a thank you email for the link, and he replied graciously. This began a conversation where he referred me to his literary agent, and this ultimately led to a real-world, dead-tree-and-ink book publishing deal[1]. He even provided a nice blurb for the book cover.
I can't say that I agreed a lot with the person Scott Adams later became--I only knew him vaguely, from a distance. But he brought humor into many people's lives for a lot of years, and he was generous to me when he didn't have to be. Today I'll just think about the good times.
I loved Dilbert, having worked for more than one Dilbert-like company the humor frequently resonated with me.
How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced, e.g. a stroke or something. It was incredibly sad to see him throw away his life's work and go down a path most of us at least hadn't foreseen and die having alienated his fans.
I read one of his books once, written in the 90s or so. It included the idea that affirmations could literally change reality ("law of attraction"), and an _alternative theory of gravity_. At the time, I thought that these were probably attempts at jokes that didn't land very well, but... Once you believe one thing which is totally outside the pale, it is often very easy to start believing others.
After reading that book I found it a lot less easy to be amused by Dilbert. That experience contributed to my actively trying not to learn things about artists I enjoy. It's that "don't meet your heroes" cliche, I guess.
I had this exact experience. Growing up I had nothing but good memories of reading Dilbert over my breakfast cereal, and then laughing as I got into the workforce and realized how accurate the satire was. And then seeing what "he" was actually like just completely threw me for a loop.
At some point he had a mailinglist called Dogbert's New Ruling Class (DNRC) which would soon come to rule the world. In it he wrote lots of really weird, unhinged, occasionally funny stuff. At the time I thought it was all one massive joke, layers of irony and trolling. But more recently I've been wondering if he was actually serious.
I had that same epiphany when reading a biography of Ernest Hemingway.
Another type of work I avoid are "the making of ..." documentaries/accounts of classic works of film, music, and TV shows. Pulling back the curtain really destroys the magic.
I remember those, i think they were in the appendix of The Dilbert Principal. I thought the gravity one was particularly strange. I bet he had one of those perfect storm personalities that just go completely crazy when hooked into a sufficiently large social media network.
btw, affirmations is a pretty common thing in a lot of religions and other superstitions. Every single Catholic mass is pretty much just the same affirmations/mantra/rituals over and over with a bible story at the end. They even publish the schedule on an annual basis iirc. (my wife briefly converted to Catholicism when we were getting married)
It's a weird book and not in a great way. He presents a bunch of very strange "theories" in a way where he kind of says "haha just a silly lil thought... unless it's true", which I remember seeing in some of his early Trump stuff too.
"Theory of positive affirmations" and related ideas have been floating around for a long time. There is some scientific research around this (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-age-of-overindul...) but there are also some culty groups that use it for indoctrination or as sales tools.
Yeah likewise. The book I read had a completely wrong “explanation” of Bell’s inequalities that said that FTL transmission of information was going to be happening in the future as soon as we’d got some of the technical details around entanglement ironed out. It wasn’t a joke it was pseudo—scientific magical thinking. I knew then that he had either always been, or had turned into, a crank.
My youth experiences left me with zero desire to ever work anywhere near a tech company. But when I was still in grade school, I once flipped through a Scott Adams book that my father had borrowed from the local library. There's one line that I remember particularly clearly, directed at any woman who felt uncomfortable or ignored in the workplace:
"WE'RE THINKING ABOUT HAVING SEX WITH YOU!"
Google tells me this is from "The Dilbert Future", 1997, pg. 146 under "Prediction 38". It's presented as the explanation for when a woman speaks in a meeting, and male coworkers don't listen to, quote, "the woman who is generating all that noise".
Adams more or less tells female readers to just deal with it, while also telling male readers that they're broken/lying if they're not engaged in a constant sexual fantasy about their female coworkers.
To be honest, this did real damage to how I felt about sexuality and gender. Not a huge amount on its own, but it's just such a distorted take from a respected author, whose books my father kept checking out, that I read at a young age.
Scott Adams clearly lived an atypical life. Most people don't quit their jobs to write comics about corporate culture. If I had to guess why he took such a hard turn later on, I think, maybe it's something that happens when a humorist can't compartmentalize their penchant for absurdity and need for attention from real life, they can tell jokes that resonate with a lot of people, but at the same time their serious views also end up becoming ungrounded...
You have to remember, it is theorized that Scott Adams is the 'Cartoonist' from the Pick Up Artist book "The Game".
If you aren't familiar with it, well I was once given a copy by a friend who said they used it to 'get their partner'.
I tried reading it, found it despicable (its basically everything we hate about manipulation in the attention economy,) also the person who loaned it to me had bad narcissistic tendencies; the only time I saw them cry was when someone died that they didnt get to bang.
He has ... very problematic ... perspectives on females. "If you take away my ability to hug, I will kill people. I'm deadly serious and I won't apologize for it. I like hugging more than killing, but I will become a suicide bomber."
and "Learning hypnotism has been my Jedi mind trick to sleep with more women".
> How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed,
They weren't surpressed; he was very open about them from very early on in his career as a comic artist; they were central to his “origin story” and were woven directly into the comics. Its just, for a while, other aspects of his still-recent experience in corporate America gave him other relatable things to say that were mixed in with them, which made it easier to overlook them.
I specifically do remember comics poking fun at diversity initiatives. A quick search of "Dilbert comic about diversity" brings up some examples.
At the time i read those i probably thought they were on point. I've changed my views over the years. You can't keep them or you end up like Adams. That's probably the key to understanding him. He grew up in an era where black students were not allowed to attend white schools. The world changed. He didn't.
Later on there was a ton of weird anti-feminist content in the comics.. he also had his blog where he wrote way too much so ended up in holocaust-denial and “evolution is fake” territory. Another person talented in one field and pretty unremarkable otherwise who needed to air his terrible opinions about everything else.
Even in early (20 yrs before Trump stuff) interviews, Adams said that one of the reasons he tried various businesses out (like the comic) was that his coprorate manager told him that the manager was being strongly discouraged from promoting white men. That's likely what folks are referencing with regard to his "origin story."
He definitely blamed both the end of his career in banking and at PacBell on alleged discrimination against promoting White men in/into management (and I think he claims responsible people at both told him explicitly that that was the reason he was being passed over).
Somewhat later (but still quite a while before what people describe as him “turning”), he would also claim his Dilbert show on UPN was cancelled because he was White, making it the third job he lost for that reason. (More likely, it was cancelled because its audience was both small and White and UPN was, looking at where it had successes and wanting a coherent demographic story to sell to advertisers and in an era where synergies between the appeals of shows on the same network was important to driving ratings, working to rearrange its offerings to focus on targeting Black audiences.)
Were there early signs? I don't know of them, but to be honest, I mostly "knew" him through Dilbert. When he turned out to be a bigot it was a disappointing surprise to me.
I remember reading (I think in newspaper interview) in the late 1990s his own description of how comics became his full-time focus and his deep resentment of how difficult it had been to advance in management in corporate America because he was a White man in the 1980s (!?!) was pretty central to it.
To add, he also said elsewhere that he didn't like his job and was phoning it in and focusing increasingly on his art. He thought he was passed over because of his gender for a promotion... When he was openly phoning it in and writing comics about how his work culture sucked. Why would you promote someone with their foot out the door and who was badly misaligned with the organization? One or the other maybe (someone who doesn't like the work culture might be a good pick to improve it) but both? Why would you even be upset about it when your art is blowing up and going full time on it is clearly the right move?
Similarly he felt his TV show was cancelled after two seasons because it wasn't PC, but his show wasn't getting good viewership and had a terrible time slot. That's a pretty typical trajectory for a TV show, it's like complaining your startup failed.
He wrote a lot about explicitly magical thinking. Sort of along the lines of The Secret; that he could achieve things where the odds were against him through sheer force of will and wishing. That's not necessarily a problem but it does set you up for denial when things don't always go your way. And the denial is dangerous.
The later chapters of his life were marked by tragedy. His stepson died of overdose. His marriage collapsed. He lost the ability to speak and had to fight like hell to get a proper diagnosis and treatment (he later recovered). He went through COVID like the rest of us. Unfortunately these events would seem to have hardened and radicalized him.
I think we can understand and empathize with that without condoning it. I hope he found his peace in the end.
> * He thought he was passed over because of his race for a promotion...*
He didn't just invented it in his own head, you know. He was directly told that he won't be promoted because he was a white man. If I remember correctly, it had more to do with his sex and not his race.
> He was directly told that he won't be promoted because he was a white man.
I think Adams was lying. I don't think they ever told him that.
For instance in contemporary interviews about his show being cancelled he gave reasonable explanations. Only later did he claim his show was cancelled unjustly. He also wrote a book with the subtitle, Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter. I think as his views hardened he didn't feel obligated to tell the truth, and/or that his lies were in service of a deeper truth.
So I think he sincerely believed he had been passed over because of his sex, but that that conversation never took place and he knew it.
> If I remember correctly, it had more to do with his sex and not his race.
You're right. I've updated the comment. Thanks for the correction.
There was nothing of the modern taboo on discussing this during the 80s and 90s. White man were more or less free to complain, not that anyone would listen, but complaining was still acceptable.
Oh, oof. But also ... huh. Not that I'm steeped in dilbert lore, but wasn't the the main villain was a stupid balding white manager guy? Dunno if he's an unreliable narrator or was just smart enough to keep the white supremacy out the comics at first.
> Not that I'm steeped in dilbert lore, but wasn't the the main villain was a stupid balding white manager guy?
I'd bet dollars to donuts that (if there is truth at all to him being told what he claims) the superiors making the promotion decisions so that told him he was being passed over because he was a White men were also White men. If he had to justify it, he might say that PHB also became a manager before the wave of political correctness.
I had one of his books from ages ago and it had a long bit on the end about affirmations and his weird views on quantum physics and the ability of human mind to manipulate them.
I read his blog every now and then. He was cheering and celebrating the technical aspects of Trump's manipulative language... with no regard for its impact.
He was always a contrarian. Sometime around 2007-2008, he had a humorous blog post that (IMO rightfully) questioned the US's narrative on Iran and nuclear weapons. He had to backpedal very quickly after it blew up.
I don't recall any of his rightwing stuff, but I remember one of his 90s books had some stuff at the end about how quantum physics meant you could control reality by envisioning what you want and then you'd enter the universe with it. I was a teen and remember being utterly baffled.
That's basically the premise of the book "The Secret", which ironically destroyed the lives of a few friends of mine for a few years before they snapped out of it.
Adams had a normal range of beliefs. Postulating that they arose from some extrinsic and extra-personal source is a condemnation of your own limited views. People get older and begin to care less about conformity, including keeping controversial thoughts to themselves, as society loosens its reins as your needs are met (to make money, to find a partner, to have a family, etc.)
The law of attraction / master persuader/ I can hypnotize large audiences stuff isn't that normal, I think?
If you want an explanation for why he would try ivermectin for cancer treatment he had a lot of beliefs in that vein for a long time. I consider that tragic for him.
He was into NLP (the hypnosis theory) from way back.
James Hoffman, the coffee YouTuber, had an interesting comment on how he tried to use that in one of his 90s barista competitions, but seemed skeptical of it now. Scott remained a believer.
It's a communications skill, like, say, making powerpoint slides. If you get good at it, you will swear by it. But if can't gain skill, it's easy to think it's bogus. If you're deeply interested I can go into detail as to what it's about and not about. Or you can buy some books, get a trainer, or take a class.
Tl; dr: it's about adding a second layer to your communication which attends to the subconscious, not unlike art. It was originally for therapy, but unfortunately a lot of businessdorks in the 90s got into it and perverted it.
uh I don't know, try asking almost any person who was born pre-1960? Doubt they all had brain damage. Not that it was necessarily a good thing, but it was certainly 'normal' in many eras throughout time.
Did he go off the rails? My understanding is that the zeitgeist is taking people’s opposing views online and distorting them, removing context, to outrage our own audience and align it to our cause.
Almost everyone is reasonable, it’s the contexts that our reasons are relevant to, which are different.
> the zeitgeist is taking people’s opposing views online and distorting them, removing context, to outrage our own audience and align it to our cause.
This is 100% the case, with very infamous baddies, but people don't want to acknowledge it. It's a sad reality of this always on media we ingest. No idea what can be done, other than slowly ignoring more and more algorithmic stuff, and choose your own adventures based on content providers you have known for a long time, and still have their backbone intact.
Elements of society slowly wise up to how they are being manipulated, as they are increasingly exposed to it. Now with modern AI the online manipulation tactics are getting worse. So as we find ourselves in that pool of ppl who see what is happening, we just stop using those platforms, and increasingly trust more human-human contact or long form video where people have a chance to state their positions.
Sure, the context was a poll that asked Americans "Is it OK to be white?" with about half of the black participants saying they either disagreed or weren't sure. A bit of Scott's elaboration is near the bottom: https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/poll-finds-over-a-qu...
I haven't followed everything Scott Adams has done recently (largely because most of his stuff ended up paywalled), but in the past I'd note that he'd have an interesting take on something, possibly hard to defend but not intrinsically "bad", but then he'd get lumped in as having a "bad" opinion by people that just wanted to create headlines. One example was his assertion that Donald Trump was a "master persuader", and much more skilled in his speech then people were giving him credit for. I remember, at the time at least, that he always prefaced it by saying it wasn't in support/antagonism of Trump, just an observation of his skill, but it quickly got turned into "Scott Adams is a MAGA guy." (Since then, I don't know if Adams ever became a MAGA guy or not, but it's an example of how at the time his statements got oversimplified and distorted). Anyway, I saw a lot of examples of that -- he'd have a relatively nuanced take probably expressed too boldly, but people wanted to just lump him in to some narrative they already had going.
I think Scott Adams' biggest problem in life (although partially what also made him entertaining), is that he'd kind of pick fights that had little upside for him and a lot of downside.
It would have been easy for you to check whether he was a "MAGA guy or not", which he was in the sense that he spent the last years of his life spreading neonazi adjacent rhetoric.
He and been way off the rails for decades before that.
In fact, growing up in the very affluent part of my city, I saw a bunch of kids die using opiates to mentally escape the weird family fiefdoms where they [p/m]atriarch inexplicably wouldn't ever need for money, so went completely off the rails mentally. I was prescribed a bunch of opiates (including fent) after a bad ski accident, and can tell you that they basically work by turning down the volume on life around you. I can understand why someone would turn to them to mentally escape a bad family life.
About the only good thing I can say about recreational Xanax is that those kids are generally still alive in contrast to the ones who preferred opiates.
He wasn't though. He was simply analyzing the communication styöe of Trump, using his hypnosis knowledge, and explained why and how it was better (more efficient) than the competitors. This turned out to be true, giving him the win, just like Scott Adams predicted.
The description of reality is not at all the same as supporting it. "Is" vs. "Ought to be".
Can definitely see how that'd warm someone up to a politician who is crippling drug enforcement capabilities, addiction treatment programs, and addiction research... errr wait.
I suspect growing up in an era where community, the newspaper, radio and TV spewed religious, racist, and sexist content gradually increased sensory memory related neural activity that fostered biochemical and epigenetic effects that over time become effectively immutable.
Not sure why we are being coy about the triggers. Society of his youth and the biology are well documented.
Concluding he would need an M.B.A if he wanted to climb the corporate ladder, Adams got into UC Berkeley, with the bank footing the bill. As he closed in on his master’s degree, he learned that an assistant vice president position was opening up but figured he wouldn’t get it because the bank was leaning toward hiring a minority, he said.
Adams jumped to Pacific Bell and completed his degree, thinking he was on the fast track to upper management. But in his book, Adams wrote that as was the case at Crocker National, his new employer was also coming under fire for a lack of diversity in its executive ranks.
Instead of getting mad, Adams got to drawing. Believing all this was a sign for him to revive his dream of cartooning, he purchased a primer on how to submit a comic strip and went about creating Dilbert.
Isn't his accounting of things the reason you judge him as crazy in the first place? I would assume you aren't just taking your personal opinions, uncritically, from others'.
He didn't go off the rails. He was using hyperbole. He went on one of the top black podcasts right after he was cancelled and explained himself. But the soundbites are all that seem to matter.
Most of us have experienced a family member who got caught up in a corporate (or worse) news addiction.
It’s so common that we barely remark on it any longer. So I don’t think it’s really a mystery, it can happen to anyone who’s not getting outside enough.
My first clue something was wrong was when he didn’t understand the criticism around the Iraq war of the early 2000s. Which even most conservatives have come around now to acknowledge as a disaster.
Looking the timeline of controversies, I reckon he was radicalized by Conservative ragebait twitter, repeating just what was hype then. I'm only aware of these things because I know some people who brought out similar 'hot takes' and 'you need to care about these issues' irl at similar times
I always thought it was the same as a solid part of his specific cohort and generation; excessive entertainment-style news consumption through the normal rabble rousers. For a group of people who were obsessed with telling me that wrestling was fake, they sure were a group of marks when a guy with a gravelly voice told them what to think.
I didn't know about his comments about Black people until today. It's more than a bit pathetic that he devolved into colour-based absurdities so late in life. For someone who could pattern match the reality of life at a large company so effectively, it's unfortunate he couldn't realize he was being played by 4chan trolls and fellow travelers in the media.
My working hypothesis is that some jobs are inherently isolating and that gradually leads to mental deviance. CEOs and cartoonists are similar in this way.
He didn't have peers to challenge him on anything, and after a couple decades of that, he was just high on his own supply. Elon Musk and Kanye West have the same issue.
I think it was that there was a cancel culture censorship type of intensity that occurred while he was able to express before, it particularly latched onto targeting people like him (we all know about and have heard of the intensifying censorship in the last half decade COVID-era) and one of the things I've recently learned is censorship, a form of criticism, has that affect of creating and triggering insecurities which digs us deep into extreme positions.
Think of it this way: if you were cancelled and repressed and censored in your own home and unable to express yourself, your efforts to communicate to remain authentic would intensify not die down. Or you die and let yourself morph to the average new censor-ship approved world.
Scott wouldn't do that and neither would I. All this to say I think its normal to intensify your opinions and even take on and be pushed to more extremes when you live in a controversial time of "you're either on my side or the other side and theres no acceptable middle gray area.
While he definitely went off the rails, I first caught a hint, back in the 90s, when his fanclub/e-list was named "Dogbert's New Ruling Class"... and he seemed to take it a bit too seriously.
I followed his blog back when he started this descent, and I have a theory that it was hill climbing.
He used to blog about pretty innocent stuff; his wife making fun of him for wearing pajama pants in public, behind the scenes on drawing comics, funny business interactions he'd had. But then he started getting taken out of context by various online-only publications, and he'd get a burst of traffic and a bunch of hate mail and then it'd go away. And then he'd get quoted out of context again. I'm not sure if it bothered him, but he started adding preambles to his post, like "hey suchandsuch publication, if you want to take this post out of context, jump to this part right here and skip the rest."
I stopped reading around this point. But later when he came out with his "trump is a persuasion god, just like me, and he is playing 4d chess and will be elected president" schtick, it seemed like the natural conclusion of hill climbing controversy. He couldn't be held accountable for the prediction. After all, he's just a comedian with a background in finance, not a politics guy. But it was a hot take on a hot topic that was trying to press buttons.
I'm sure he figured out before most people that being a newspaper cartoonist was a downward-trending gig, and that he'd never fully transition to online. But I'm sad that this was how he decided to make the jump to his next act.
I should have clarified for people who had the good fortune to not be exposed to these posts, but that was usually his lead-in to his ultra toxic writing. i.e. it was an engaging hook that led to more engaging trolling
>How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced.
No surprises for me. By my standards he was never radicalized just an objective thinker with a flair for humor.
I got to interact with Scott just once on Twitter. I shared one of his strips in response to a tweet he made. My intent was tongue-in-cheek and very inline with the themes of his work, but he reacted very aggressively and then blocked me.
It was a bit of a crushing moment because inside my head I was thinking, "I know and love this guy's work. Surely if I just engage him at his level without being a jackass, we can add some levity to the comments section." My instinct was that maybe he really was just a jackass and I should label him as such in my brain and move on.
But then my cat got sick last year and went from being a cuddly little guy to an absolute viscious bastard right up to the day he died. It was crushing. One day I realized it felt similar to my experience with Scott. I wondered if maybe Scott was just suffering really badly, too. I have no idea what the truth of the matter is, and I don't think that people who suffer have a free pass for their behaviour. But I think I want to hold on to this optimism.
Always give the benefit of doubt. Perhaps him acting aggressively and blocking you was a misunderstood attempt at humor. A lot of comments I make online are tongue in cheek but people take everything very seriously. Adding emojis doesn’t solve that problem and can even make it worse. It’s really impossible to know for certain. Online communication is totally different from the real world where feedback is instantaneous. Better to assume good intent, even when there’s a very high likelihood of being wrong. If nothing else it’s better for you to err towards rose colored glasses.
Quite frankly, this is a worry for me. I have noticed that I've become shorter with people and less tolerant as I've got older. I've started to feel some resentment in certain situations where I felt I was being unfairly treated.
I recognise these feelings and things, which I am grateful for. So I work hard to correct this, and I hope I succeed, but I seriously worry about my brain changing and becoming someone quite unpleasant. You look at people from the outside, and it is so easy to judge, but we're all just a big bag of chemicals and physics. Personality change does happen, it could happen to any of us.
It's a sad moment for me. I got into Dilbert at the tender age of eight years old. I don't know why I liked it so much when half the jokes went over my head, but I loved computers and comics, and I plowed through every book at my local library. It was my real introduction to software engineering, and it definitely influenced me in many ways that certainly shaped the man that I am today.
I never agreed with him politically, and I honestly think he said some pretty awful stuff. However, none of that changes the positive impact that his comics had on my life. Rest in peace.
> I got into Dilbert at the tender age of eight years old. I don't know why I liked it so much when half the jokes went over my head, but I loved computers and comics
Same! Or at least I got into them as a young kid I don’t remember the exact age, it was probably a few years older but definitely tweens max.
I’m also not sure why I liked them so much, other than that I loved computers and always knew I’d end up working in the industry, so maybe it was like a window into that world that I liked. I also loved the movie Office Space, so maybe I just had a thing for office satire.
very interesting to find other folks who jibed with this comic at a young age. My mom and aunt had cubicle jobs and the entire idea seemed very fun to me. I recall looking at my 4th grade classroom and thinking we could really benefit from some cubicles.
Sadly I'm doomed to work in an open floorplan.
I wasn't exactly a daily reader at the time, but I was sad to hear when dilbert was pulled, and why. I tried to send him some fan mail when I heard he had fallen ill, but the email of his that I found had been deleted.
Same! My dad worked in corporate HR and loved Dilbert (I guess it spoke to him), so we usually had a few of his books and/or a strip-a-day desk calendar around the house that I would read. I never considered it before, but maybe I'm the cynical software engineer I am today because of Scott Adams. The world is a funny place sometimes.
One thing I appreciated from Scott was his "compounded skills" concept. He explained it: he wasn't a very good writer or illustrator. But he combined those skills with some humorous business insights to make Dilbert.
I'm very fond of a quote from Tim Minchin that I'll paraphrase as: "I'm not the best singer or the best comedian, but I'm the best voice of all the comedians and I'm the funniest singer."
Don't max one stat. Be a unique, weird combination of several.
"If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:
1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things."
I'm certain at least some small part of my own success can be attributed to my exposure to this idea, and for that I give my respects to Adams. As far as Adam's character (or lack thereof) is concerned, that's already being discussed elsewhere in this thread by others more eloquent than myself, so I'll leave that to them.
> 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
Is this idea that top 25% is "very good" at something innumeracy, or a subtle insight I'm missing? There's got to be a million skills that you could assess rank at -- writing embedded C code, playing basketball, identifying flora, PacMan, archery, bouldering… I can't imagine ever being able to not continue this list -- and you should expect to be in the top 25% of roughly a quarter of those skills, obviously heavily biased towards the ones you've tried, and even more biased towards the ones you care about. It's hard to imagine anyone who's not in the top 25% of skill assessment in a dozen things, let alone two or more…
Ignore the numbers - the gist is being good enough at the right two or three things can create similar value for you as being the best at one specific thing.
Everyone (for the sake of my argument) wants to be an engineer at a FAANG but there are tons of folks making more money with more autonomy because they've found a niche that combines their good-enough technical ability with an understanding or interest in an underserved market.
I think it's generally accepted that at a high level being in the top quartile is considered very good. Not excellent. Not unicorn. Just very good.
Beyond that, it's not about becoming very good at two different, completely orthogonal things, it's about becoming very good at two things that are complementary in some way that is of value to others. Being good at PacMan and Bouldering is only particularly valuable if you are competing for opportunities to participate in a hypothetical mixed reality video game, or perhaps a very niche streaming channel. Being the top quartile of embedded c code, and flora identification could result in building software/hardware tools to identify flora, which is a niche that currently has multiple competing products that are high value to those interested.
If you consider your denominator to be the population of practitioners, rather than "everybody", top quartile would be pretty good. To use chess as an example, the 75th percentile of the global population probably knows the rules and nothing else. The 75th percentile of chess players would be an Elo of 1800 and change.
Growing up I read Dilbert in the paper every morning. At some point I got one of the compilation books and for some reason in an epilogue Adams included his alternate theory of gravity which was essentially that gravity as force didn't exist and things pressed down on each other because everything was expanding at the same rate. He said he had yet to find anyone who could refute this.
Even at 12 I could tell this guy was an annoying idiot. Loved the comic though.
> things pressed down on each other because everything was expanding at the same rate
I don't think this originates with him, it sounds like an amusing joke a physicist would say because the math happens to be equivalent, and there is not an experiment to differentiate between the two.
> He said he had yet to find anyone who could refute this.
Which is why it's so important for people understand the Principle of Parsimony (aka. Occams Razor), and Russels Teapot.
Also, refuting it is rather easy, and doesn't even require modern technology, Henry Cavendish performed the experiment in 1797 [1]. Nothing in the experimental setup would change if all involved objects expanded.
> Humor often comes from the weird thoughts and emotions involved in a situation, as opposed to the simple facts. The best fodder for humor can be communicated by a simple description of the situation and then saying "So then I was thinking..."
Yeah, at the end of one of his books, I forget which, he described how he could manifest reality, such as getting a specific score on the GMAT not by targeted studying but by staring as hard as possible at the mail before he opened it. Absolute lunatic.
--absolute lunatic.
To paraphrase Adams, he always said manifestation was likely not "magic" but that when you tried it out for yourself, it *seemed* like it happened by magic.
There was a super weird alignment at a previous job where the appearances, personalities, and seniority/rank of some of my co-workers matched characters in Dilbert to the T. It was really funny and almost eerie, like Scott Adams was hiding in a cube taking notes.
Once, for a whole week, every Dilbert cartoon matched something that happened in our office of ~50 people the day before. People started getting freaked out like we were in the Matrix or someone was feeding it to Adams.
Really love Scott for creating Dilbert one of the best all-time comic strips, teaching the psychology of persuasion, and for writing How to Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big. It taught me to focus on systems and habits as a preference over goals (goals are still useful, but can be unrealistic and less adaptable). Plus God's Debris was an interesting thought experiment about the origin of the universe. Really great thinker and humorist. RIP Scott.
I didn't always agree with Scott Adams on everything he did and said, but "The Dilbert Principle" taught me more about living in a corporation and management than any other book on business and his dilbert comics were a source of endless wisdom and amusement, which I use often today.
I always enjoyed Dilbert, one of the few of my friends who did as it was a bit of a specific sense of humor. But Scott Adam’s really, really fell off a cliff into some very odious takes in his recent years. Feels like he should have stuck to Dilbert, but he lived long enough to see himself become the villain instead.
He fell off the cliff when he left his day job to write the comic full time. At least that is my opinion. Falling down the cliff took a while, at first he was still close enough to corporate reality to still be realistic in his exaggerations and thus funny, but the longer he was a way the less his jokes were grounded in reality and so they became not funny because they felt a little too far out.
Of course writing a comic takes a lot of time. I don't begrudge him for wanting to quit, and others have made the transition to full time humorist well - but he wasn't the first to fail to make that switch. He should have retired when he was a head....
Let the above be a warning to you. I don't know how (or if) it will apply, but think on it.
The story I read long ago was that he had a long-standing agreement with his manager that if his cartooning ever became an issue for his day job, he would leave. Then a new manager came in who basically said "OK."
Worth the read: “The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh” https://a.co/d/7b7Jnt6
I couldn’t read Dilbert the same after that. Adams avoids, with surgical precision, things like unionization, while the author simultaneously supports downsizing despite seeming to mock it in his strips.
Anyway, shame he’s dead, but to me he died a long time ago. I only feel sad when thinking about how I used to enjoy Dilbert.
Very true, loved Dilbert. I guess I was unaware of his dubious takes early on because my only interaction was seeing the comics. Later on the interactions became Dilbert + Reddit post on how Scott Adams is an antivaxxer.
Dilbert was pretty influential for me in the 90s and early 2000s. I enjoyed those comics a bunch while I was kid. He seemed to struggle a bit with his fame, and apparently his divorce caused him a pretty big psychic trauma, which was unfortunate.
His later personality was.. not my style.. and I dumped all of his books into little free libraries a few years back. The only things I really found interesting from his later work was focusing on systems rather than process.
Can't deny the early influence, though. The pointy-haired boss will live on forever.
In the 90's, I worked for a small consulting company with large corporate clients.
We joked that we could assess the health of a company's culture by whether Dilbert cartoons were tapped up in cubicles. Companies without them tended to have not much in the way of a sense of humor, or irony, or self-awareness.
The worst job I ever had was working for a manager who literally had a "no Dilbert cartoons in the workplace" policy. Other cartoons, fine, go crazy. But no Dilbert.
That place wasn't just kinda like Initech in Office Space, it pretty much WAS Initech in Office Space, only way less funny and interesting.
Yeah I think that Joel Spolsky wrote some blog post about Dilbert cartoons on walls being a red flag. However, surely no cartoons is surely more often down to stiff policy which in it self is a way worse red flag. (Black flag? At least on the beach)
As a young engineer, I was once visited at my work desk by my CEO and the HR team because of all the Dilberts I had up on my cubicle wall. They felt they were harming morale. The engineers around me loved them, but they made fun of management, the real issue. I was surprised it merited the attention. I won a short battle over the issue and was allowed to keep them up. I still have a photo of that cubicle with them up.
Once, before the web existed, I emailed Scott and joked that perhaps he was someone at my company, looking over my shoulder. The comics were often absurd but also so accurate. He replied something friendly, I forget what.
As was Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. Oddly in my own corporate travels, the practice seemed to have stopped mid-90's. In the '00's and later, cubicle walls were mostly barren. After '08, cubicles had disappeared altogether and they just lined us up along long tables like cordwood.
That brings back memories. They were definitely popular. In the early 2000s, I worked at a small company and one coworker had a bunch of Dilbert strips all over one of her cubicle walls. It wasn't an insane amount, but her cube was on the way to the break room, so it was visible to everyone passing by. Apparently the owners of the company did not like that and had her take them down.
I always thought that finding those strips in an office was a warning sign. If they identify with those characters, there was something profoundly wrong.
Why does every other comment apologize for adams' political views? It's like a bunch of people were conditioned or brainwashed into reflexibly regurgitation nonsense.
Long ago where one's politics is elevated to the position of identity the culture shifted and continues to shift.
I realized early on through IRC that some people cannot have a professional or cordial relationship with someone opposed to their position. The moment someone found out I believed in the opposite of the group I was attacked.
Always gave a sensible chuckle to his comics. One of my favorite scenes from the show was about "The Knack". My dad originally shared this with me, reminding me that I'm "cursed" for inheriting the knack from him.
Make a will.
Pay off your credit card balance.
Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.
Fund your company 401K to the maximum.
Fund your IRA to the maximum.
Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.
Put six months’ expenses in a money market account.
Take whatever is left over and invest it 70 percent in a stock index fund and 30 percent in a bond fund through any discount brokerage company and never touch it until retirement
If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issue), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges you a percentage of your portfolio.
Solid advice overall. But I have to disagree with the 401k advice.
> Fund your company 401K to the maximum.
Fund it up to amount your company matches. The maximum you can contribute to 401k is 40% of your salary I believe. I wouldn't contribute 40% of my salary to the 401k. Just the amount your company matches ( 5% or whatever it is for your company ). That 5% match ( or whatever it is ) is free money. It would be foolish to leave it on the table.
Not American, but as I understand it, 401k's are tied to your employers 401k implementation and while you are employed you have little choice in how the funds are managed. If you are contributing to a third party managed fund (employer or otherwise) that is not being matched, then you are ceding control of your retirement funds for no practical benefit. You would be better off putting your savings into another tax shelter appropriate to your needs that you can control.
If you aren't getting a matching benefit or other reward for using an employer managed investment, then you shouldn't. If someone doesn't have the time, inclination, or knowledge to understand the difference then investing in an unmatched 401k is still better than not saving at all :S
I kept meaning to tune in again to his livestream before the end. It was always a good listen as he went over the news with his dry sense of humour and judgment on fact vs fiction.I liked how he kept going after they cancelled all the Dilbert syndication - good lesson in resilience. RIP.
I didn't like the person he became towards the end of his life, but Dilbert gave me a lot of laughs and was a perfect representation of what the corporate world looked like to my younger self. May he rest in peace.
He was quite a public person and aggressively tried to shape public sentiments. It's perfectly valid to have an opinion on him without knowing him personally.
Dilbert definitely captured a 90s era corporate zeitgeist. But, after he departed PacBell, although there was the occasional strip that really nailed it, Dilbert never really moved on to modern SV/startup/open floor plan tech and it mostly felt like been there, done that. That said, Dilbert in its prime was easily in the top comics I enjoyed.
That’s exactly it. I got into the industry right at that transition, at a startup that sold software into telcos. At the startups we found out what happens when Wally becomes the CEO…
Someone I knew taped a cloud-related strip to my half-cube wall. It was perfect. (I had been hired in early cloud-related days for that purpose.) But there were increasingly fewer things in that vein latterly.
I loved Dilbert back in the day, and even the books were witty and poignant.
I would like to point out that the quality of his satire really feel of as time went on. He came from an office life in the late 90s and had a lot of insight into it's dysfunctions. But after decades of being out of that world, he had clearly lost touch. The comics often do little to speak to the current corporate world, outside of squeezed in references.
As I see it, decline in quality and the political radicalization go hand in hand. You cannot be a good satirist and be so long removed from the world you are satirizing.
The political radicalization and the divorces. The strips he created after being fired by his syndicate are a bleak insight into his mindset in his final years. https://x.com/WyattDuncan/status/2011102679934910726
Taking his anodyne setup-punchline-sarcastic quip formula and applying it to aggressively unfunny shock material is actually low key brilliant, albeit unintentionally so.
It’s like if Norm MacDonald didn’t posses a moral compass.
I think that a lot of us on here can give credit to Scott Adams for helping develop their cynicism, for better or worse.
He was a role model to me for helping me to make sense of the corporate world and its denizens. This might not sound like a compliment, but it is. He was my Mr. Miyagi for mental resilience by providing good arguments for most people not being evil, despite how it might seem.
This guy was always interesting...because he understood satire so well, he understood nuance and made comedy from it...then he became chronically online and went down insane alt-right rabbit holes.
Even those of a logical mind may not have the fortitude to protect themselves from propaganda that exploit their victimhood.
Scott Adams shaped my sense of humor and perspective on a lot of things. Even in later years, when I disagreed with him immensely on a lot of things, I found that there was a thread of insight in what he said regarding how people experience reality and the power of words and images. Ultimately I tuned out, but before I did I followed his line of inspiration (which he was very public about, often naming books and authors) for a lot of that and was not disappointed. I was grateful that the insight was again sincere, and learning them didn’t take me to the places I did not want to go — the places he himself seemed to sincerely enjoy.
It’s not hard for a lot of us to criticize who he became. He certainly had no shortage of criticism for others. I looked up to Scott a lot as a kid, and as an adult found him to be a man like any other, with limits and flaws… not merely in spite of his accomplishments, but often because of them. There’s a lesson there that I wish to carry too.
I disagreed with him politically, especially during the last few years, but I'm very appreciative of Dilbert and in particular the Dilbert cartoon. The Knack is one of those clips that I keep coming back to and sharing with friends whenever someone shows signs.
> After a 2022 mass shooting, Adams opined that society leaves parents of troubled teenage boys with only two options: to either watch people die or murder their own son.
Regardless of the truthiness of that statement, that sentence at most makes him say something wrong. How on earth is that sentence making him a "PoS"??? At worst, he sees a tragic binary option where others see better and more. Some of his other public statements, sure, but this one?
It's typical right wing "boys will be boys" mentality. Under no circumstance should boys or men be held accountable for their actions. The only options for boys with issues is to let them kill people or kill them. It's simply not possible the parents are doing something wrong or that we hold young men accountable. It contributes to how extremely fragile a scary percentage of young men are these days. Everything must revolve around them or violence is expected and understood. It's all this and much more from him.
Which is at it should be. Wikipedia isn't a news source, and especially for something like this should be careful about allowing edits to stand until they can cite sources.
> Later (incorrect) predictions repeatedly featured in Politico magazine's annual lists of "Worst Predictions", including that one of Trump, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden would die from COVID-19 by the end of 2020,[98] that "Republicans will be hunted" if Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election
> In a 2006 blog post, Adams asked if official figures of the number of deaths in the Holocaust were based on methodologically sound research.
It's not about assumptions, it's rationalization. The tribal playbook requires one to demonize the enemy in order to justify what they want to do to them.
The entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale.
To go from a brilliant satirist to becoming terminally online and just completely falling off the far right cliffs of insanity is incredibly sad. And unfortunately, this is plight is not uncommon. It is incredibly dangerous to make politics part of your identity and then just absolutely bathe yourself in a political media echo chamber.
I read the Dilbert Principle when I was young, but still old enough to appreciate a lot of its humor. Later, when I discovered Scott was online and had a blog, I couldn't believe it was the same person. To me, the Scott Adams of comic strip fame had already died many years ago.
> just absolutely bathe yourself in a political media echo chamber.
It seems to me that social media belongs in the same "vice" category as drinking, drugs, and gambling: lots of people can "enjoy responsibly", some make a mess but pull back when they see it, and some completely ruin their lives by doubling down.
The danger is those three are usually done in social situations where others can "pull you back" - which is why online gambling and drinking/drugs alone can get so bad so fast.
Social media has nobody to pull you back, you just get sucked in to the whirlpool.
Social drinking and smoking can also pull you forward. What pulls you back is having something else to do (in other words a greater life to go back to), and that is why behavior problems fit in to a larger picture of a not-having-anything-to-do crisis, which is referred to in the media as a mental health crisis, a loneliness crisis, alienation of labor, or anything that involves the natural cycles regulating normal human behavior (socializing, working to make stuff, having balanced views) being interrupted.
Absolutely. Social media is designed to elicit a constant stream of dopamine hits, prey on our need for social validation, keep the amygdala engaged, stoke conflict, and bolster whatever beliefs we carry (no matter how deranged). It’s the ultimate distortion machine and is wildly dangerous, particularly for individuals who struggle to keep it at arm’s distance and fail to equip mental PPE prior to usage.
Just watching it now (and what a house it is). There's a TV in almost every room, and Fox News is on each of them. He says: "Yes, it is the same station on every television, because that's how the system is designed. It's designed so it'll play the same station all over the house. It happens to be Fox News, but I do flip around. It's not nailed on Fox News, in case you're wondering."
What makes it cautionary? From what I can tell, he hardly suffered from what you described. I'm not saying that I agree with everything that came out of Scott's mouth, but I never saw a sign of regret in him in regards to politics.
Well on the health side, he might not quite be Steve Jobs level, but he spent months taking complete nonsense "treatments" where his medical condition (predictably) worsened dramatically. That part's certainly a cautionary tale.
Sure, though I'm not sure why that matters as I am pretty sure we all have some sort of cautionary tale in our lives the further back you dig.
I don't agree that this is a clear-cut example of a cautionary tale. I think for most people it can be a cautionary tale since it's common to chase things that promise hope in a desperate situation. We also shouldn't dismiss that someone can weigh the risks and take a gamble on something working out. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong or stupid for someone trying something conventional even if it backfires.
It's important to try and see this from Scott's perspective. According to him, he had his use of his vocal cords restored by a treatment that was highly experimental and during a time when all the official information said there was no treatment. If we are to believe his words, it worked out for him once, so it makes sense that he would decide to try things that are unconventional when his entire life was at stake.
I don't recall where (Vic Berger?), but someone made a compilation of "regret" clips from Trump influencers (Alex Jones and others, and Scott Adams). This was in the circa January 6 days, where humiliation reigned, and they all felt betrayed because "RINOs" dominated Trump's term, "the deep state" was still standing, and he accomplished nothing of note. It's been memory-holed since then but that was the dominant mood back then (they blamed his mediocrity on "bad staffing", which later led to Project 2025).
Well Scott Adams was in there, venting (in a video) that his life had basically been ruined by his support for Trump, that he'd lost most of his friends and wealth due to it, and that he felt betrayed and felt like a moron for trusting him since it wasn't even worth it. Nothing had changed and the country wasn't "saved".
This video is so badly edited that it’s really difficult to figure out what he’s actually saying. It’s obviously cut to portray some kind of regret, but for example what does “he left me on the table” even mean? Who? How?
Sorry, as other commenter points out, the editing is only “bad” in a specific context. It’s brilliant for purposes of comedy and mockery. It’s definitely not good for purposes of understanding what Adams really thought.
Edit: and for what it’s worth, I have no idea who “Berger” is or that/if they edited that Vice video.
It’s edited well for its purpose, perhaps; it is not edited well for the purpose of understanding the context and intent of the Scott Adams quote being discussed, which is very much not its purpose. From the perspective of someone trying to understand the evolution of Adams’ views, it is badly edited, which is different than saying Berger is a bad editor, or even that it is badly edited from any other perspective.
Well okay, if you could find this compilation then I'd be interested. That really doesn't sound like the Scott Adams I've seen over the course of the last decade.
I’d be interested in seeing this. Not to doubt you, but I suspect a more accurate characterization is not “my life was ruined by my support for Trump” but rather “look what being right about everything gets you in a world of trump haters.”
> Nothing had changed and the country wasn't "saved".
Let's be precise and remove those scare quotes.
In 2015/2016 Trump was literally talking about saving U.S. critical infrastructure:
1. Promising to fulfill a trillion dollar U.S. infrastructure campaign pledge to repair crumbling infrastructure[1]
2. Putting Daniel Slane on the transition team to start the process to draft said trillion dollar infrastructure bill[2]
By 2017 that plan was tabled.
If anyone can find it, I'd love to see Slane's powerpoint and cross-reference his 50 critical projects against what ended up making it into Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.
Infrastructure Week was literally a running joke throughout Trump's first term because his staff would start by hyping up some substantive policy changes they wanted to pass, only for it to be completely derailed by yet another ridiculous/stupid/corrupt/insane thing Trump or one of his top people did.
Clearly Trump himself has no interest in these sorts of substantive projects, I mean just look at his second term. He has even less interest in policy this time around and isn't even pretending to push for infrastructure or similar legislation.
Don't forget his claim that master hypnotists are using camgirls to give him super-orgasms to steal his money. He was a nutter in more ways than just his politics.
> In other news, for several years I have been tracking a Master Wizard that I believe lives in Southern California. It seems he has trained a small army of attractive women in his method. The women create a specialized style of porn video clips that literally hypnotize the viewer to magnify the orgasm experience beyond anything you probably imagine is possible. Hypnosis has a super-strong impact on about 20% of people. And a lesser-but-strong impact on most of the rest.
> Once a customer is hooked, the girls use powerful (and real) hypnosis tools to connect the viewer’s enjoyable experience (a super-orgasm, or several) to the viewer’s act of giving them money, either directly or by buying more clips. Eventually the regular viewers are reprogrammed to get their sexual thrill by the act of donating money to the girls in the videos. There are lots of variations tied to each type of sexual kink, but that’s the general idea.
> My best guess is that 10% of the traffic that flows through their business model literally cannot leave until they have no money left. The Master Wizard is that good. The women are well-coached in his methods.
Many, many commenters here are themselves bathed in a political media echo chamber, just a different one. Ironic, isn't it?
If you treat your political opponents as 'insane' instead of trying to understand what moves them, it says more about you than about people you consider insane.
I have a two famous friends in the television industry. It seems they fall into the trap that since they produce popular TV shows that they then can think they know every thing about everything else, mostly because of the people that surround them want to stay friends so they can be associated with the fame. I think this is the trap Adams fell into as well. Whether that was with his knowledge or ignorance I do not know.
I do not let my friends get away with them thinking they are experts on everything.
Adams turned his fame of Dilbert into his fame for saying things online. I mean he even started a food company! Anyone remember the "Dilberito"??? Seems he was always just looking for more ways to make money. And reading his books it sounded like he wanted to get rid of religions.
So he was human, just like the rest of us. And he died desperate and clutching to life, leveraging whatever power he had to try to save it from who ever he could.
When I was young I didn't understand meaning of the words "do not bear false witness" and it was explained to me as "do not lie". As I've gotten older and now understand the words better, the much broader category of "do not bear false witness" seems like the better precept. Spreading false witness, even if sincere, has great harm.
And why did he say that? And what was the end result of him posting that?
You should add context so people know that Kaiser was delaying his treatment, Trump's team got Kaiser in gear so that he could receive it (Trump did indeed help him). Now imagine any other non-famous person with Stage IV cancer trying to get treatment without the help of a president.
When I was a lot younger I thought the comic strip was funny but I read a review of it circa 2005 which pointed out it was dangerously cynical and that Dilbert is to blame for his shit life because he goes along with it all. That is, if you care about doing good work, finding meaning in your work, you would reject everything he stands for.
It's tragedy instead comedy and it doesn't matter if you see it through the lens of Karl Marx ("he doesn't challenge the power structure") or through the lens of Tom Peters or James Collins ("search for excellence in the current system")
I mean, there is this social contagion aspect of comedy, you might think it is funny because it it is in a frame where it is supposed to be funny or because other people are laughing. But the wider context is that 4-koma [1] have been dead in the US since at least the 1980s, our culture is not at all competitive or meritocratic and as long we still have Peanuts and Family Circle we are never going to have a Bocchi the Rock. Young people are turning to Japanese pop culture because in Japan quirky individuals can write a light novel or low-budget video game that can become a multi-billion dollar franchise and the doors are just not open for that here, at all.
Thus, Scott Adams, who won the lottery with his comic that rejects the idea of excellence doesn't have any moral basis to talk about corporate DEI and how it fails us all. I think he did have some insights into the spell that Trump casts over people, and it's a hard thing to talk about in a way that people will accept. What people would laugh at when it was framed as fiction didn't seem funny at all when it was presented as fact.
his conservative viewpoints and political support (which incidentally i do not share) do not automatically make his beliefs “far right”. i have not seen or heard a single thing he’s expressed or done that suggests “far right”. if anything, he appears rather centrist.
and can we stop already with the smearing? it clearly wasn’t intended to be a nazi salute, which both the ADL as well as the person who made the gesture have clarified. do we think he is lying about that? why would someone who wants to make nazi salutes on stage then go and lie about it later?
scott adams, however, has said and clarified his far-right viewpoints many times publicly. there’s no ambiguity there.
Actually it’s more accurate to say Scott was always a far right troll and provocateur, but at some point he fell down a racist rabbit-hole. The book “The Trouble with Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh” shows how Scott Adams never cared about the plight of workers in the first place, using his own words. It was way ahead of its time, as the angry reviews from 1998 and 2000, back in Dilbert’s heyday, demonstrate.
I say this as someone who used to really enjoy Dilbert, but looking back with a critical eye, it’s easy to see an artist who deliberately avoids bringing up topics that might actually do something to improve corporate culture.
Scott Adams’s boss at Pacbell in 1985 was (still) an SVP (and my boss) at AT&T in 2012.
There was always a buzz and a whisper whenever someone was frustrated: “SHE’s the boss who inspired Dilbert.”
Internally there was a saying that ATT stands for “Ask The Tentacles.”
I haven’t really read the “funnies” since I was a kid but the few Dilbert comics I ever did read NAILED her org.
I will never forget being paged 1,000 times a night - not even kidding — or having my boss demand I “check sendmail” every time anything and I mean anything went down. Voice? Data? CALEA tunnels? IPTV? Fax? No, I can’t go immediately investigate the actual issue, I have to go into some crusty Solaris boxes the company forgot about 11 years ago and humor some dinosaur with three mansions who probably also directly inspired the Peter Principle in 1969 and are still working there.
As a product manager in the computer industry from the mid 80s into the 90s, Dilbert really resonated with me as satire--except, as you say, when it was barely satire. Not so much except for occasional later strips that really nailed some specific thing.
I do not know about anybody else, but I do not read comics, watch movies, listen to music, or read books [for pleasure] in order to learn a lesson, learn how to "improve corporate culture", or anything else. Entertainment is, for me, 100% escapist. I indulge in entertainment as a brief escape from reality. If Dilbert had been preachy, which A LOT of comics seem to be these days, I would not have enjoyed it.
This progressive movement is absolutely totalitarian.
As long as you adhere to all mainstream tenets, you're good and virtuous, like pre-2018 JK Rowling. Gay Dumbledore, yay!
But if the mainstream tenets change, and some previously loyal followers disagree with some of them, they should be ostracised, cancelled and vilified, like post-2019 JK Rowling.
The funny thing is that this is what real fascists and communists did to a T, yet, progressive people view themselves as anti-fascists.
When my everyday life is no longer impacted by politics, I'll be able to put it aside for a day, because I'll be able to ignore the impact politics has on me for that day.
But that's not the world we live in. It won't ever be the world we live in.
Not having a dog in this fight, what it really looks like to me is the “haters” started as people who respectfully acknowledged his greatness while also recognizing that there were aspects of him they didn’t like. The real hatred came out when people couldn’t handle this due to sharing a political identity with him.
I think maybe you’re reading too much into it. I’ll happily acknowledge that I’ve fallen off my own cliffs of insanity at times. It’s hyperbole, not an attack.
Using wikipedia as the arbiter of truth is ridiculous. The man spoke about all sorts of things for an hour a day, almost every single day for years - to boil down his thoughts and opinions to 4 paragraphs that other people wrote is asinine.
I would imagine whoever wrote those 4 paragraphs has researched a lot more than I did about his political views. If someone with better sources went there and corrected any mistakes made previously, with referenced demonstrating it, the article would be much improved.
You don't need to have an opinion on everything. Clearly you don't care about this or you would spend the time watching some of his videos or reading his articles that expound on his "controversial" statements. It's ok to just say "I don't know" rather than thinking you're well informed because Wikipedia says so.
No, his comments about race and supporting political groups that advertise oppression and hate have not and will not be simply categorized as a political view. There are universal truths and morals that do not change and simply saying we have different views does not excuse violating those.
I hope this isn't too off topic but one of the key underpinnings of, for lack of a better word, capital-D Democratic / liberal (/ leftist-ish?) ideology in the US is that there is not a universal truth governing reality. Watch any debate where "objective truth" gets brought up and more than half the time the response won't be disagreeing with that truth but that the entire idea of an objective, universal truth is faulty.
I think the issue isn't whether there's an "objective truth", but it's obvious that some things are truer than others. I often find that people who argue against objective truth are actually trying to push a viewpoint that has little to no evidence to support it whilst they also try to deny a different viewpoint which does happen to have some decent evidence.
A little. Broadly, the things that historical people considered "good" and "bad" are still considered "good" and "bad" today – discounting brief thousand-year fads (which largely boil down to how and whether to signal allegiance with particular ways of organising society).
> Do you eat factory farmed animals?
So you, too, understand that factory-farming animals is wrong – and that many people eat factory-farmed animals despite knowing that it's wrong, because very few people are paragons of moral virtue.
> Currently some leftist group is trying to justify Female Genital Mutilation.
You believe that leftist groups in some sense "should" be more moral than… I'm guessing the comparison is "rightist groups", perhaps the various contemporary fascist governments. But you've correctly pointed out that FGM is wrong, and that identifying with a contemporary political label or ideology does not automatically mean you're in the right.
I fail to understand why you think this is a gotcha. Your comment only functions as a gotcha if we all broadly agree on what's right and what's wrong.
My girlfriend died of cancer. She was 30 years old and we had a toddler. No matter how rational you start, terminal cancer diagnosis throws much rationality out the window.
> No matter how rational you start, terminal cancer diagnosis throws much rationality out the window.
Doctors who get cancer typically stay level-headed. I wish society talked about death and mortality more often and openly, most people are ill-equiped to face it square on, and yet its the one thing that is truly universal. Humanity needs sex-ed, but for dying.
Use of passive voice doesn't help anyone grapple with one's mortality. I specifically meant in the context of contemplating our own mortality, and not that of others - which is closer to death porn and not death sex-ed (learning how to do it ourselves)
I would not. At some point this becomes agony, this is the reason I have a suicide plan in place for a long time alredy, despite being in perfect health.
It's not when you need it that you start googling around
So much this. They gave my mom an effectively unlimited supply of opiates when the time called for it, and we convinced her that it was perfectly OK and good to use them. One need not suffer without help, unless that happens to be personally important to them. Like, I can imagine religious objections, maybe, or perhaps an addict who wants to “go out clean” knowing that they beat the cravings. But if those don’t apply, pain meds are good and plentiful now.
I am truly sorry for your loss. That must’ve been a nightmare, and I can imagine someone exploring outside their usual lines in such a situation. I hope you and your child are well now.
Snark aside, he got his doctor's approval first and acknowledged it didn't work after. Also, it shows promise in oncology, but doesn't have mature studies. [0]
I don't know that I would call en vitro studies promising. Cancer would be long be a solved problem if even a tenth of the stuff that kills cancer cells in a petri dish was viable in humans.
Sure, there's a few. But 3 rodent studies isn't exactly enough evidence for a layperson to worry about, either. It's not even much of a signal for scientists in that area of research.
Ivermectin is pretty safe for people to use regardless of whether or not they have parasites, so sure, do the human RCTs. Maybe we'll get lucky and have another tool in our anti-cancer toolbox.
But trying to extrapolate out that it's reasonable for people to take it for cancer based on the current evidence is premature, at best.
During peak covid-19 I read a lot of ivermectin studies posted in HN. Most were just horrible, with obvious mistakes. If you pick one, I can give a try to roast it.
My personal quick rubric for determining if an ivermectin study showing improvement for cv19 outcomes is likely to be trustworthy:
Was the population being studied one where parasite infections that ivermectin can take care of are endemic?
Yes - improves outcomes in this population because many of them are likely to have parasites and killing them reduces strain on the body and frees up immune system resources to deal with covid
No - you'll find glaring flaws even in a quick once-over.
> Complete tumor regression was observed in 6/15 mice on the combination treatment, 1/20 on ivermectin alone, 1/10 on anti-PD1 antibody alone, and 0/25 on no treatment.
Scott did have a lot of really thoughtful articles, but its also true he become much less rational and much more identity based on his reasoning over the last 3-5 years.
Scott Adams said that Republicans would be hunted down and that there would be a good chance they would all be dead if Biden was elected and that the police would do nothing to stop it.
Dilbert was brilliant. Adams' political discourse after that became his primary schtick was quite frequently insane.
Advocating for physical oppression of broad groups and races is not a political view much as you want to normalize it. It’s the same reason all the right’s effort to lionize Charlie Kirk just won’t take, much to their chagrin.
> In a 2006 blog post, Adams asked if official figures of the number of deaths in the Holocaust were based on methodologically sound research. In 2023, Adams suggested the 2017 Unite the Right rally was "an American intel op against Trump."
> After a 2022 mass shooting, Adams opined that society leaves parents of troubled teenage boys with only two options: to either watch people die or murder their own son
Maybe “insanity” is strong but I do not think anyone who holds beliefs like those is thinking straight. Toying with Holocaust denial is not simply “having different opinions to you”.
What did he mean when he said this well reasoned opinion?
“When a young male (let’s say 14 to 19) is a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting family two options: 1. Watch people die. 2. Kill your own son. Those are your only options. I chose #1 and watched my stepson die. I was relieved he took no one else with him.”
“If you think there is a third choice, in which your wisdom and tough love, along with government services, ‘fixes’ that broken young man, you are living in a delusion. There are no other options. You have to either murder your own son or watch him die and maybe kill others.”
That’s surely from the calm rational mind of someone not filled with resentment and hate right?
Scott Adams also was a self-professed libertarian - he offered no prescription on what additional options society could provide to families of troubled kids.
Some context? What exactly happened with his son, and I assume he elaborated on what those two options mean, or what specifically they were in his case?
This is not about disliking “different opinions” or refusing to hear opposing views. It is about a documented pattern of statements in which Adams moved from commentary into explicit endorsement of collective punishment, racialized generalizations, and norm breaking prescriptions that reject basic liberal principles.
Being “aware of both sides” means engaging evidence and counterarguments in good faith. Repeatedly dismissing data and framing entire groups as inherently hostile is not that. Calling this out is not echo chamber behavior, it is a substantive judgment based on what was actually said, not on ideological disagreement.
"In a 2006 blog post (which has since been deleted), Adams flirted with Holocaust denialism, questioning whether estimates of the number of people killed during the Holocaust are reliable [...] If he actually wanted to know where the figures come from, he could have looked on Wikipedia or used his Internet skills to Google it or even asked an expert as he once recommended"
"Just 3 hours after the 2019 Gilroy Garlic festival mass shooting, Adams attempted to profit off of it by trying to sign up witnesses for a cryptocurrency-based app that he co-founded called Whenhub.[58][59][60]"
"After being yanked from newspapers due to racism, Adams moved his operations to a subscription service on Locals. While Adams continued to create a "spicier" version of Dilbert "reborn" on that site, Adams' focus shifted towards "political content". His Locals subscription included several livestreams with "lots of politics" as well as a comic called Robots Reading News, with a little bit of alleged self-help media content as well.[73] His Twitter feed also increasingly focused on angry MAGA politics.[74]"
"Adams continued to believe Donald Trump's Big Lie and maintained that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was rigged. In March 2024, when Adams falsely suggested that US "election systems are not fully auditable and lots of stuff goes 'missing' the day after the election", the Republican Recorder of Maricopa County Stephen Richer explained that US elections actually were fully auditable, and gave some information on the actual process officials use for auditing elections.[82]"
I don't understand why anyone would extend empathy and tolerance towards someone who would not reciprocate. I think you should temper your expectations here.
The entire purpose of your brand-new account seems to be complaining about HN and comparing it to Reddit. Is this how you are going to raise the level of discourse here?
As much as I dislike Adams and disagree with a lot of the attempts to paper over a lot of reprehensible stuff, he gave it a try, abandoned it, and publicly denounced it after it didn't work, and even spoke out against the pressuring campaigns done by ivermectin/etc. quacks to push people to waste time, money, and hope on quack treatments.
There's much better examples of areas where he was off the rails than him spending a month on a relatively safe treatment trying to stay alive before giving up when faced with reality.
The man spend a tremendous amount of time trying to discredit the entire medical industry. In the past he has claimed to avoid cancer through prayer. This is part of a pattern.
he gave it a try, abandoned it, and publicly denounced it after it didn't work
I'm not sure why that should be lauded. A sample size of 1 (and a trial length of merely 1 month, according to other posts) does not make a convincing study to warrant any public statements.
When there is no science behind it and you've been convinced by a bunch of charlatans hoping to make a quick buck off of taking advantage of the fear of their victims, there's not really a need to turn your experience into a study.
It's a matter of realizing you're being taken advantage of and speaking out about the experience.
My grandfather was a surgeon, an excellent one. When he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, he went to every dubious healer my grandmother could find. He did it for her, and likely for himself as well. He was never right wing.
>...When he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, he went to every dubious healer my grandmother could find...He was never right wing.
Desperation isn't partisan, friend.
My father was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer and died from its ravages too. He participated in clinical trials and did everything medically reasonable to save himself. None of it worked, and when the treatments came to an end, he faced his death with grace and dignity. I've often thought that if I was in a similar situation, I'd be happy to be half as courageous as he was.
Other folks I've seen have been more along the "freak out" axis and have fallen apart, sought out any treatment regardless of efficacy (or sanity), or both, in order to stave off their fear.
None of that is partisan. All of that is sad.
If Scott Adams died from his cancer's advance, he died a slow, painful (opioids notwithstanding) death which included numerous indignities and, at the end, a lack of awareness that, had he been conscious of it, would likely have driven him mad.
That's what's sad. No one, not even Scott Adams, should suffer and die that way. How folks meet death, especially one as grueling and painful as cancer eating your central nervous system, isn't a partisan thing.
And while I'm not a fan of his later incarnations, his brief cameo here[0] was quite amusing.
The online world breeds extremism. It wasn't too long ago criticizing someone on their obituary was considered classless. This is the world we have made.
Well, if you think of person as a bunch of ideas, maybe with a mind attached, then by attacking a dead person you're attacking a bunch of vulnerable ideas that no longer have a mind to defend them. You can still call it a person, if you like.
Completely agree. If you're motivated enough about a topic to post about it online, you're probably emotional about it and unable to see it in a clear-headed manner.
The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online. The people who have developed unhealthy and biased obsessions are the ones who post constantly.
> If you're motivated enough about a topic to post about it online, you're probably emotional about it and unable to see it in a clear-headed manner.
> The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online.
And here you are posting your opinions online! How fascinating. I hope you recognize the extreme irony in the fact that you were motivated enough about this topic to post about it.
Unwillingness to engage with others breeds extremism. There are many who are silenced if they do not fit into the social dogma. Those people eventually lose it if they can't find a productive outlet.
Good to know that "Don't speak ill of the dead," is now truly dead. Ironic that an online post trying to push a political point is attempting to frame itself as rising above. There is no middle ground. There is no common decency.
The reaction to Adams death is simply a reflection of how he lived his life.
There’s this curious demand (often though not exclusively from right leaning folks) for freedom of speech and freedom from consequences of that speech. It doesn’t work that way.
You have the freedom to say reactionary things that upset people as much as you want. But if you do, then you die, people are going to say “he was a person who said reactionary things that upset people”.
I've never entirely understood "don't speak ill of the dead"; it seems like a vastly-scoped rule with far too many exceptions (and that can prevent learning any lessons from the life of the deceased). Forgive the Godwin's law, but: did that rule apply to Hitler? If not, then there's a line somewhere where it stops being a good rule (if it ever was one to begin with) – and I'd feel confident saying that there's no real consensus about where that "cutover" occurs.
To me, comments like "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" rings less of vitriol and more of a kind of mourning for who the man became, and the loss of his life (and thus the loss of any chance to grow beyond who he became).
That rings empathetic and sorrowful to me, which seems pretty decent in my book.
Because the dead can't respond or defend themselves. That's why you don't do it.
And it's the framing of the statement that is the problem. They didn't say "I disagreed with Scott" or "I didn't like Scott"; they framed it in a way that made it seem like truth. "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" makes it seem like he did something wrong and there is some universal truth to be had, when it's really just this person disagreed with Scott's political views. It's persuasion, which ironically I think Scott would have liked.
> they framed it in a way that made it seem like truth
"the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get the fuck away"
It is true that this is an evil and racist thing to say.
> when it's really just this person disagreed with Scott's political views
white supremacism isn't just a small policy difference.
If you hold hateful beliefs in which you believe certain people are inferior based on superficial traits like skin colour, why should you expect to be treated with respect? I disrespect such people because I don't respect them, I am if nothing else being sincere.
Why is questioning a historical event abhorrent behavior? Every historical event is fair game except for one, even historical events where far more people died due to their religions or cultural affiliations. There's only one we aren't allowed to question however. We even have special made-up terms to describe people that question this one specific event. We don't do it for any other historical event. Why is that?
>We don't do it for any other historical event. Why is that?
Sure we do, there are lots of things (usually genocides) that are considered crass or hateful to deny or downplay (let's be honest he was downplaying, he certainly wasn't suggesting the numbers were underestimated!)
I guess it comes down to this: If you're an already racist nut job and start questioning the holocaust, then I assume you're acting in bad faith and are racist. Anything else would be supremely naive, sorry, I don't have to be infinitely credulous.
And yet, there is only one event that has laws that protect it from being questioned. You said there are lots of things, but failed to mention even one.
>Everyone's views, evern yours, are abhorrent to at least some other person on the planet.
Yes and I accept that they won't respect me. I do not demand that they respect me, it's fine, of course they won't respect me if they find me abhorrent. I don't care.
>The grown up thing is to accept that and still be able to hold meaningful dialogue.
Not really, I don't debate every one and every topic. It's totally valid to just write people off as bastards based on their behaviour and move on with your life.
Your first link seems like he was just trolling. He says "intelligent design" and then defines it in a way that nobody else would.
> What he means by intelligent design is the idea that we are living in a computer simulation. We are overwhelmingly likely to be “copies” of some other humans who intelligently designed us, in a virtual reality.
That seems to have been pretty common with him. "I believe in X. And by X I mean Y. Look at all these people talking about X, aren't they stupid?"
> I've never entirely understood "don't speak ill of the dead"
Agree. Much more hurtful to speak ill of the living. I can even see both R's and D's as people suffering in the duality of the world and have compassion for them. “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
You don't even really need to invoke Godwin's law, since you can just ask the same question about financier to the billionaires Jeffrey Epstein or beloved British presenter Sir Jimmy Savile (presented without speaking ill of the dead).
The dead man, whomever is in question, can no longer harm you. He was a man, maybe a husband and father, and speaking ill of them is of no tangible benefit. To those that respected or loved them, the relationship is gone, and it is not wise to add to their pain.
I have been to the funeral of bad men. His earthly power is gone and if there is an afterlife his judgment is sealed.
This goes for all enemies and tyrants and criminals. We use the term "I am sorry for your loss" because most times the loss is not ours.
I suppose you shouldn't jeer at them for being dead, for a start, and you should make allowances for their being dead when judging their actions. Treat them fairly.
This has been mentioned a few times in this thread. But it doesn't really make a lot of sense, especially in the case of someone famous.
If two or three days ago, not knowing he was sick (which I didn't), I had said to someone "That Dilbert guy seems to be sort of a whack job," why would it matter that he was alive to hypothetically defend himself? It's extremely unlikely that he would ever be aware of my comment at all. So why does it matter that he's alive?
I didn't fear reprisal from Scott Adams when he was alive, either.
And there are plenty of people willing to step in for Scott and defend him, as evidenced by the contents here.
Someone dying doesn't mean the consequences of their words and actions disappear and acting like we should pretend that death washes away those consequences is silly.
Scott Adams was influential on me in my younger years but he was always a bit out there and that caught up with him eventually. The brain rot that took him in the last decade made him basically unreadable.
As with many others here, I admired his early creative work, but found his political beliefs to be abhorrent. An illustration, I guess, that we are maybe all of a mixture.
I'm sorry about the manner of his dying, even if the world may also be a marginally better place without the bile he inflicted on it. Still, I'm sorry he's died. He was only ten years older than me.
And my favourite Dilbert cartoon is still the one about "eunuch programmers" [1].
He was from a kinder more tolerant time, when people thought being non-anonymous online was safe. Sort of the same problem that others from his generation, Julian Assange, many others had. But I wonder if time won’t prove these people right. If you do put yourself out there you make enemies and open yourself to the hatred on many psycho basement dwellers. But if you don’t the world never knows you. All if that is too many words to say there’s a price to be paid for fame. Anyway, Dilbert was an important part of our cultural landscape and made a lot of people feel good despite the pains of cubicle life. To make people smile and feel better, that’s a pretty great achievement after all. Rip Scott, hopefully you’ll be making many folks smile in the afterlife too.
In the 90s you’d get flamed on Usenet for posting pseudo-anonymously. Even in early 00’s sites like /. Carried that forward with “anonymous coward” iirc.
For those who do not know, Adams was still putting up daily Dilbert strips, just for paid subs on Twitter instead of in a newspaper. I think it's impressive he didn't stop until the end, even though AIUI he was in serious pain for a while. (He did stop doing the art himself in Nov.)
I've lost enough loved ones to cancer to know that it's not something I'd wish on even the worst people. My opinions of Scott Adams are… complicated, to say the least, but above all I'm glad that he's no longer suffering.
I understand he sought to convert to Christianity in his last days. I hope he succeeded in finding God — that he understood that there's more to faith in Christ than chanting “I do believe in Jesus! I do! I do!”, that it requires identifying and purging the hatred in one's heart and replacing it with the unconditional love Christ exemplified. That journey is hard enough when you've spent most/all of a lifetime trying to tackle it; deathbed conversions are even harder, with no time to put that newfound unconditional love into practice. No time for apologies to those harmed, no time for righting one's wrongs — only bare, raw remorse and shame.
May Scott Adams rest in peace. May he be remembered honestly — both for what he got right and what he got wrong.
I don't get "avoiding the ugliness" when someone dies. We need to acknowledge the ugliness and try to do better.
Acting like "oh, he was trolling", or "it was just a small amount of hating Black people and women" is exactly how you get Steven Miller in the fucking White House.
We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again, and that means calling out the bigotry even in death.
In the context of the above comment I read "avoiding the ugliness" as avoiding incorporating it and continuing it in your own life, not shying away from talking about and addressing it.
This comment actually makes a specific point of calling it out compared to some others here.
Care to elaborate on what flavors of bigotry have been lauded and socially rewarded/what valid viewpoints and statements have been mislabeled as bigotry? I feel like you're being intentionally vague to avoid taking a stance here.
If you don't recognize the patterns of incuriosity, groupthink and misguided confidence that have permeated western society in the last ten years, nothing I say here is going to enlighten you.
Ah, so you're socially conservative, support Trump but probably consider yourself a libertarian, secretly a big fan of the moves ICE has been making? I'm assuming you've used the term "liberal media" unironically in the last year. You didn't storm the capitol, but you consider the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 to be worse than January 6. Antifa is more of a danger than far-right agitators. Charlie Kirk's death hit hard. No social identity group is more persecuted than white, heterosexual, cisgender Christian men.
Any of those resonate? You're welcome to correct me.
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts
"lives lost based on the decline in outlays (current spending) may be in the range of 500,000 to 1,000,000 and potential lives lost based on the decline in obligations (commitments to future spending) are between 670,000 and 1,600,000."
What is your best estimate of deaths due to "woke" or whatever you consider the scourge of the "past decade" to be?
How many visas revoked due to the holder being not woke enough? How many people were deported from the US for being insufficiently woke? And so on. "Woke" may not be what you meant. Whatever you meant, present your measure and data.
They didn't, though. Plenty of people who had one reputation at their death have had that reputation change over time, especially with more information and awareness of what they did. Sometimes their reputations improve, sometimes they decline.
Speaking only positively about people distorts the reality.
Reputation guides your behavior toward that person. But they're no longer around. There is no behavior toward them. They're gone. Their reputation is no longer relevant.
> Reputation guides your behavior toward that person. But they're no longer around. There is no behavior toward them. They're gone. Their reputation is no longer relevant.
It also culturally informs someone's perceived suitability as a role model. It doesn't matter to the dead person if they are held in high or low esteem, but it may matter to people in their formative stages deciding whose influence they follow and whose they shun.
I suspect that racism is inherent in humanity, hard-wired into our brains by millions of years of evolution.
If that were true, how could it be anything but ok? Should I feel guilty because I evolved from monkeys and carry around the leftist equivalent of original sin? No thanks. Though, I suppose you could disagree and say that it's not intrinsic, but that's a really difficult argument to make.
Humanity and civilization are defined by going beyond any base instincts.
Even if you're correct (I don't agree), consider other things: if you look at someone and your body has an instinctive desire to have sex with them, you are obligated to realize that just doing so without regard for consent or other things is not OK. If you don't realize that and proceed based on instinct, that's rape.
You can feel whatever instincts you want. If you feel bad or harmful ones, you should acknowledge it. It doesn't really matter if you feel guilty or shame or whatever you want to call it, but you should absolutely internally recognize that these things are *wrong*.
>Humanity and civilization are defined by going beyond any base instincts.
Civilization is nothing more than "lives in cities". That's it. That's what the science of anthropology has to say on the matter. It's not even that big of a deal, you'd much rather be involved with some hunter-gatherer living in a tent who had noble ideas and a sense of fairness than with most of the very "civilized" people who live in Oklahoma City. Why?
You don't share their values. Humanity, for all its potential, does not scale beyond Dunbar's number, and attempts to do so have resulted in horrors beyond comprehension on a regular, cyclical basis, for many thousands of years. You're quite certain that your values should win out and exterminate their values (and if they're not enlightened enough to just let their values be obliterated, they too can be exterminated with them... leftists are, right now, trying to work up the nerve to go on the attack, we've both seen the internet messages and not all of them are russian bots).
> If you feel bad or harmful ones, you should acknowledge it.
I do. I like to acknowledge it. I despise dishonesty, but most of all I despise self-deception. But sometimes I need to keep my mouth shut, because others would be quick to punish me for words. For spoken-aloud thoughts. And it causes distress.
>but you should absolutely internally recognize that these things are wrong.
Why? What makes those things wrong? Can you explain, objectively and empirically what makes it wrong? From the other set of values (see above), you're the one with wrong thoughts, wrong feelings, and wrong desires.
What you really mean, but don't have the words to say, is that you want me to be one with your group. To accept its set of group-beliefs, to espouse no dissent (or at least below some tiny, acceptable threshold), and to support your causes. But I've seen what sort of world you want to make, and I do not want to live in that world. I do not think your group survives, even should it win.
The world I want might well have room in it for other peoples. They could do as they want, peaceful (distant) coexistence. Your world doesn't have any room in it for me.
Your strategy of indoctrinating young children in public education was working. It was absolutely foolproof, I think, none could fight against it. But then someone managed to sneak in behind its armor, to drop the torpedo in that trench, and now your death star blew up. I'm not even sure anyone on the left has noticed how bad this is for your movement.
But to address the point. There may be base instincts to which we are all subject. But that doesn't mean we should embrace them or proudly wear them as a badge. Violence is entirely natural. And yet most will agree it should not be embraced. Someone proudly declaring themselves as violent will (and should!) be judged harshly. I say the same holds true for racism, whether it is "natural" or not.
Much (all?) of civilisational progress is characterised by moving away from the natural state to a higher strata. The civil part of civilization is entirely unnatural
What's silly about it? I am neither unnatural nor supernatural, and my nature is who I am.
>But that doesn't mean we should embrace them or proudly wear them as a badge.
Maybe. But it also means that I shouldn't be ashamed of them or try to suppress myself into neuroticism. And since the left has made a point of that for decades now, has tried to bully people into doing just that, the pendulum was primed to swing the other way. So yeh, I think I will be proud. It feels good.
>Violence is entirely natural.
It is, but also something to be avoided unless there is no other reasonable option. I would recommend not trying to drive an SUV over the top of me. That's caused some strife recently. I can remain nonviolent indefinitely.
I'm missing the well-reasoned argument with subtlety. It sounds like parent is saying that "X is a natural product of evolution and hardwired" so "X must be ok".
I don't see subtlety here. As others pointed, the story of human civilization is one long arc of going against our base animal instincts in order to build a society that benefits everyone.
>As others pointed, the story of human civilization is one long arc of going against our base animal instincts in order to build a society that benefits everyone.
I'd add that it's cooperation and the ability to moderate impulsive behavior that, over the long term, differentiates us from our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzee.
If we were just our base instincts and nothing more, we wouldn't be having this conversation as we'd likely have died out, because our ability to accept and work together with each other allowed us to flourish despite the threats of predation, climate change, natural disasters and other challenges.
As such, making the argument that we're "hardwired" to hate and fear our fellow humans doesn't make sense, whether that argument is an intellectual one or an evolutionary one.
I feel sorry for folks who feel so isolated that they can't understand just how closely related we all are. It must be quite lonely.
> If that were true, how could it be anything but ok? Should I feel guilty because I evolved from monkeys and carry around the leftist equivalent of original sin?
I think that there's a gap between "how can it be anything but OK" and "should I feel guilty." There are plenty of things that aren't OK, but about which you don't need to feel guilty. Should you feel guilty that your body intrinsically craves foods that aren't good for you? I'd say that no purpose is served by feeling that way, but that doesn't mean that it's healthy to indulge those cravings.
>The best we can do for the dead is remember them as they were, good and bad, not demonize them nor write hagiographies for them
I agree with your conclusion, but not with your premise.
We can't "do" anything for the dead. They're dead. What's more, since they're dead they don't care what we do or say because they're, you know, dead.
Anything we might do or say in reference to dead folks is for the benefit of the living and has nothing to do with the dead.
That said, you're absolutely right. We should remember folks for who they were -- warts and all -- to give the living perspective both on the dead and the dead past.
Respect is earned by your actions and deeds, not by your death.
When someone I know dies, I speak frankly about them, good or bad, because to do otherwise is a lie, and the most disrespectful thing to do is to misrepresent a person who no longer can represent themselves.
Scott Adams did what he did, that's surely not in question. Honor his life by speaking frankly about how he affected oneself and others, good or bad. Let the chips fall where they may.
I was directly responding and replying to jchallis, but a mod detached my comment from its parent and now it makes less sense without the proper context. Great job.
The moderation on this site is really such garbage. Filled with all kinds of weird and subtle manipulation, almost never openly acknowledged and they are more than happy to gaslight you when you confront them about it.
I agree with the sentiment. I think timing is pretty important, though, and a cooling-off period might be a kind gesture for his loved ones.
I posit that self-reflection might be a better avenue to understanding this world where Steven Miller is in the White House, at least in the immediate. Personally, I stopped reading Dilbert quite a while before he cancelled himself, just because it wasn't available in a medium that worked for me. I do have a couple books on the shelf of old Dilbert comics and I considered getting rid of them when the racism came out. I cracked one open and laughed out loud at a handful of the comics and so the books are still in my house. I abhor racism, but he already got my money. At least for me, and maybe I'm damaged, I still laugh at some of the comics, even after I knew he was a jerk. I think if one of my black friends told me he was offended that I had those books, I'd get rid of them.
How about Harry Potter? I'm certain that there are some folks here who have been hurt by Rowling's statements and I'm also certain that there are some folks here that would sacrifice a limb to live in the Harry Potter universe. Do you separate the artist from the art or what's the rational thing? I have the Harry Potter books on my shelf, I've actually read them out loud to my children. They also are aware of LGTBQ issues, they know and are around LGTBQ people and we have had conversations about those issues. Is that enough? Should one of my kids pick up the Dilbert books, I have a conversation locked and loaded and I already know that I've raised them to be anti-racism. I don't know that I'm super eager to put more money in to J. K.'s pocket, I probably won't go to Disney Harry Potter Land or whatever they come up with but I've bought and read the books and I haven't burned them.
And make no mistake, had I known he was a biggot in 1995, I don't think I would have continued reading Dilbert or ever bought books. The problem is it made me laugh, then years later I found out he was a jerk and I still laugh at the comics, I remember laughing the first time I read some of them, and I think of that more when I re-read them than I think about Scott Adams. Fact is, he still made me laugh all those years ago, I can't put that back in the bottle, it happened.
Is "calling out the bigotry" useful? I feel like the Internet has been used for this purpose pretty consistently for the last 15 years. Is it effective? Is there less bigotry now than before?
I would argue it has not in fact been useful, that making it shameful hasn't reduced it, and that calling it out in death is not useful in reducing it. I think we do it because it's easier than doing something useful and it makes us feel good.
I hate bigotry as well. I encourage to do something IRL about it.
Think about all the things people have done in the real world the last 50 years to combat bigotry. During the civil rights movement of the 60s, black people sat at segregated lunch counters and marched peacefully in the street, and were consequently spat on and attacked by white mobs, beaten by police, sprayed with fire hoses, attacked by dogs, etc.
In the last 10 years, the modern black lives matter movement has triggered similar violent backlashes, with every public gathering drawing a militarized police response and hateful counter-protesters. On a policy level, even the most milquetoast corporate initiatives to consider applications and promotions from diverse candidates of equal merit are now being slandered and attacked. In education, acknowledgment of historical racial and gender inequality is under heavy censorship pressure.
It really does seem like the more effective we are at acting IRL, the greater the backlash is going to be.
Are you saying that Scott Adams was right and, say, white people _should_ avoid black people? Or are you saying that we shouldn't remember how awful people were once they die?
Agree with this. I didn’t agree with it in the past, but I can see now that it has caused the issue you raise. I don’t know if this is a great insight, but one reason I think people have not connected the results (Stephen Millers in the White House) back to the action (not speaking ill of the dead) is because THEY are not the ones affected. When Stephen Miller is in the White House, it’s all the non white people - including legal immigrants and naturalized citizens and citizens born here - that are living in fear of where the administration will go. I doubt others are aware that there is this fear, or even that the DHS’s official account tweets out threats to deport a third of the country.
We have made our society shameless. Pornographers, gamblers, and truly creepy people are told that it's fine to be what they are. I dunno, maybe that really is the case. But having abandoned shame as a method of social cohesion, you don't get to resurrect it for those things you dislike. The two-edged sword cuts both ways.
I did not follow the Scott Adams brouhaha when it happened, and vaguely I somehow get the impression it's like the Orson Scott Card thing. I'm afraid to check for fear that when I do I will find there was nothing he should've been ashamed for. People use the word "bigot" to mean things I can't seem to categories as bigotry.
What exactly was the bad stuff? He was insensitive about empirical reality or he was literally wrong about something in the sense of being very confident about something despite having little data? Or something else? I only remember the cartons really but was aware some people seemed to be irked about him recently.
Some random internet poll said many people of race A agreed it was "not OK" to be a person of race B. Adams said if that were true, then people of race B should probably not hang out with people of race A that thought it was not OK to be race B. The internet did its thing and quoted him out of context, and tried to cancel him. He dug in his heels and doubled down. He also liked a certain president that many dislike. And here we are.
> The internet did its thing and quoted him out of context
Let's not act like this is some case of out of context quotes. Here's the actual quote for people to decide for themselves:
"I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off. I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying. I'm not saying start a war or do anything bad. Nothing like that. I'm just saying get away. Just get away."
'Don't speak ill of the dead' comes from an era where everyone genuinely believed that the dead could haunt you from the grave.
It continues to have prominance in our society due to inertia and the fact that some people want a positive legacy to endure long after they pass regardless of whether or not they did anything in life to deserve that kind of legacy.
As the person you're replying to wrote it better than I ever could I'll write what they just shared becauase I think it's worth repeating, "taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest."
We should strive for honesty in these kinds of discussions over sensitivity.
In the modern era it's usually said because the dead person cannot defend himself.
Now, Adams had plenty of opportunities to defend/explain his comments on certain issues, and he did not satisfy many people with those or perhaps dug himself in deeper (I myself really only know him from Dilbert in the 1990s, and am only superficially aware of anything controversial he did/said outside of that).
But I don't see anyone saying anything about him now that was not being said when he was alive.
When I was a young man my mother did use that but explained ill more in the sense of unfair/unkind. I guess as an adult you realize everyone ends up living a somewhat complicated existence, and it's easier (maybe even sometimes safer) to say this person was bad than it is to say this person did unacceptable things.
No. Disbelief has always been around. That there is no Church of Disbelief is a feature not a bug. Not speaking ill of the dead has a range of connotations, probably most prominent being avoiding easy targets that can't defend themselves. Want to show righteousness and strength of conviction? Then try a live target. There are many.
I think this is a question of who you're talking to, and is something you have to evaluate on a case-by-case basis.
If the person/people you're speaking with, already followed this public figure, or was forced by society to be aware of the life of this public figure at all times — and so were surely also aware of the bad turn that person's career/life took — then to your audience, the ugliness would have already been long acknowledged. To your audience, the ugliness may be the only thing anyone has spoken about in reference to the public figure for a long time.
And, for an audience who became aware of the public figure a bit later on in their lives, the bad stuff might be all they know about them! (Honestly, there are more than a few celebrities that I personally know only as a subject of ongoing public resentment, with no understanding of what made them a celebrity in the first place.)
In both of these cases, if this is your audience, then there's no point to carrying on the "this is a bad person" reminders during the (usually very short!) mourning period that a public figure gets. They already know.
On the other hand, if you presume someone who has no idea who a certain person is, and who is only hearing about them in the context of their death — then yes, sure, remind away.
I think, given the audience of "people in a comment thread on Hacker News about the death of Scott Adams", people here are likely extremely aware of who Scott Adams is.
---
That said, on another note, I have a personal philosophy around "celebrations of life", that I formed after deciding how to respond to the death of my own father, himself a very complicated man.
People generally take the period immediately after someone's death as a chance to put any kind of ongoing negative feelings toward someone on pause for just a moment, to celebrate whatever positive contributions a person made, and extract whatever positive lessons can be learned from those contributions.
Note that the dead have no way of benefitting from this. They're dead!
If you pay close attention, most of a community does after the death of one of its members, or a society does after the death of a public figure... isn't really a veneration; there is no respect or face given. Rather, what we're doing with our words, is something very much like what the deceased's family are doing with their hands: digging through the estate of the deceased to find things of value to keep, while discarding the rest. Finding the pearls amongst the mud, washing them off, and taking them home.
Certainly, sometimes the only pearl that can be found is a lesson about the kind of person you should strive not to be. But often, there's at least something useful you can take from someone's life — something society doesn't deserve to lose grasp of, just because it was made by or associated with someone we had become soured on.
I think it's important to note that if we don't manage to agree to a specific moment to all mutually be okay with doing this "examination of the positive products of this person's life" — which especially implies "staying temporarily silent about the person's shortcomings so as to make space for that examination"... then that moment can never happen. And that's what leads to a great cultural loss of those things that, due to their association with the person, were gradually becoming forgotten.
Nobody (save for perhaps a few devoutly religious people) argues that you should never speak ill of the dead. People really just want that one moment — perhaps a week or two long? — to calmly dredge up and leaf through the deceased's legacy like it's a discount bin at a record store, without having to defend themselves at each step of that process from constant accusations that they're "celebrating a bad person."
And it is our current societal policy that "right after you die" is when people should be allowed that one moment.
Feel free to call out Adams' bigotry a week from now! The story will still be fresh on people's minds even then.
But by giving them a moment first, people will be able to find the space to finally feel it's safe to reminisce about how e.g. they have a fond memory of being gifted a page-a-day Dilbert calendar by their uncle — fundamentally a story about how that helped them to understand and bond with their uncle, not a story about Adams — which wouldn't normally be able to be aired, because it would nevertheless summon someone to remind everyone that the author is a bigot.
Personally, I despise an outspoken bigot like Scott Adams more when they die, not less, because now their window for growth and repentance has closed. The grotesqueness they harbored becomes permanently tied to their legacy.
This is a post about a public figure who was extremely public about their absolutely horrible views. Not addressing that would be weird.
And I was responding to a comment that suggested avoiding that by saying that we shouldn't. Hardly random.
As for US politics - it's quite obvious that ignoring or tolerating racism and xenophobia has lead to more bigots and assholes feeling comfortable expressing their views publicly. I think we should shame them out of the public sphere again. That includes talking about someone's abject vileness when they die, like with Scott Adams.
You, on the other hand, bring up a random unrelated website. Which is random?
I think there's a big difference between the following:
- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who died hundreds of years ago, whose work is in the public domain, who does not materially benefit from your spectatorship (what with them being dead and all)
- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who is alive today, whose work they have ownership of, who materially benefits from your spectatorship
- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who died mere minutes ago, whose work is owned by their estate, whose heirs materially benefit from your spectatorship
I think the first category is fine, the second category is unambiguously not fine, and the third category is ambiguous, but I would err on the side of "don't consume".
I personally would go with no, because you're still propagating their cultural product. One rarely consumes media with the intention of keeping it a secret; half the point of watching a movie or tv show is to talk about it. The entire sociological function of celebrities is that we talk about them. "I am doing research on Scott Adams and I want to consume some Dilbert as a research device", um, sure, I guess, I dunno, why are you doing research on a recently dead bigot, what is the purpose of that. etc.
I'm not -your- conscience, I can only explain my own. To me? No, that's not fine.
Laws consist of words, but making a law is something different than just saying something. It is an act, and indeed American laws are often (or always?) called Acts.
In any period of history, there are people who know things are wrong and are vocal about it. There are artists prior to the Civil Rights Era that were not bigots. The problem you have is the artists that were celebrated AT THAT TIME which we know about were also those accepted by the status quo which allowed them to be known.
People knew slavery was wrong when slavery was happening. People knew child labor was wrong when child labor was happening. People knew segregation was wrong when segregation was happening. Those people were not rewarded by society.
Enjoy Bach's music all you want, but when I read his biography those difficult details better be in there, and if that ruins his music for you that's on you.
What's wrong with this tho? Maybe we should stop uplifting people when we find out they are nasty individuals. Acting like there aren't also artists that are good people is odd, these are the ones deserving our attention.
FWIW, I use to be a big fan of Crystal Castles (like listening to 4+ hours a day for close to a decade). It was a core part of my culture diet. Once it was known that Ethan Kath was a sexual predator that groomed teenage girls, I simply stopped listening or talking about them ever.
Why is this hard? IDK, it really feels like people put too much of their identity into cultural objects when they lack real communities and people in their lives.
Also throwing it out there, I don't really know much about Scott Adams (or his work for that matter). Dilbert comics weren't widespread memes on the phpBB forums I'd post on throughout the 00s and 10s.
The thing that is wrong about it is that the purity spiral may get out of control and result in wholesale purging of art, Iconoclast-style (or perhaps Cultural Revolution-style).
I don't trust people with an instinct to purge history. They rarely know when to stop.
Plus, standards change a lot. Picasso had a teenage mistress. It wasn't as scandalous back then. Should we really be so arrogant as to push our current standards on the entire humanity that once was? If yes, we will be obliterated by the next generation that applies the same logic to us, only with a different set of taboos.
"Acknowledge the ugliness and try to do better" and purging art and history are different things. The comment you replied to above did not call for a purging of Adams' work or life from history.
It seems to me that, even here in this discussion, people call for avoiding work of such authors. Would that entail, say, pressure on galleries not to show such art? If so, that is more than half way to a purge.
People often like to conflate criticism and personal choice with censorship, but they're not the same.
We're allowed to avoid consuming the work of artists we think are horrible humans. We're allowed to encourage others to do that too even. None of that is purging or censorship.
That's not purging at all, words have meaning. If you grep my comment you might be encountering a massive bug if you found the word purge.
You can still stream all of Crystal Castles songs on every platform, you can still buy their music, their albums still have hundreds of seeders on trackers. Just as I'm sure you can buy your Dilbert books.
Telling people to maybe look up to better humans, which it needs to be stated have always existed and aren't a modern invention, should be encouraged.
One of the other threads in here an OP states that we should use this moment to reflect and do better in our own lives, what is wrong with this viewpoint?
We've seen countless examples of people getting sucked into social media holes and I've yet to encounter a single case where this has ever led to healthy outcomes.
The purity spiral on the other side is already batshit. "If you support that we're going to say you're bad and not buy your work" is quite a way from widespread physical and media violence.
Adams was a mediocre bureaucrat who discovered he could make a living as a competent comedian. His success at that persuaded him that he was an Important Moral Authority.
He started as a banker and ended as a self-harming prosperity preacher - not exactly a rare archetype in the US.
The funny parts were funny. The rest, not so much.
My TL;DR Choosing not to financially support a creator for ethical seasons makes sense as an ethical stance. But that doesn't mean the media we like needs to always reflect our values.
I see where you’re coming from. But I’d argue that there’s broad consensus that his bigotry at the end was bad. So in this one moment, when we’ve just learned that he’s died, we can recall the good as well as the bad.
It is shameful to have those views. But perhaps we can bring it up tomorrow rather than right this minute.
But Dilbert still lives on. As a telco person, Dilbert was always uncannily accurate -- to the point where I was once accused of telling Adams about a specific event :)
Sad news. Dilbert was a big part of my life for a long time, and brought much laughter and enjoyment to my life. But on the other hand, later in his life Scott said a lot of things I found frankly repugnant, and Dilbert more or less disappeared, all of which made me sad. But he was still an amazing writer of comedy at his best, and I hate to know that he has passed. Plus, every death is at tragedy for somebody - friends, family, loved-ones of all sorts - whether we specifically like someone or not.
I grew up with dilbert being referenced. I was on the early internet, so things were odd. It was full of nuts and wierdos.
Scott Adams stuck out to me because his cartoons were funny and sarcastic. His books felt like he was letting me in behind the scenes. He talked to me, the reader about dealing with large amounts (for the time) traffic to his website in a honest, funny and simple way.
His books also had a link to his website, which was pretty unique for a non-technical book at the time.
I also quite liked his TV show.
I stopped reading them regularly as I grew up. I would see the odd salient dilbert in slack or email.
during the trump primary, thats when I bumped into his other side. It was heart breaking to see someone who made what I thought was such observant cartoons shit out such bile.
I loved Dilbert and I really believe that you often have to separate art from artist if you want to enjoy many things. He put a very unique perspective on corporate and tech environments that made me laugh. Sad to see a human pass but also sadder that later he expressed some disappointing opinions that diminished his contributions.
"In November 2025, he said his health was suddenly declining rapidly again, and took to social media to ask President Trump for help to get access to the cancer drug Pluvicto. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. replied saying "How do I reach you? The President wants to help." The following month he said he was paralyzed below the waist and had been undergoing radiation therapy."
"On January 1, 2026, Adams said on his podcast that he had talked with his radiologist and that it was "all bad news." He said there was no chance he would get feeling back in his legs and that he also had ongoing heart failure. He told viewers they should prepare themselves "that January will probably be a month of transition, one way or another." On January 12, Adams' first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, told TMZ that Adams was in hospice at his home in Northern California."
Wow that is really fast, in my view, and I wonder how many more of his cohort will similarly crash out.
I don’t have an estate to get in order, so to speak. Then again, I also won’t pass along a house full of a lifetime of “collections” or “mementos” with little to no monetary value. The oncoming secondary market is about to be awash in Boomer junk. Nobody wants to send their precious collections to the dump or recycling.
One of my biggest mental hiccups to work through of late is the changing nature of collective memories, fame, and idols. Scott is a great example who was “big in the 90s” and 30 years later his method (print cartoons and books) is basically dead and can’t be folllowed. Gen Z will be spared Scott, and probably Elvis and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, ABBA, and Garth Brooks comparatively speaking.
This is a meandering way to note how fast we can be poof gone and life will move on with a pace quite breakneck.
> The oncoming secondary market is about to be awash in Boomer junk. Nobody wants to send their precious collections to the dump or recycling.
Maybe, maybe not. My mother died a couple years ago, and while she was too old to be a boomer, she still had plenty of accumulated possessions in her estate. We sold as much as we could, kept the few things we wanted and had space for, and the rest went to recycling or the dump. I'd guess 90% went to the dump.
The owner of that stuff may not want to send it to the dump. My mom would be mortified to hear some of the things she treasured held no value for anyone else, but when you're dead, you aren't making those decisions. The next generation probably isn't that sentimental about it.
Scott's estate shared his final words via his X account.
A Final Message From Scott Adams
If you are reading this, things did not go well for me.
I have a few things to say before I go.
My body failed before my brain. I am of sound mind as I write this, January 1st, 2026. If you wonder about any of my choices for my estate, or anything else, please know I am free of any coercion or inappropriate influence of any sort. I promise.
Next, many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I'm not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So, here I go:
I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. I won't need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified for entry.
With your permission, I'd like to explain something about my life.
For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent, as a way to find meaning. That worked. But marriages don't always last forever, and mine eventually ended, in a highly amicable way. I'm grateful for those years and for the people I came to call my family.
Once the marriage unwound, I needed a new focus. A new meaning. And so I donated myself to "the world," literally speaking the words out loud in my otherwise silent home. From that point on, I looked for ways I could add the most to people's lives, one way or another.
That marked the start of my evolution from Dilbertcartoonist to an author of - what I hoped would be useful books. By then, I believed I had amassed enough life lessons that I could start passing them on. I continued making Dilbert comics, of course.
As luck would have it, I'm a good writer. My first book in the "useful" genre was How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. That book turned out to be a huge success, often imitated, and influencing a wide variety of people. I still hear every day how much that book changed lives. My plan to be useful was working.
I followed up with my book Win Bigly, that trained an army of citizens how to be more persuasive, which they correctly saw as a minor super power. I know that book changed lives because I hear it often.
You'll probably never know the impact the book had on the world, but I know, and it pleases me while giving me a sense of meaning that is impossible to describe.
My next book, Loserthink, tried to teach people how to think better, especially if they were displaying their thinking on social media. That one didn't put much of a dent in the universe, but I tried.
Finally, my book Reframe Your Brain taught readers how to program their own thoughts to make their personal and professional lives better. I was surprised and delighted at how much positive impact that book is having.
I also started podcasting a live show called Coffee With Scott Adams, dedicated to helping people think about the world, and their lives, in a more productive way. I didn't plan it this way, but it ended up helping lots of lonely people find a community that made them feel less lonely. Again, that had great meaning for me.
I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my work, I'm asking you to pay it forward as best you can. That is the legacy I want.
I loved this guy. His writing and book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big particularly impacted me early and exposed me to First Principles, biases, and in particular not giving a f*k about what people care so much.
he was one of those people who was attacked during COVID and labeled and propagandized against as a scapegoat for the failings of our unaccountable leadership - the cancel culture was unfair and unwelcome towards him. I resonated with that too.
Another one was the one where he went to work in Marketing, and they were doing their research by yelling questions into a well. But I can't find that one.
Can't tell if this is sarcasm. This was his statement (he says "I'm not a believer"),
Next, many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I'm not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So, here I go:
I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. I won't need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified for entry.
I remember stealing my dad's newspaper to read the included Dilbert strip and it shaped my understanding of corporate life. Fortunately it proved not to be this grotesque, but I have a few stories to share, like anyone who was ever put in such an environment.
I recall having a "huh?" moment when I once saw the titular character say that there's no evidence for climate change.
The strangest thing is that I hail from a particularly conservative region of the world and I've met many such Scotts Adamses in college (some of whom went on to work in FAANG companies). I don't share these views and I could never wrap my head around the idea that a clearly intelligent and often otherwise kind person could be like this.
I've talked with Scott Adams. In private he seemed a lot more reasonable than in public. I always wondered how much of his public life was a show, a way to make money.
But then the way he dealt with his cancer make me reconsider. Adams publicly acknowledged trying ivermectin and fenbendazole as alternative cancer treatments, which he later declared ineffective, before pursuing conventional medical care in his final months. Unfortunately by then it's too late.
The problem is that the same personality trait that makes for good engineers, namely the hubris to think "just because this problem hasn't been solved by anybody else doesn't mean I can't solve it", also gets applied to everything else.
I try to consider how I feel about this, and all I come back with is an emptiness, a follow feeling.
I'm not going to gloat, nor am I going to consider him even remotely a good person based on things he's said and done. I will never know him outside of his works and the things he's said and done, so I can only judge on those merits.
I guess all I can really do is shake my head and wonder what could have been had he not completely lost his way; his death by cancer was likely (not guaranteed, but there's always some hope if treated early and properly) preventable, but he made a choice.
I guess I'll just remember the early, funny, too-true-to-life material and try not to think too much about what happened after that.
--[not] remotely a good person?
Depends on the metric I guess.
Adams-- helped and cheeredd up thousands (millions?) of people, said racist stuff.
--You (probably) or me --helped maybe one or two people, didn't say racist stuff.
Scott Adams was a legitimate genius. Nobody else could have made Dilbert.
People are saying that he said some bad things. I just want to encourage people to look past the ramblings of a dying man, even in our hyperpolarized age.
When I first started working in tech 25+ years ago, I really enjoyed Dilbert. It was ubiquitous in my circles and seemed accurate.
Then, I had my own startup, and as a manager of people, had to come to terms with a bunch of personality defects I brought in that I was blind to. Those blind spots really made me a bad manager. I'm grateful I got to learn about myself in that way.
But, then I started to view Dilbert differently. It felt like only some of the characters deserved empathy. I bet Scott Adams would hate that I used that word to critique his comics.
Is it just me? I always felt like half of the people were stupid no matter what the situation. Did I miss a more complex part of Dilbert?
I haven't been able to separate who Scott Adams was, or more specifically, the racist things he said, from his cultural commentary, no matter what insights there are. And, I can't admire "4d chess" because it feels like it is bragging that you can predict the winner if you throw an alligator and Stephen J Hawking into a pen together.
> Is it just me? I always felt like half of the people were stupid no matter what the situation. Did I miss a more complex part of Dilbert?
No, a lot of characters were clearly meant to be unlikable, but based on a kind of person that exists in real life. I don't think you were meant to care much for e.g. Topper.
The first email I ever wrote was to Scott Adams. He actually replied!
I was a child and had just read and enjoyed one of his older books, maybe the Dilbert Principle. I came from a religious household and I was surprised by something in the book that revealed him to be an atheist.
I looked up his email, or maybe it was in the back of the book, and wrote him a quick message about how and why he should convert. He replied to me (unconvinced) and I replied back, at which point he realized I was a child and the conversation ended.
When I heard he was dying of cancer I wrote him another email, again offering my own unsolicited thoughts, this time on cancer and experimental treatments. He did not reply, but I thought there was a kind of symmetry to it -- I wrote him towards the start of my life and again towards the end of his.
Interesting guy, I've enjoyed several of his books and the comics for many years. He had a big impact. Tough way to die.
Sadly, Scott Adams' political opinions came to overshadow Dilbert, but I shall choose to remember him as Dilbert's creator and how Dilbert captured a moment in time and work so aptly.
Back when Dilbert was massive my company ran the following ad in cinemas in Silicon Valley: https://imgur.com/a/ZPVJau8 Everyone seeing that ad knew what we were referring to.
I stopped paying attention long before he became a freak.
After a couple of years his jokes became repetitive, formulaic, obvious,...
For some people that might be a good thing. Chuckling at an old joke is like trying again the food or music they used to love when they were young. Being funny or revealing isn't the point, being familiar and reassuring is what matters.
He had a moment at his time. A few more years and no one will remember him.
Loved Dilbert as a kid, even into college, but fell off it eventually. Even if he turned to right wing trolling, I'll always remember those big comic compilations fondly.
It was interesting watching him encounter the bureaucracy of healthcare provision in the US. He had a line to the President to get him somewhere but it doesn’t seem to have helped. https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1984915690634252352?s=20
His son died of a fentanyl drug overdose which is really tragic. Scott Adams was definitely a crazy person by the end of his time with all sorts of rants on this and that. But I always viewed this stage with pity rather than outrage. Being crazy after losing your child is perhaps just how things are.
It’s just unfortunate that others treated him as sane.
> In his May stream announcing his cancer, he said he’d used anti-parasitic medications ivermectin and fenbendazole to treat himself, but they didn’t work. There’s no evidence that ivermectin works as a cancer treatment.
I don't really think bureaucracy was his downfall.
No, of course not. He was doing all these alt therapies and they obviously wouldn’t help which I don’t think is that interesting. What I did find interesting is that someone who seemed so “connected” was still subject to all the usual normal-people problems.
He said some particularly strange stuff about his son, but I choose to believe it was a complicated survivors guilt. losing a child is pretty up there for trauma.
I'm not sure about the hypnotism and manifesting beliefs, but that might have been the start of some deeper mental health issue too.
Agree. What an odd tweet. It feels like he couldn’t be bothered to bug Kaiser every day to get the IV scheduled or didn’t have anyone who could make calls for him? Maybe he was truly alone and had no one to trust IRL.
I was a Kaiser Northern California member and yes their scheduling system was dysfunctional — they were the better of the options my employer offered. However, if you’re in need of treatment that is already approved, one phone call was always all you had to do book. Surgery was harder to book than anything, particularly for rare conditions.
Scott Adams is a bit of a mystery to me. Like most here, I loved his comics in the 1990s and 2000s. I even joined the mailinglist for his werd rd and surely ironically intended Dogbert's New Ruling Class. Through Dilbert, he came across as a hero of underappreciated tech workers, and a critic of ignorant managers, so it feels really weird that he became such a supporter of the ultimate pointy haired boss.
I remember how he predicted Trump's victory all the way back in 2015, early in the primaries. He argues that Trump (and Kanye, for that matter) were super-convincers who used mass hypnosis techniques. Sounds utterly bizarre, and yet mass hypnosis struck me as the only possible explanation of Trump's popularity. Because there were certainly no rational arguments for it.
And yet, this seemingly critical (if unhinged) thinker who claimed to see through those alleged hypnosis techniques, somehow fell for it.
Supremely confident, charismatic people are very attractive. There's no "mass hypnosis" about it, other than that it's something that's baked in to many of us. Obama had those qualities also, and won the Presidency twice despite lacking much experience or traditional qualifications.
> Obama...won the Presidency twice despite lacking much experience or traditional qualifications.
He went from Illinois state senator (7 years) to US senator (4 years) to President. A prodigious rise, but hardly non-traditional or inexperienced. The equivalent of a new grad at a FAANG becoming a director or VP within a decade.
This whole "Trump is very good at persuation therefore I support him" is bullshit.
Yes, Trump IS very good at persuation. But that is no justification to support him. No, he supported Trump because he liked the things that Trump says and does. Everything else is just trying to make himself sound less bad.
I used to love watching Family Matters when I was a kid. I grew up in the 80s/90s. There was nothing "DEI" about Family Matters because it was just a show they made that focused on black families. However it was wildly popular for everyone because the things the families experienced were universal. Skin color does not matter.
Things changed drastically in 2020 (or probably even 2014). People started picking specific events to showcase black hatred. Some kind of specific moment where a cop killed a black person. That stuff happens and it does suck. But again, all of the people being accused of black hate literally loved "in living color" just a couple decades before.
A family friend's husband was shot to death because he didn't open a door to the police as he was going through an "episode" in his bedroom. His wife had called the police because he was yelling threatening things at her. The couple was white. Why didn't that make the news - it didn't fit all the narratives.
I would say most people on the left are in a cult created by the mainstream media and told exactly what to think in all these situations. The leftist cult needs to enrage people to support its causes. It's causes are linked to pulling at your empathy, not at pulling at good policies. Even if there is a grain of truth to "climate change", the selling of it was designed to get votes. The other side of it all has been reactionary. At this point people on the right are just like - ok, what's the new rage going to be this month, and why do I even care anymore. And for the most part its because every rage cycle is entirely predicated on the right combination of ingredients they can mix together to whip people into emotional thinking.
You don't have to EXCUSE Scott Adams for knowing this truth and then start speaking it.
Did AOC get leftist backlash as large as Good when she said to stop chanting for Hamas the other day? That's what the right has been saying for 3 fucking years.
Did Iran protests where reports of 12k people dead get encampments on the lawn of Columbia?
What about when Hamas murdered a bunch of Palestinians on a video a few months ago?
What FAKE rage cycle do you all want to keep participating in?
We say things like "you gotta separate the art from the artist" when we talk about folks like Scott Adams, whose take on the corporate world were unique in the comic industry and funny in general.
However, Scott Adams as an individual was deeply problematic and I would not ever stand him up as a role model for my children or behavior in general.
Of course, I wouldn't do the same for a vast number of famous people, politics aside.
The "problem" (which is in scare quotes because it's not a discrete identifiable sole-source issue but a complex and dynamic phenomenon that permeates every aspect of our modern-day life) is that we have collectively determined that if you're good at your art, you must be a person we should listen to for topics outside of your art.
To use an inflammatory but real-life example: Donald Trump is a great showman. He knows how to incite a crowd, and he knows how to feed into this modern-day mess we've made of our world. He is objectively a terrible manager of a country, and objectively a terrible human being.
But, for some reasons that have to do with politics, and some reasons that have to do with identity, folks who like Donald Trump as a showman are unable to disassociate his showmanship from his policies. To the point that if you were to write down the actual actions taken and attribute them to a leader of the other side (famous examples: Biden, Obama) as their policies, the same folks who are loudly cheering Donald Trump on would immediately castigate those actions if taken by someone on the "left".
It's a problem with no easy solution, and it requires more growth from humanity than we are at this moment exhibiting we possess. Scott Adams is a shining example of both this problem and our reaction to it, and while I mourn the passing of his art, I do not mourn his passing, and reading this comment section instead mourn our present state of wrapping ourselves in the cloth of identity politics while not engaging seriously on the fundamental underlying problems we face as a people.
Every Christmas since I was a teen I would get a Dilbert desk calendar from my mom (who worked in software startups since 1979). When my mom was dying of cancer during COVID the people in our small, red state town yelled at her for wearing a mask. She could barely move to go shop, and she was harassed to tears. It all turned me from hippy libertarian (that moved from California to a red state) to fuck conservatives. It's so weird to find out the lessons I learned from people like Scott Adams, they never learned from/for themselves.
If it were shadowbanned we wouldn't be able to comment on it. People have flagged it, it triggered the flamewar detector, or both. That's why it got downranked.
If you think the topic of his death has been "shadowbanned" (for some non-standard definition of shadowbanned), check the front page. There's another discussion there about it.
> This topic is not on the front page for me, yet it was on the front page for you.
I'd suggest checking again. It's around #12 right now. I suspect you didn't actually look and just wanted to make something up to complain about. Which is a strange thing to do, but there are stranger things people do on this site.
Dilbert was an ok comic I suppose, but I'll never go out of my way to read one again, and won't mourn the passing of such an openly horrible human. I prefer to simply remember them for who they were:
This was someone who called all Black people a "hate group"; said that parents of troubled boys could only watch them kill other people, or kill their sons themselves; and opposed women presidential candidates because they would negatively affect men.
nobody really cares about whether or not you’re going to mourn for someone, but I think it shows the content of your character that you felt the need to share that you won’t be mourning him because XYZ. Nobody is perfect, and I wager to guess even the almighty You has a few things in your past you wouldn’t want people to remember about you if you died slowly and painfully very publicly.
Scott Adams said some really stupid, poorly thought out things about minorities and women, and he faced real world consequences for his actions. But he also died slowly and painfully of cancer, and he died crying out for help very publicly. That’s objectively very sad, and if you should ever share the same fate I truly and genuinely hope your loved ones are there and with you, and choose to forgive you of any of your perceived sins.
I guess he got the death that he wished, personally and seriously, upon some large fraction of the Earth's population
I don't want anyone to misconstrue this post as satire or exaggeration. So I'll reiterate. If you have acted, or plan to act, in a way that keeps doctor-assisted suicide illegal, I see you as an accomplice in torturing my father, and perhaps me as well someday. I want you to die a painful death, and soon. And I'd be happy to tell you the same thing to your face.
Awesome! That’s so cool. I’m glad you are a perfect sinless little angel and not a cruel, horrible twisting little wretched creature like 99% of humanity.
I promise you that maybe nobody speaks up to you, but I’ve heard people like you on the street. I overhear you in a cafe, at a restaurant, I work with you, I’ve gone to school with you. People will not remember you based on how you think they should. They will remember you based on how you actually were. Surely I will forget this interaction in a few hours as the tandem of a typical day creeps back in, but know that I have personally assessed you to be a horrible person, and if you’re anything like this behind the screen other people in your life have too!
I was vacationing in New York, and we went to some pretty standard-looking mall bookshop somewhere near Poughkeepsie some time in mid 90s. And I bought an interesting looking comic book, something I had never seen before.
I liked Dilbert for a long time, but Adams's Trump Dementia became so bad in the last decade that it completely tainted his legacy for me. His role in enabling Donald Trump to rise to power is undeniable, and his death makes me wish I had reserved a bottle of sparkling wine for the occasion.
I yearn for the time when it was possible to never meet your idols.
The minimum recognition Scott Adams deserves should be having updated the world model of those who read his blog.
It is hard to remember how thoroughly Trump's presidential run was seen as a joke in 2015. I bet most people can't remember and somehow think they always knew Trump stood a real chance. That is likely a lie.
Scott made specific, reasoned, unique arguments about why Trump would win, with high conviction. This was at a time when it was about as non-consensus and unpopular as possible to do so (it wasn't just that people didn't want Trump to win, there was a complete dismissal of the possibility from both sides of the aisle).
The fact that Scott was right, and continued to be right when forecasting much about politics, taught me a lot about the nature of the world we live in. Scott clearly understood something important that I did not at the time.
This being a nerdy site, my first thought was that title was referring to Scott Adams the game designer famous for his text adventures in the 70s and 80s. Scott Adams the cartoonist makes me less sad.
He drew Dilbert for decades. He had a lot of comics and books in him.
In his later life he was clearly trolling and dabbling in stirring up social media for fun, and it was hard to tell where the lines between that and his personal identity were.
"And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed."
Not that your exactly guilty, but that comes close to the cringeworthy attitude of "haha, what a great troll! Those poor fools can't tell when he's being serious, so brilliant! Wait, wait, you touched my sacred cow? Well, now you're obviously toxic and I've discovered empathy."
I think he literally said white people should stay away from black people.
I forget which video it is and don't want to re-watch it anyways. I Googled the specific quote and it sounds about right with my memory (which admittedly could be faulty):
"I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people."
"Just get the f— away. Wherever you have to go, just get away".
I guess we could discuss whether this is straight up racist, but it sounds pretty bad to me.
There's a difference between speaking out against injustice when there is real risk involved, and speaking against a person because you don't like their views. Silence is appropriate in the latter case; or even better, express your own positive (in the logical sense) positions. Bloodless, priggish condemnation of individuals with fascist views makes fascism rise even faster than silence.
I don't think it's possible to want to troll about those things without at least somewhat believing them. To troll about them at the expense of your career and reputation takes a deeper belief that goes beyond trolling.
He was not trolling. Please don’t persist the lie that people spouting racism are “only joking.” It’s harmful, disrespectful, and either purposefully in bad faith or embarrassingly naïve.
> He said it revealed that 26% of Black respondents said it’s “not OK to be White” and 21% said “they weren’t sure.” With a degree of amazement, Adams said: “That’s 47% of Blacks not willing to say it’s OK to be White. That’s like a real poll. This just happened.”
> Adams said that the poll demonstrated that there is “no fixing” current racial tensions in America, which is why White people should live in largely segregated neighborhoods.
> “Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people,” the 65-year-old author exclaimed. “Just get the (expletive) away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.”
...
> “I’ve been identifying as Black for a while because I like to be on the winning team,” Adams continued. “And I like to help. I always thought if you help the Black community, that’s sort of the biggest lever, you could find, the biggest benefit.”
> “But it turns out that nearly half of that team doesn’t think I’m okay to be White,” Adams said.
> Given the poll results, Adams said he’s now “going to re-identify as White,” arguing that he doesn’t “want to be a member of a hate group,” which he claimed he had “accidentally joined” with his supposed Black identification.
Dilbert was great, and one of my favorite comics for a long long time. But yeah. Adams turned out to be kinda a jerk, at best. Of late, I've kinda concluded that no single piece of art or single artist is so great that I can't live a full life without it, regardless of how much I love said work or artist. I think individuals should have the right to read and enjoy Dilbert, but I also think if you don't like him and can't let that go, don't give your limited time and attention to the comic. There are lots of other great comics out there!
In a weird way, I want to give him credit for saying out loud what he actually thinks. It's a good reminder for people to see it out in the open.
The reality is that there are tens of millions of racists in the United States. In fact, they put a group of Christian Nationalist (Nat-C) white supremacists in the White House.
It's not a Scott Adams problem in particular, and trying to make the issue just about him is a cop out.
He was the creator of Dilbert, a comic strip that became a cultural touchstone for corporate life in the 1990s and 2000s. Through satire, Adams articulated the frustrations of office workers and popularized ideas about systems thinking, incentives, and the gap between organizational rhetoric and reality. For many in the technology and business sectors, Dilbert functioned as a shared language for workplace dysfunction.
In later years, Adams became increasingly known for provocative and polarizing commentary. His public statements grew more strident over time, culminating in remarks in 2023 that led to the widespread removal of Dilbert from newspapers. These comments were widely criticized as racist and effectively ended the strip’s mainstream publication.
Adams’ legacy is a complicated one. His early work influenced how a generation understood corporate systems and personal habits, while his later conduct overshadowed those contributions. Assessing that full record requires holding both facts at once, without simplification.
He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.
His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.
You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.
For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.
Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.
There are many responding about “ignoring racism,” “whitewashing,” or the importance of calling out bigotry.
I’m not sure how that follows from a comment that literally calls out the racism and describes it as “unambiguous.”
Striving to “avoid the ugliness” in your own life does not mean ignoring it or refusing to call it out.
Same to me when it comes his comics. There is an ugly part I did not like about Scott Adams but, that doesn't mean I will like his work (Dilbert) less. I have to admit it felt disappointing to find out about his vitriol online. Best wishes to his family and rest in peace for Scott. alway
There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though. (Note: I'm not talking about Scott Adams. I'm honestly not that familiar with his later life social media)
Thank you for at least acknowledging this. It's valid to appreciate someone's art while disagreeing with their behavior, but it's also valid if someone's behavior sours you on their art and makes it difficult to appreciate what they've accomplished - especially if you start to recognize some of their inner ugliness in their artistic endeavors.
Personally, I found that I connected with his early work a lot more than his latter work, as I found Dlibert's "nerd slice of life" arc a lot more compelling than his "Office microaggression of the week" arc. Scott revealing his inner ugliness did not make me eager to return, but I still keep a well-worn Dlibert mouse pad on my desk that my Dad gave me as a teenager; the one that says "Technology: No place for whimps."
Wherever Scott is now, I hope he's found peace.
EDIT: A few strips that live rent-free in my head.
In the internet age, simply consuming an artists media funds the artist. Get as philosophical as you'd like while separating the art from the artist, but you're still basically saying "look you're a piece of shit but here's a couple of bucks anyways".
Is it ethical to buy Dilbert books now that Adams is dead and the money's not going to him?
I would, for instance, watch The Ninth Gate a couple times a year if Polanski hadn’t directed it, or had directed it post jail instead of hiding from justice for 25 years. Instead I watch it about twice a decade. Luke Beson is almost as problematic, and I have a hard time reconciling just how brilliant Gary Oldman is as Stansfield with how creepy the overall tone is, especially the European cut. I enjoyed that movie when I was young and had seen the American version. Trying to show it to other people (especially the Leon version) and seeing their less enthusiastic reactions made me see the balance of that story less affectionately. As well as seeing it through the lens of an adult responsible for children instead of being the child. Now I watch The Fifth Element and that’s about it.
There's enough good content out there that I can selectively disregard content from individuals who have gone to great lengths to make their worst opinions known. It doesn't mean their content was bad, it just means that juice isn't worth the squeeze.
> There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though.
I think this is common. Everyone separates art from the artist based on their own personal measurements on 1) how much they liked the art and 2) how much they dislike the artist's actions/beliefs. I'm sure a lot of people lambasting the GP for not completely rejecting Dilbert due to its creator still listen to Michael Jackson, or play Blizzard games, or watch UFC. There are musicians I listen to who have been accused of SA, but there are musicians I enjoyed but stop listening to because I found out they were neo-Nazis (not in the Bluesky sense, but in the "swastika tattoo" sense).
I was never a Dilbert fan, but know it spoke to people like the GP commenter and completely understand why they'd be conflicted.
I do think there was another formula he gravitated towards, though. Maybe one in every four strips, it seemed to me like he would have a canonically "stupid" character present a popular belief or a common behavior, and then have his author self-insert character dunk on them... And that was it, that was the entire comic. Those strips weren't very witty or funny to me, they just felt like contrived fantasies about putting down an opponent.
Once I noticed that, it became harder to enjoy the rest of his comics. And easier to imagine how he might have fallen down the grievance politics rabbit hole.
Were they? Can you cite an example? Because I also grew up with Dilbert, and I was never aware of it.
They were valuable to me because it gave me perspective on a way of thinking I would never have considered. I disagreed with the majority, but some had the subtle beginnings of truth that helped to expand my world view.
I'm grateful he was part of the world, and will miss his comedy.
Right. But he's not actually your family member.
I dont disagree with your general sentiment but you are literally trying to pick your family.
They related him to an uncle figure who became a mean drunk.
Over time I've learned context about how those doldrums occurred, and more about what Reagan actually did, and the trade seems much less worthwhile. :-/
If anything, the US is still far away from as bad as China.
That is a matter of opinion
I am unsure about social conditions within the countries ( freedom Vs. economic security -hard to compare)
But in international relations the USA has been a rouge state for many decades (e.g. tjr Gulf of Tonkin deception). The USA pretends to care about "values", but does not, it cares about it's own interests
China is plain speaking and cares, openly and transparently, about its interests
The USA has institutionalised hypocrisy. China sins her own sins in the open
The USA is much worse than China - to foreigners
Opium Wars, Rape of Nanking. Things had been pretty hardcore for the Chinese for quite some time when Mao took power.
People that take power in those kinds of environments rarely trend towards genteel treatment of their political enemies in the peace that follows.
Whether this is objectively true is another question, but from their perspective, that's what it is.
>Whether this is objectively true is another question, but from their perspective, that's what it is.
Correct, as a general rule, slaves think more highly of their slave owners, compared to people about their politicians/leaders who were elected by them.
( what happens behind the scenes is this: the slaves/dissidents who are rebellious are killed off by the dictator - only the most ardent supporters survive)
However I don't know by what definition of democracy a country with a unique party, with so little freedom of press, can be considered as one.
Correct, as a general rule (true) slaves think more highly of their slave owners, compared to people about their politicians/leaders who were elected by them.
(what happens behind the scenes is this: the slaves/dissidents who are rebellious are killed off by the dictator - only the most ardent supporters survive)
Even the US - after independence one imperialism was replaced by another - a committee of the wealthy. It was a slow march to the democracy and universal suffrage that exists today.
~ Julius Nyerere
Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not? I think most people could actually "choose family" (or not, if it's better for you as individual). Why stick with people if they're mostly negative and have a negative impact on you? Just because you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human on the planet?
Not to take away from the rest of what you say, it's a highly personal experience, and I thank you for sharing that heartfelt message to give people more perspectives, something usually missing when "divisive" (maybe not the right word) people end up in the news. Thank you for being honest, and thank you for sharing it here.
> Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not?
I'm sorry you had that experience.
There are very good reasons to leave / avoid family. I have an extended family and I've seen it all: One cousin recently had to kick her husband out for being an alcoholic; a different cousin was kicked out for being an alcoholic and met his 2nd wife in AA. Fortunately, my ultra-conservative aunt and uncle tolerate their transgender grandchild, but it creates a lot of friction between them and my cousin (transgender child's parent).
For most of us, our families are a positive experience. As we get older, we also learn that families are an exercise in learning to accept people as they are, and not as we wish they would be. We just can't go through life changing our people whenever they don't live up to what we want them to be.
As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.
Protip: the love has to be reciprocated. Never, ever unconditionally love an abuser in the name of family. Set boundaries, when they are crossed, leave. There may be a cost, but it may be lighter than the cost of staying. We may not choose family, but we continually choose whose company we keep.
My brother has a substance abuse problem. When he gets out of prison, he’s clean. Them a cousin or uncle that hasn’t seen him in a while will stop by with a party favor (an 8 ball of coke or something) and then before you know it my brother is in jail again. They all are alcoholics and drama often escalates to fist fight type drama. Or the women will start throwing stuff around someone’s house and trash the place. It’s just like normal to them. Sometimes they make up and help clean up and sometimes they don’t. But the few times I’ve been around them on the decades since I made a decision to cut them out, it’s always just the same ole shit. They’re in a cycle of “dependence on family” while also “destroying family” from my perspective. It’s so volatile I can put up with it at all. My kid has only met these people a couple times and it’s always for brief time because once the booze get flowing or the other substances get passed around anything can happen. When I was a kid my mom was arguing with her then boyfriend and he ran her over and she was in a full body cast for like 6 months. My dad was always normal ish, from a more stable family, then in my mid 20s he was caught in a pedophile sting situation. And that’s just the beginning.
Like, who tf are these people. I have no time for this shit, Is my take on it.
Of course it's different for everyone, some families are so tragic they may not be worth preserving, etc. But that's an outlier-- the modal experience is that the power of family is precisely in the fact that you don't get to choose it.
If you can get friends who live nearby and come over once a month that's probably closer than the modern us family structure tbh
An adopted child is also a form of chosen family. As is a spouse.
I have not found this to be true.
In my teens I began to learn that most of the people on my father's side of the family were horrifically broken people with severe issues. There's at least one town in New Mexico where I wouldn't want to use my last name because an uncle of mine has run it deeply through the mud and 20' underground so to speak.
I've actively cut those people out of my life. I've decided that blood isn't the only thing that makes family, and that I can choose who I want to treat as family.
The infighting bastards who happen to share my last name are not my family.
Your immediately family shares hundreds of thousands more variable sites in your genome than a 'random' individual. Which is to say there would need to be something like a 2^(100000) population of humans before someone 'random' would be as close to you in terms of variable sites.
I guess my point being "you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA" is just not trivial or a small coincidence that can be waved away with "we are more similar to each other than not". Whether any genetic similarity means that one's biological family deserves one's attention, I have no comment.
- The people with whom we share close bonds, stronger than ordinary friendship; we absolutely can (and should) choose them, and choose them wisely.
- The people who've disproportionately shaped our development into who we are as persons today; barring sci-fi technologies like time machines or false memory implantation, that's pretty hard to change.
GP's comment seems to be more about the latter, and of Scott Adams being in that category. I agree with that in my case, too; both the Dilbert comics and The Dilbert Principle were formative for me both personally and professionally — which amplified the pain I felt when Adams started to “go off the deep end” and reveal himself to be less of a Dilbert and more of a PHB.
It's all fun and games until grandma passes with a $10M net worth without a will, and the 5 children and 20 grandchildren start a real life session of battle royale
I was better off without those people, and that's quite the realization before you're 10.
The farther I get, the happier I am. Put me in the "choose your own" camp for family.
I first read those words many years ago. They were a comfort and a revelation then, and they still resonate today, when I have very much chosen my own family.
And back in the day, Adams was a pretty crunchy California guy. Remember the Dilburrito?
At some point I stopped reading because the RSS feed kept getting broken and it was just too hard for me to follow.
I didn’t hear about Adams again until maybe 7-8 years ago when I found out about the sock puppet thing and he had seemingly gone off the deep end.
From the meager amount I know, it only got worse from there.
It makes things very odd. Given who he was/became I don’t miss him. But I did enjoy his work long long ago.
What did the guy say that has everyone stumbling over themselves to vaguely allude to it?
"But as of today I'm going to re-identify as White, because I don't want to be a member of a hate group, I'd accidentally joined a hate group."
"The best advice I would give to White people is to get away hell away from Black people, just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this, this can't be fixed, you just have to escape. So that's what I did, I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6TnAn7qV1s
Now, someone who disagree with the statement "it's ok to belong to <ethnic group>" is usually called a racist. That's if we stick to the default meaning of words, without second and third guessing what people really mean to say when they deny it's ok to belong to an ethnic group. I think it's legitimate to be upset in this context and at the normalisation of such a thought, even to the point of reacting offensively.
I provided the link to the full episode for anyone who would like more context.
"So I realized, as you know I've been identifying as Black for a while, years now, because I like to be on the winning team"
"But as of today I'm going to re-identify as White, because I don't want to be a member of a hate group, I'd accidentally joined a hate group."
"The best advice I would give to White people is to get away hell away from Black people, just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this, this can't be fixed, you just have to escape. So that's what I did, I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6TnAn7qV1s
God forbid someone just decide to live their own life, rather than dedicate it to a race they're not a part of.
"So I realized, as you know I've been identifying as Black for a while, years now, because I like to be on the winning team"
"But as of today I'm going to re-identify as White, because I don't want to be a member of a hate group, I'd accidentally joined a hate group."
"The best advice I would give to White people is to get away hell away from Black people, just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this, this can't be fixed, you just have to escape. So that's what I did, I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6TnAn7qV1s
Then, of course, racism consists of the believe that some races are intrinsically less valuable (in whatever sense) than others. I didn't see Scott Adams voice that part. But I might have missed it or it might have been implied.
But it's important to note that US identity politics of the last couple of decades looks increasingly weird to me as an outsider in any case.
The funny thing is that most people do not know what exactly he said, their stand is everyone else says that he is a racist so he must be one. Very similar to people calling the author of a book as bigoted - a book that they have never read.
I have difficulty reconciling this with the other side of the picture. It seems to me like true clarity of thought wouldn't have ended up in the places he did.
Shouldn't we reject these people entirely? We have a fascist regime running the USA right now, with a gestapo running around killing and kidnapping people, in no small part due to people like Adams making his point of view acceptable and palatable over time.
As to ICE deporting criminal aliens, that's not what they're doing. They're kidnapping people off the street and out of their homes and cars, with no warrants. They're literally doing "Papers, please" style stops of anybody they even suspect could be an immigrant, including Native Americans. Just a few days ago in Minneapolis they abducted four homeless men who are members of the Oglala Nation. This all sounds pretty Gestapo like to me.
His comments were in response to a Rasmussen Reports poll that asked people if they agreed with the statement "It's OK to be white". Around 26% of Black respondents disagreed (with some unsure), which Adams interpreted as meaning nearly half of Black Americans were not OK with white people.
Is it reductive? Sure. Is it racist? Of course not. You're allowed to have opinions on the Internet as long as you treat others with respect.
Don't forget the murder.
Was Obama’s use of ICE also kidnapping, in your eyes? For reference material, please read the ACLUs papers on their site.
No ICE agent has been indicted for kidnapping. Can you explain why? ( Remember, they have been doing this for many years, under presidents of both parties ).
> That also felt like family [emphasis added]
See the problem?
"Chosen family" is chosen. You weren't recruited.
He was a racist person, and the people he was racist towards would prefer that people not forget that, even in death, because the problems that Scott Adams embodied at the end of his life did not die with him.
(It really takes a low IQ person to takes things out of content and call him a racist. I'm no fan of SA, but I did appreciate what he had to say about the race thing, somebody has to speak up against the politically correct nonsense out there. Not surprisingly many people who call him racist - haven't even heard him on the topic. Very similar to people calling the author of a book as bigoted - a book that they have never read)
While you're out here conducting pseudoscientific IQ readings of internet commenters you disagree with, some of us are actually aware of what overt racism looks like.
"...you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous."
Whitewashing has been a thing since before races (which are biologically meaningless) were called colors.
As a metaphor, it means exactly the same thing -- hiding the parts underneath with something that covers them.
Whitewashing is not sanitizing. Sanitizing something actually fixes it. A whitewashed surface is not implied to be sanitary. Lime is basic (high pH) so it also discourages (eg) mold growth, but it's not sanitary.
More generally, not every word that includes the substring "white" is a part of the conspiracy. Whichever conspiracy you are demonstratively opposing here.
That's actually funny!
I like it much more than your implication that I am a bigot for whitewashing the walls of my basement last weekend.
But you avoided the point. Whitewashing is literally applying a wash which happens to be white.
To me, he died many times in the past few years. Dilbert of the 1990s is dear to me and I really enjoyed the animated series. My sons tell me it prepared them for corporate life. I'm sad he left us this way. I wish I could admire him again.
Politics is "How much should we tax people?" and "Where should we set limits on carbon emissions?" or "Which candidate do I support"
Politics is not "Black Americans are a terrorist group" and "Actually, maybe the Holocaust was not as bad as people say it was".
The latter are core moral views, and we should not be so quick to dismiss them as merely political.
That’s why it’s not productive to just point at people and say they’re bad because they have bad ideas.
There is a lot of this in the modern era, and probably will only get "worse". People need to sooner than later be able to reconcile this whole idea of "not liking the person yet can't help but like their art". Back in the day it was easy to ignore, and probably most of the bad stuff was easily hidden, not so much these days.
I loved reading the Belgariad as a young teen and was shocked upon learning more about the author as an adult.
I think the Egyptians had it right. Ultimately your heart will be weighted against the feather of Ma'at, and it is up to the goddess to decide. We mere mortals don't know the true intentions and circumstances of other people and their lives to judge, nor to throw the first stone.
Why hide from it? Embrace it, love it. Be it.
The only people he pushed away are the increasingly intolerant leftists who always choose to interpret whatever he said in the worst possible way.
> So I think it makes no sense whatsoever, as a white citizen of America, to try to help Black citizens anymore
And:
> So if you are wondering how men become cold-blooded killers, it isn’t religion that is doing it. If you put me in that situation, I can say with confidence I would sign up for suicide bomb duty. And I’m not even a believer. Men like hugging better than they like killing. But if you take away my access to hugging, I will probably start killing, just to feel something. I’m designed that way. I’m a normal boy. And I make no apology for it.
I'd particularly love to hear how I should interpret this second one in a manner that isn’t just me being an “intolerant leftist”.
Oh, and this one:
> Learning hypnotism has been my greatest Jedi mind trick to get women to sleep with me.
How are these not “deeply troubling” attitudes towards females and not “reader intolerance”?
I’m sorry, are you also racist or do you mean a different family?
Scott Adams undoubtedly “won at life” but also somehow remained angry at the world. More of an example of things we shouldn’t do and things we should try to eradicate.
I sent him a thank you email for the link, and he replied graciously. This began a conversation where he referred me to his literary agent, and this ultimately led to a real-world, dead-tree-and-ink book publishing deal[1]. He even provided a nice blurb for the book cover.
I can't say that I agreed a lot with the person Scott Adams later became--I only knew him vaguely, from a distance. But he brought humor into many people's lives for a lot of years, and he was generous to me when he didn't have to be. Today I'll just think about the good times.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-damn-interesting-book/
Edit: I found the relevant Dilbert Blog link via the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20071011024008/http://dilbertblo...
How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced, e.g. a stroke or something. It was incredibly sad to see him throw away his life's work and go down a path most of us at least hadn't foreseen and die having alienated his fans.
Another type of work I avoid are "the making of ..." documentaries/accounts of classic works of film, music, and TV shows. Pulling back the curtain really destroys the magic.
btw, affirmations is a pretty common thing in a lot of religions and other superstitions. Every single Catholic mass is pretty much just the same affirmations/mantra/rituals over and over with a bible story at the end. They even publish the schedule on an annual basis iirc. (my wife briefly converted to Catholicism when we were getting married)
For people who haven't read The Dilbert Future: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32627/has-anyone...
It's a weird book and not in a great way. He presents a bunch of very strange "theories" in a way where he kind of says "haha just a silly lil thought... unless it's true", which I remember seeing in some of his early Trump stuff too.
Adams more or less tells female readers to just deal with it, while also telling male readers that they're broken/lying if they're not engaged in a constant sexual fantasy about their female coworkers.
To be honest, this did real damage to how I felt about sexuality and gender. Not a huge amount on its own, but it's just such a distorted take from a respected author, whose books my father kept checking out, that I read at a young age.
Scott Adams clearly lived an atypical life. Most people don't quit their jobs to write comics about corporate culture. If I had to guess why he took such a hard turn later on, I think, maybe it's something that happens when a humorist can't compartmentalize their penchant for absurdity and need for attention from real life, they can tell jokes that resonate with a lot of people, but at the same time their serious views also end up becoming ungrounded...
If you aren't familiar with it, well I was once given a copy by a friend who said they used it to 'get their partner'.
I tried reading it, found it despicable (its basically everything we hate about manipulation in the attention economy,) also the person who loaned it to me had bad narcissistic tendencies; the only time I saw them cry was when someone died that they didnt get to bang.
and "Learning hypnotism has been my Jedi mind trick to sleep with more women".
They weren't surpressed; he was very open about them from very early on in his career as a comic artist; they were central to his “origin story” and were woven directly into the comics. Its just, for a while, other aspects of his still-recent experience in corporate America gave him other relatable things to say that were mixed in with them, which made it easier to overlook them.
At the time i read those i probably thought they were on point. I've changed my views over the years. You can't keep them or you end up like Adams. That's probably the key to understanding him. He grew up in an era where black students were not allowed to attend white schools. The world changed. He didn't.
It took a long time to actually get to diversity that was beyond token "person of group" inclusivity.
Are we really beyond that now?
Many of the initiatives I've experienced are the same thing today, which is why I'm not a big fan.
Somewhat later (but still quite a while before what people describe as him “turning”), he would also claim his Dilbert show on UPN was cancelled because he was White, making it the third job he lost for that reason. (More likely, it was cancelled because its audience was both small and White and UPN was, looking at where it had successes and wanting a coherent demographic story to sell to advertisers and in an era where synergies between the appeals of shows on the same network was important to driving ratings, working to rearrange its offerings to focus on targeting Black audiences.)
I remember reading (I think in newspaper interview) in the late 1990s his own description of how comics became his full-time focus and his deep resentment of how difficult it had been to advance in management in corporate America because he was a White man in the 1980s (!?!) was pretty central to it.
Similarly he felt his TV show was cancelled after two seasons because it wasn't PC, but his show wasn't getting good viewership and had a terrible time slot. That's a pretty typical trajectory for a TV show, it's like complaining your startup failed.
He wrote a lot about explicitly magical thinking. Sort of along the lines of The Secret; that he could achieve things where the odds were against him through sheer force of will and wishing. That's not necessarily a problem but it does set you up for denial when things don't always go your way. And the denial is dangerous.
The later chapters of his life were marked by tragedy. His stepson died of overdose. His marriage collapsed. He lost the ability to speak and had to fight like hell to get a proper diagnosis and treatment (he later recovered). He went through COVID like the rest of us. Unfortunately these events would seem to have hardened and radicalized him.
I think we can understand and empathize with that without condoning it. I hope he found his peace in the end.
He didn't just invented it in his own head, you know. He was directly told that he won't be promoted because he was a white man. If I remember correctly, it had more to do with his sex and not his race.
Why would he work his ass off after that?
I think Adams was lying. I don't think they ever told him that.
For instance in contemporary interviews about his show being cancelled he gave reasonable explanations. Only later did he claim his show was cancelled unjustly. He also wrote a book with the subtitle, Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter. I think as his views hardened he didn't feel obligated to tell the truth, and/or that his lies were in service of a deeper truth.
So I think he sincerely believed he had been passed over because of his sex, but that that conversation never took place and he knew it.
> If I remember correctly, it had more to do with his sex and not his race.
You're right. I've updated the comment. Thanks for the correction.
> Why would he work his ass off after that?
He was phoning it in before that.
I'd bet dollars to donuts that (if there is truth at all to him being told what he claims) the superiors making the promotion decisions so that told him he was being passed over because he was a White men were also White men. If he had to justify it, he might say that PHB also became a manager before the wave of political correctness.
Or I don't know, maybe everyone hates corpo suit types no matter the race?
The 6/11/1994 comic about sensitivity training comes to mind. "I can't find my keys" and "my blouse falls to the floor."
June 03, 1994
https://www.reddit.com/r/egg_irl/s/zoFG1Ox2Dv
If you want an explanation for why he would try ivermectin for cancer treatment he had a lot of beliefs in that vein for a long time. I consider that tragic for him.
James Hoffman, the coffee YouTuber, had an interesting comment on how he tried to use that in one of his 90s barista competitions, but seemed skeptical of it now. Scott remained a believer.
Tl; dr: it's about adding a second layer to your communication which attends to the subconscious, not unlike art. It was originally for therapy, but unfortunately a lot of businessdorks in the 90s got into it and perverted it.
Manifesting things into reality through writing them often enough is FAR from a normal belief. Dude was a bit looney from the get go
uh I don't know, try asking almost any person who was born pre-1960? Doubt they all had brain damage. Not that it was necessarily a good thing, but it was certainly 'normal' in many eras throughout time.
Almost everyone is reasonable, it’s the contexts that our reasons are relevant to, which are different.
This is 100% the case, with very infamous baddies, but people don't want to acknowledge it. It's a sad reality of this always on media we ingest. No idea what can be done, other than slowly ignoring more and more algorithmic stuff, and choose your own adventures based on content providers you have known for a long time, and still have their backbone intact.
Perhaps?
Does that sound reasonable to you?
I think Scott Adams' biggest problem in life (although partially what also made him entertaining), is that he'd kind of pick fights that had little upside for him and a lot of downside.
Some of it goes quite far back, even:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070222235609/http://dilbertblo...
It started at roughly the time of his divorce, so it's hard to imagine there's not a connection. But, of course, you're right that we'll never know.
I don't want to excuse his opinions but that's the sort of event that can change a person.
He did online chats, and did one immediately after. It's a tough watch. https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1046764270128484352
In fact, growing up in the very affluent part of my city, I saw a bunch of kids die using opiates to mentally escape the weird family fiefdoms where they [p/m]atriarch inexplicably wouldn't ever need for money, so went completely off the rails mentally. I was prescribed a bunch of opiates (including fent) after a bad ski accident, and can tell you that they basically work by turning down the volume on life around you. I can understand why someone would turn to them to mentally escape a bad family life.
About the only good thing I can say about recreational Xanax is that those kids are generally still alive in contrast to the ones who preferred opiates.
The description of reality is not at all the same as supporting it. "Is" vs. "Ought to be".
Not sure why we are being coy about the triggers. Society of his youth and the biology are well documented.
Adams jumped to Pacific Bell and completed his degree, thinking he was on the fast track to upper management. But in his book, Adams wrote that as was the case at Crocker National, his new employer was also coming under fire for a lack of diversity in its executive ranks.
Instead of getting mad, Adams got to drawing. Believing all this was a sign for him to revive his dream of cartooning, he purchased a primer on how to submit a comic strip and went about creating Dilbert.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/scott-ad...
He explains it himself, if you are open to primary source material.
It’s so common that we barely remark on it any longer. So I don’t think it’s really a mystery, it can happen to anyone who’s not getting outside enough.
My first clue something was wrong was when he didn’t understand the criticism around the Iraq war of the early 2000s. Which even most conservatives have come around now to acknowledge as a disaster.
I didn't know about his comments about Black people until today. It's more than a bit pathetic that he devolved into colour-based absurdities so late in life. For someone who could pattern match the reality of life at a large company so effectively, it's unfortunate he couldn't realize he was being played by 4chan trolls and fellow travelers in the media.
He didn't have peers to challenge him on anything, and after a couple decades of that, he was just high on his own supply. Elon Musk and Kanye West have the same issue.
Think of it this way: if you were cancelled and repressed and censored in your own home and unable to express yourself, your efforts to communicate to remain authentic would intensify not die down. Or you die and let yourself morph to the average new censor-ship approved world.
Scott wouldn't do that and neither would I. All this to say I think its normal to intensify your opinions and even take on and be pushed to more extremes when you live in a controversial time of "you're either on my side or the other side and theres no acceptable middle gray area.
The key is that it seemed like he was Dilbert when he actually always thought of himself as Dogbert.
He used to blog about pretty innocent stuff; his wife making fun of him for wearing pajama pants in public, behind the scenes on drawing comics, funny business interactions he'd had. But then he started getting taken out of context by various online-only publications, and he'd get a burst of traffic and a bunch of hate mail and then it'd go away. And then he'd get quoted out of context again. I'm not sure if it bothered him, but he started adding preambles to his post, like "hey suchandsuch publication, if you want to take this post out of context, jump to this part right here and skip the rest."
I stopped reading around this point. But later when he came out with his "trump is a persuasion god, just like me, and he is playing 4d chess and will be elected president" schtick, it seemed like the natural conclusion of hill climbing controversy. He couldn't be held accountable for the prediction. After all, he's just a comedian with a background in finance, not a politics guy. But it was a hot take on a hot topic that was trying to press buttons.
I'm sure he figured out before most people that being a newspaper cartoonist was a downward-trending gig, and that he'd never fully transition to online. But I'm sad that this was how he decided to make the jump to his next act.
But Trump was elected president. Twice. So maybe Adams was right? Or what did you mean with "hill climbing controversy"?
(The same) people also call him crazy (or "toxic") for those other writings. Maybe those other writings were right as well?
Seems at least plausible.
And yeah, I also thought it was completely impossible for Trump to get elected even once. Never mind twice. I was wrong.
No surprises for me. By my standards he was never radicalized just an objective thinker with a flair for humor.
I was expecting something insightful, an insider's view of why the right had coalesced around Trump.
Instead it was some of the most awful drivel I have ever read.
It was a bit of a crushing moment because inside my head I was thinking, "I know and love this guy's work. Surely if I just engage him at his level without being a jackass, we can add some levity to the comments section." My instinct was that maybe he really was just a jackass and I should label him as such in my brain and move on.
But then my cat got sick last year and went from being a cuddly little guy to an absolute viscious bastard right up to the day he died. It was crushing. One day I realized it felt similar to my experience with Scott. I wondered if maybe Scott was just suffering really badly, too. I have no idea what the truth of the matter is, and I don't think that people who suffer have a free pass for their behaviour. But I think I want to hold on to this optimism.
Quite frankly, this is a worry for me. I have noticed that I've become shorter with people and less tolerant as I've got older. I've started to feel some resentment in certain situations where I felt I was being unfairly treated.
I recognise these feelings and things, which I am grateful for. So I work hard to correct this, and I hope I succeed, but I seriously worry about my brain changing and becoming someone quite unpleasant. You look at people from the outside, and it is so easy to judge, but we're all just a big bag of chemicals and physics. Personality change does happen, it could happen to any of us.
I gave up caffeine, and the rages completely vanished.
Worth a try?
I never agreed with him politically, and I honestly think he said some pretty awful stuff. However, none of that changes the positive impact that his comics had on my life. Rest in peace.
Same! Or at least I got into them as a young kid I don’t remember the exact age, it was probably a few years older but definitely tweens max.
I’m also not sure why I liked them so much, other than that I loved computers and always knew I’d end up working in the industry, so maybe it was like a window into that world that I liked. I also loved the movie Office Space, so maybe I just had a thing for office satire.
Sadly I'm doomed to work in an open floorplan.
I wasn't exactly a daily reader at the time, but I was sad to hear when dilbert was pulled, and why. I tried to send him some fan mail when I heard he had fallen ill, but the email of his that I found had been deleted.
That concept of merging skills stuck with me.
Don't max one stat. Be a unique, weird combination of several.
1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things."
I'm certain at least some small part of my own success can be attributed to my exposure to this idea, and for that I give my respects to Adams. As far as Adam's character (or lack thereof) is concerned, that's already being discussed elsewhere in this thread by others more eloquent than myself, so I'll leave that to them.
Is this idea that top 25% is "very good" at something innumeracy, or a subtle insight I'm missing? There's got to be a million skills that you could assess rank at -- writing embedded C code, playing basketball, identifying flora, PacMan, archery, bouldering… I can't imagine ever being able to not continue this list -- and you should expect to be in the top 25% of roughly a quarter of those skills, obviously heavily biased towards the ones you've tried, and even more biased towards the ones you care about. It's hard to imagine anyone who's not in the top 25% of skill assessment in a dozen things, let alone two or more…
Everyone (for the sake of my argument) wants to be an engineer at a FAANG but there are tons of folks making more money with more autonomy because they've found a niche that combines their good-enough technical ability with an understanding or interest in an underserved market.
Beyond that, it's not about becoming very good at two different, completely orthogonal things, it's about becoming very good at two things that are complementary in some way that is of value to others. Being good at PacMan and Bouldering is only particularly valuable if you are competing for opportunities to participate in a hypothetical mixed reality video game, or perhaps a very niche streaming channel. Being the top quartile of embedded c code, and flora identification could result in building software/hardware tools to identify flora, which is a niche that currently has multiple competing products that are high value to those interested.
Even at 12 I could tell this guy was an annoying idiot. Loved the comic though.
I don't think this originates with him, it sounds like an amusing joke a physicist would say because the math happens to be equivalent, and there is not an experiment to differentiate between the two.
Which is why it's so important for people understand the Principle of Parsimony (aka. Occams Razor), and Russels Teapot.
Also, refuting it is rather easy, and doesn't even require modern technology, Henry Cavendish performed the experiment in 1797 [1]. Nothing in the experimental setup would change if all involved objects expanded.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_experiment
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdb/1996Mar/0000.ht...
The simplest objection I can see is orbital mechanics.
> Humor often comes from the weird thoughts and emotions involved in a situation, as opposed to the simple facts. The best fodder for humor can be communicated by a simple description of the situation and then saying "So then I was thinking..."
I'm not here to judge the man or everything he did, I'm here to say thanks for the stuff I loved.
Farewell Scott, you are now God's debris.
Of course writing a comic takes a lot of time. I don't begrudge him for wanting to quit, and others have made the transition to full time humorist well - but he wasn't the first to fail to make that switch. He should have retired when he was a head....
Let the above be a warning to you. I don't know how (or if) it will apply, but think on it.
No idea how true it is of course.
I couldn’t read Dilbert the same after that. Adams avoids, with surgical precision, things like unionization, while the author simultaneously supports downsizing despite seeming to mock it in his strips.
Anyway, shame he’s dead, but to me he died a long time ago. I only feel sad when thinking about how I used to enjoy Dilbert.
His later personality was.. not my style.. and I dumped all of his books into little free libraries a few years back. The only things I really found interesting from his later work was focusing on systems rather than process.
Can't deny the early influence, though. The pointy-haired boss will live on forever.
We joked that we could assess the health of a company's culture by whether Dilbert cartoons were tapped up in cubicles. Companies without them tended to have not much in the way of a sense of humor, or irony, or self-awareness.
That place wasn't just kinda like Initech in Office Space, it pretty much WAS Initech in Office Space, only way less funny and interesting.
Once, before the web existed, I emailed Scott and joked that perhaps he was someone at my company, looking over my shoulder. The comics were often absurd but also so accurate. He replied something friendly, I forget what.
And yes, the norm was already pretty bad.
Has happened on a grander scale in the past in China, Germany, Russian and others. This is hardly anything.
I realized early on through IRC that some people cannot have a professional or cordial relationship with someone opposed to their position. The moment someone found out I believed in the opposite of the group I was attacked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8vHhgh6oM0
I think it is pretty good.
You can, of course, debate it - and HN being HN people probably will.
> Fund your company 401K to the maximum.
Fund it up to amount your company matches. The maximum you can contribute to 401k is 40% of your salary I believe. I wouldn't contribute 40% of my salary to the 401k. Just the amount your company matches ( 5% or whatever it is for your company ). That 5% match ( or whatever it is ) is free money. It would be foolish to leave it on the table.
If you aren't getting a matching benefit or other reward for using an employer managed investment, then you shouldn't. If someone doesn't have the time, inclination, or knowledge to understand the difference then investing in an unmatched 401k is still better than not saving at all :S
Fair winds and following seas, Scott.
He was generous with his time to the end.
I would like to point out that the quality of his satire really feel of as time went on. He came from an office life in the late 90s and had a lot of insight into it's dysfunctions. But after decades of being out of that world, he had clearly lost touch. The comics often do little to speak to the current corporate world, outside of squeezed in references.
As I see it, decline in quality and the political radicalization go hand in hand. You cannot be a good satirist and be so long removed from the world you are satirizing.
Taking his anodyne setup-punchline-sarcastic quip formula and applying it to aggressively unfunny shock material is actually low key brilliant, albeit unintentionally so.
It’s like if Norm MacDonald didn’t posses a moral compass.
He was a role model to me for helping me to make sense of the corporate world and its denizens. This might not sound like a compliment, but it is. He was my Mr. Miyagi for mental resilience by providing good arguments for most people not being evil, despite how it might seem.
I wonder if he managed to do it in time.
Even those of a logical mind may not have the fortitude to protect themselves from propaganda that exploit their victimhood.
It’s not hard for a lot of us to criticize who he became. He certainly had no shortage of criticism for others. I looked up to Scott a lot as a kid, and as an adult found him to be a man like any other, with limits and flaws… not merely in spite of his accomplishments, but often because of them. There’s a lesson there that I wish to carry too.
That's something.
> In a 2006 blog post, Adams asked if official figures of the number of deaths in the Holocaust were based on methodologically sound research.
Jesus christ.
I don't know how he got there from Biden's literal pitch to donors that "nothing will fundamentally change".
To go from a brilliant satirist to becoming terminally online and just completely falling off the far right cliffs of insanity is incredibly sad. And unfortunately, this is plight is not uncommon. It is incredibly dangerous to make politics part of your identity and then just absolutely bathe yourself in a political media echo chamber.
It seems to me that social media belongs in the same "vice" category as drinking, drugs, and gambling: lots of people can "enjoy responsibly", some make a mess but pull back when they see it, and some completely ruin their lives by doubling down.
Social media has nobody to pull you back, you just get sucked in to the whirlpool.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...
I don't agree that this is a clear-cut example of a cautionary tale. I think for most people it can be a cautionary tale since it's common to chase things that promise hope in a desperate situation. We also shouldn't dismiss that someone can weigh the risks and take a gamble on something working out. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong or stupid for someone trying something conventional even if it backfires.
It's important to try and see this from Scott's perspective. According to him, he had his use of his vocal cords restored by a treatment that was highly experimental and during a time when all the official information said there was no treatment. If we are to believe his words, it worked out for him once, so it makes sense that he would decide to try things that are unconventional when his entire life was at stake.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/02/23/dilberts-scott-adams-...
[2] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jan/26/scott-adam...
Well Scott Adams was in there, venting (in a video) that his life had basically been ruined by his support for Trump, that he'd lost most of his friends and wealth due to it, and that he felt betrayed and felt like a moron for trusting him since it wasn't even worth it. Nothing had changed and the country wasn't "saved".
Edit: and for what it’s worth, I have no idea who “Berger” is or that/if they edited that Vice video.
Let's be precise and remove those scare quotes.
In 2015/2016 Trump was literally talking about saving U.S. critical infrastructure:
1. Promising to fulfill a trillion dollar U.S. infrastructure campaign pledge to repair crumbling infrastructure[1]
2. Putting Daniel Slane on the transition team to start the process to draft said trillion dollar infrastructure bill[2]
By 2017 that plan was tabled.
If anyone can find it, I'd love to see Slane's powerpoint and cross-reference his 50 critical projects against what ended up making it into Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OafCPy7K05k
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdvJSGc14xA
Edit: clarifications
Clearly Trump himself has no interest in these sorts of substantive projects, I mean just look at his second term. He has even less interest in policy this time around and isn't even pretending to push for infrastructure or similar legislation.
https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpupp...
https://web.archive.org/web/20201108112121/https://www.scott...
> In other news, for several years I have been tracking a Master Wizard that I believe lives in Southern California. It seems he has trained a small army of attractive women in his method. The women create a specialized style of porn video clips that literally hypnotize the viewer to magnify the orgasm experience beyond anything you probably imagine is possible. Hypnosis has a super-strong impact on about 20% of people. And a lesser-but-strong impact on most of the rest.
> Once a customer is hooked, the girls use powerful (and real) hypnosis tools to connect the viewer’s enjoyable experience (a super-orgasm, or several) to the viewer’s act of giving them money, either directly or by buying more clips. Eventually the regular viewers are reprogrammed to get their sexual thrill by the act of donating money to the girls in the videos. There are lots of variations tied to each type of sexual kink, but that’s the general idea.
> My best guess is that 10% of the traffic that flows through their business model literally cannot leave until they have no money left. The Master Wizard is that good. The women are well-coached in his methods.
If you treat your political opponents as 'insane' instead of trying to understand what moves them, it says more about you than about people you consider insane.
I do not let my friends get away with them thinking they are experts on everything.
Adams turned his fame of Dilbert into his fame for saying things online. I mean he even started a food company! Anyone remember the "Dilberito"??? Seems he was always just looking for more ways to make money. And reading his books it sounded like he wanted to get rid of religions.
So he was human, just like the rest of us. And he died desperate and clutching to life, leveraging whatever power he had to try to save it from who ever he could.
How can you tell anyway?
Consistency of explanations and of the underlying logic.
Bad choice of words.
You should add context so people know that Kaiser was delaying his treatment, Trump's team got Kaiser in gear so that he could receive it (Trump did indeed help him). Now imagine any other non-famous person with Stage IV cancer trying to get treatment without the help of a president.
I never understood the urge to self destruct online. Jesus, take the money and fame and disappear like Tom of myspace.
It's tragedy instead comedy and it doesn't matter if you see it through the lens of Karl Marx ("he doesn't challenge the power structure") or through the lens of Tom Peters or James Collins ("search for excellence in the current system")
I mean, there is this social contagion aspect of comedy, you might think it is funny because it it is in a frame where it is supposed to be funny or because other people are laughing. But the wider context is that 4-koma [1] have been dead in the US since at least the 1980s, our culture is not at all competitive or meritocratic and as long we still have Peanuts and Family Circle we are never going to have a Bocchi the Rock. Young people are turning to Japanese pop culture because in Japan quirky individuals can write a light novel or low-budget video game that can become a multi-billion dollar franchise and the doors are just not open for that here, at all.
Thus, Scott Adams, who won the lottery with his comic that rejects the idea of excellence doesn't have any moral basis to talk about corporate DEI and how it fails us all. I think he did have some insights into the spell that Trump casts over people, and it's a hard thing to talk about in a way that people will accept. What people would laugh at when it was framed as fiction didn't seem funny at all when it was presented as fact.
[1] 4-panel comics
and did you know Wikipedia has an entire page on his politics? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_Elon_M...
New thing for me to practice.
right != far right
his conservative viewpoints and political support (which incidentally i do not share) do not automatically make his beliefs “far right”. i have not seen or heard a single thing he’s expressed or done that suggests “far right”. if anything, he appears rather centrist.
and can we stop already with the smearing? it clearly wasn’t intended to be a nazi salute, which both the ADL as well as the person who made the gesture have clarified. do we think he is lying about that? why would someone who wants to make nazi salutes on stage then go and lie about it later?
scott adams, however, has said and clarified his far-right viewpoints many times publicly. there’s no ambiguity there.
The partisan brawling in the USA is to me most tiresome mostly because neither of the factions seems particularly interested in the truth anymore.
I say this as someone who used to really enjoy Dilbert, but looking back with a critical eye, it’s easy to see an artist who deliberately avoids bringing up topics that might actually do something to improve corporate culture.
There was always a buzz and a whisper whenever someone was frustrated: “SHE’s the boss who inspired Dilbert.”
Internally there was a saying that ATT stands for “Ask The Tentacles.”
I haven’t really read the “funnies” since I was a kid but the few Dilbert comics I ever did read NAILED her org.
I will never forget being paged 1,000 times a night - not even kidding — or having my boss demand I “check sendmail” every time anything and I mean anything went down. Voice? Data? CALEA tunnels? IPTV? Fax? No, I can’t go immediately investigate the actual issue, I have to go into some crusty Solaris boxes the company forgot about 11 years ago and humor some dinosaur with three mansions who probably also directly inspired the Peter Principle in 1969 and are still working there.
Dilbert was BARELY satire.
And that’s enough out of me.
Pre-2018: Inclusion! Weirdos are people too! The marginalized need a voice!
Post-2019: Transsexuals are a blight on society! They cause cancer in puppies!
Outside that… ideology is out the window.
As long as you adhere to all mainstream tenets, you're good and virtuous, like pre-2018 JK Rowling. Gay Dumbledore, yay!
But if the mainstream tenets change, and some previously loyal followers disagree with some of them, they should be ostracised, cancelled and vilified, like post-2019 JK Rowling.
The funny thing is that this is what real fascists and communists did to a T, yet, progressive people view themselves as anti-fascists.
But that's not the world we live in. It won't ever be the world we live in.
Except you're not being objective.
Accusing anyone of "falling off the far right cliffs of insanity" is a subjective and negative portrayal.
e.g., I could say and get away with the former, but not the latter when critiquing a co-worker's idea.
Of course "recognizing that there were aspects of him they didn’t like" is not going to be objective. And it's fine for it to not be objective.
> Accusing anyone of "falling off the far right cliffs of insanity" is a subjective and negative portrayal.
Yeah but it's right.
> I could say and get away with the former, but not the latter when critiquing a co-worker's idea.
You have to bite your tongue at work in a lot of ways that don't make sense outside work.
My issue comes someone says they "don't have a dog in the fight" and then proceeds to be highly subjective with paraphrasing.
https://www.youtube.com/RealCoffeeWithScottAdams
https://scottadams.locals.com/landing/video
We all have imagined that. But taking a look at the sources in Wikipedia articles becomes ... interesting.
Which is the key aspect of authoritarianism: power is expressed by stating their opinions -- even, indeed, especially, insincere opinions -- as fact.
A little. Broadly, the things that historical people considered "good" and "bad" are still considered "good" and "bad" today – discounting brief thousand-year fads (which largely boil down to how and whether to signal allegiance with particular ways of organising society).
> Do you eat factory farmed animals?
So you, too, understand that factory-farming animals is wrong – and that many people eat factory-farmed animals despite knowing that it's wrong, because very few people are paragons of moral virtue.
> Currently some leftist group is trying to justify Female Genital Mutilation.
You believe that leftist groups in some sense "should" be more moral than… I'm guessing the comparison is "rightist groups", perhaps the various contemporary fascist governments. But you've correctly pointed out that FGM is wrong, and that identifying with a contemporary political label or ideology does not automatically mean you're in the right.
I fail to understand why you think this is a gotcha. Your comment only functions as a gotcha if we all broadly agree on what's right and what's wrong.
Doesn't seem to have worked.
My girlfriend died of cancer. She was 30 years old and we had a toddler. No matter how rational you start, terminal cancer diagnosis throws much rationality out the window.
Doctors who get cancer typically stay level-headed. I wish society talked about death and mortality more often and openly, most people are ill-equiped to face it square on, and yet its the one thing that is truly universal. Humanity needs sex-ed, but for dying.
I mean, we had that and threw it away; centuries of memento mori in various cultures and religions
They do. For example "US army sunk a boat with drug traffickers, killing everyone."
see Banality of evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem
It's not when you need it that you start googling around
[0] https://cancerchoices.org/therapy/ivermectin/
Per article (and not arguing it's effective for human oncology), there are also studies with mice showing effectiveness.
Ivermectin is pretty safe for people to use regardless of whether or not they have parasites, so sure, do the human RCTs. Maybe we'll get lucky and have another tool in our anti-cancer toolbox.
But trying to extrapolate out that it's reasonable for people to take it for cancer based on the current evidence is premature, at best.
Was the population being studied one where parasite infections that ivermectin can take care of are endemic?
Yes - improves outcomes in this population because many of them are likely to have parasites and killing them reduces strain on the body and frees up immune system resources to deal with covid
No - you'll find glaring flaws even in a quick once-over.
Hasn't failed me yet.
From figure 1:
> Complete tumor regression was observed in 6/15 mice on the combination treatment, 1/20 on ivermectin alone, 1/10 on anti-PD1 antibody alone, and 0/25 on no treatment.
Ok, that looks interesting.
Dilbert was brilliant. Adams' political discourse after that became his primary schtick was quite frequently insane.
> After a 2022 mass shooting, Adams opined that society leaves parents of troubled teenage boys with only two options: to either watch people die or murder their own son
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams
Maybe “insanity” is strong but I do not think anyone who holds beliefs like those is thinking straight. Toying with Holocaust denial is not simply “having different opinions to you”.
“When a young male (let’s say 14 to 19) is a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting family two options: 1. Watch people die. 2. Kill your own son. Those are your only options. I chose #1 and watched my stepson die. I was relieved he took no one else with him.”
“If you think there is a third choice, in which your wisdom and tough love, along with government services, ‘fixes’ that broken young man, you are living in a delusion. There are no other options. You have to either murder your own son or watch him die and maybe kill others.”
That’s surely from the calm rational mind of someone not filled with resentment and hate right?
Being “aware of both sides” means engaging evidence and counterarguments in good faith. Repeatedly dismissing data and framing entire groups as inherently hostile is not that. Calling this out is not echo chamber behavior, it is a substantive judgment based on what was actually said, not on ideological disagreement.
[citation needed]
Here are my own citations:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams
"In a 2006 blog post (which has since been deleted), Adams flirted with Holocaust denialism, questioning whether estimates of the number of people killed during the Holocaust are reliable [...] If he actually wanted to know where the figures come from, he could have looked on Wikipedia or used his Internet skills to Google it or even asked an expert as he once recommended"
"Just 3 hours after the 2019 Gilroy Garlic festival mass shooting, Adams attempted to profit off of it by trying to sign up witnesses for a cryptocurrency-based app that he co-founded called Whenhub.[58][59][60]"
"After being yanked from newspapers due to racism, Adams moved his operations to a subscription service on Locals. While Adams continued to create a "spicier" version of Dilbert "reborn" on that site, Adams' focus shifted towards "political content". His Locals subscription included several livestreams with "lots of politics" as well as a comic called Robots Reading News, with a little bit of alleged self-help media content as well.[73] His Twitter feed also increasingly focused on angry MAGA politics.[74]"
"Adams continued to believe Donald Trump's Big Lie and maintained that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was rigged. In March 2024, when Adams falsely suggested that US "election systems are not fully auditable and lots of stuff goes 'missing' the day after the election", the Republican Recorder of Maricopa County Stephen Richer explained that US elections actually were fully auditable, and gave some information on the actual process officials use for auditing elections.[82]"
And there's no lack of empathy in immediately discussing the legacy of a public figure, on a site far away from anyone that's personally affected.
There's much better examples of areas where he was off the rails than him spending a month on a relatively safe treatment trying to stay alive before giving up when faced with reality.
I'm not sure why that should be lauded. A sample size of 1 (and a trial length of merely 1 month, according to other posts) does not make a convincing study to warrant any public statements.
It's a matter of realizing you're being taken advantage of and speaking out about the experience.
Ivermectin is a very used cheap and safe drug, so I don't expect many nasty side effects, but IANAMD, so ask a real medical doctor before trying.
Desperation isn't partisan, friend.
My father was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer and died from its ravages too. He participated in clinical trials and did everything medically reasonable to save himself. None of it worked, and when the treatments came to an end, he faced his death with grace and dignity. I've often thought that if I was in a similar situation, I'd be happy to be half as courageous as he was.
Other folks I've seen have been more along the "freak out" axis and have fallen apart, sought out any treatment regardless of efficacy (or sanity), or both, in order to stave off their fear.
None of that is partisan. All of that is sad.
If Scott Adams died from his cancer's advance, he died a slow, painful (opioids notwithstanding) death which included numerous indignities and, at the end, a lack of awareness that, had he been conscious of it, would likely have driven him mad.
That's what's sad. No one, not even Scott Adams, should suffer and die that way. How folks meet death, especially one as grueling and painful as cancer eating your central nervous system, isn't a partisan thing.
And while I'm not a fan of his later incarnations, his brief cameo here[0] was quite amusing.
[0] https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Moments_of_Transition
What he practiced was the exact opposite of a political media echo chamber.
You just labeled him far right and insane without providing any positions you disagreed with.
edit: downvoted and flagged for saying we shouldn't hurl ad-hominem attacks
Literally nobody is claiming that his politics were insane because they disagreed with him.
> edit: downvoted and flagged for saying we shouldn't hurl ad-hominem attacks
Absolutely not what "ad hominem" means.
It's very easy to avoid getting criticized in your obituary, don't be an asshole.
If you devote your life to being an asshole, the civilized response gloves will come off and maybe more people should learn this lesson.
1. Plenty of living people defend the reputations of dead people.
2. There's no proof that anything we say or do has any impact on dead people.
No thanks, because a person is not a group of ideas + a mind.
The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online. The people who have developed unhealthy and biased obsessions are the ones who post constantly.
> The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online.
And here you are posting your opinions online! How fascinating. I hope you recognize the extreme irony in the fact that you were motivated enough about this topic to post about it.
He also just passed away, show some respect.
It takes more than dying to earn respect.
There’s this curious demand (often though not exclusively from right leaning folks) for freedom of speech and freedom from consequences of that speech. It doesn’t work that way.
You have the freedom to say reactionary things that upset people as much as you want. But if you do, then you die, people are going to say “he was a person who said reactionary things that upset people”.
To me, comments like "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" rings less of vitriol and more of a kind of mourning for who the man became, and the loss of his life (and thus the loss of any chance to grow beyond who he became).
That rings empathetic and sorrowful to me, which seems pretty decent in my book.
And it's the framing of the statement that is the problem. They didn't say "I disagreed with Scott" or "I didn't like Scott"; they framed it in a way that made it seem like truth. "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" makes it seem like he did something wrong and there is some universal truth to be had, when it's really just this person disagreed with Scott's political views. It's persuasion, which ironically I think Scott would have liked.
---
> which ironically I think Scott would have liked
Agreed, RIP.
"the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get the fuck away"
It is true that this is an evil and racist thing to say.
> when it's really just this person disagreed with Scott's political views
white supremacism isn't just a small policy difference.
If you hold hateful beliefs in which you believe certain people are inferior based on superficial traits like skin colour, why should you expect to be treated with respect? I disrespect such people because I don't respect them, I am if nothing else being sincere.
Sure we do, there are lots of things (usually genocides) that are considered crass or hateful to deny or downplay (let's be honest he was downplaying, he certainly wasn't suggesting the numbers were underestimated!)
I guess it comes down to this: If you're an already racist nut job and start questioning the holocaust, then I assume you're acting in bad faith and are racist. Anything else would be supremely naive, sorry, I don't have to be infinitely credulous.
The grown up thing is to accept that and still be able to hold meaningful dialogue.
Yes and I accept that they won't respect me. I do not demand that they respect me, it's fine, of course they won't respect me if they find me abhorrent. I don't care.
>The grown up thing is to accept that and still be able to hold meaningful dialogue.
Not really, I don't debate every one and every topic. It's totally valid to just write people off as bastards based on their behaviour and move on with your life.
Yeah, that usually works wonders.
> What he means by intelligent design is the idea that we are living in a computer simulation. We are overwhelmingly likely to be “copies” of some other humans who intelligently designed us, in a virtual reality.
That seems to have been pretty common with him. "I believe in X. And by X I mean Y. Look at all these people talking about X, aren't they stupid?"
Agree. Much more hurtful to speak ill of the living. I can even see both R's and D's as people suffering in the duality of the world and have compassion for them. “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
The dead man, whomever is in question, can no longer harm you. He was a man, maybe a husband and father, and speaking ill of them is of no tangible benefit. To those that respected or loved them, the relationship is gone, and it is not wise to add to their pain.
I have been to the funeral of bad men. His earthly power is gone and if there is an afterlife his judgment is sealed.
This goes for all enemies and tyrants and criminals. We use the term "I am sorry for your loss" because most times the loss is not ours.
Well... unless he has follower, right? I would argue that Jesus remains a powerful force today despite being dead for 2000 years.
I don't think people go out of their way to talk shit about everyday shitty people. It's the ones who remain influential that issue is raised.
> no tangible benefit
On the contrary, if his beliefs were especially toxic, it is extremely beneficial to speak against them.
If two or three days ago, not knowing he was sick (which I didn't), I had said to someone "That Dilbert guy seems to be sort of a whack job," why would it matter that he was alive to hypothetically defend himself? It's extremely unlikely that he would ever be aware of my comment at all. So why does it matter that he's alive?
And there are plenty of people willing to step in for Scott and defend him, as evidenced by the contents here.
Someone dying doesn't mean the consequences of their words and actions disappear and acting like we should pretend that death washes away those consequences is silly.
I'm sorry about the manner of his dying, even if the world may also be a marginally better place without the bile he inflicted on it. Still, I'm sorry he's died. He was only ten years older than me.
And my favourite Dilbert cartoon is still the one about "eunuch programmers" [1].
[1] https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1993-11-09
(Edit: url)
I understand he sought to convert to Christianity in his last days. I hope he succeeded in finding God — that he understood that there's more to faith in Christ than chanting “I do believe in Jesus! I do! I do!”, that it requires identifying and purging the hatred in one's heart and replacing it with the unconditional love Christ exemplified. That journey is hard enough when you've spent most/all of a lifetime trying to tackle it; deathbed conversions are even harder, with no time to put that newfound unconditional love into practice. No time for apologies to those harmed, no time for righting one's wrongs — only bare, raw remorse and shame.
May Scott Adams rest in peace. May he be remembered honestly — both for what he got right and what he got wrong.
Acting like "oh, he was trolling", or "it was just a small amount of hating Black people and women" is exactly how you get Steven Miller in the fucking White House.
We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again, and that means calling out the bigotry even in death.
This comment actually makes a specific point of calling it out compared to some others here.
Interesting way to put it. For the past decade or so, many flavors of bigotry have been lauded and socially rewarded.
At the same time, many valid viewpoints and statements have been mislabeled as "bigotry" by the incurious and hivemind-compliant.
These things are balancing out lately, but quite a lot of damage was done.
If you don't recognize the patterns of incuriosity, groupthink and misguided confidence that have permeated western society in the last ten years, nothing I say here is going to enlighten you.
Any of those resonate? You're welcome to correct me.
What measures and data do you base that claim on?
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts "lives lost based on the decline in outlays (current spending) may be in the range of 500,000 to 1,000,000 and potential lives lost based on the decline in obligations (commitments to future spending) are between 670,000 and 1,600,000."
What is your best estimate of deaths due to "woke" or whatever you consider the scourge of the "past decade" to be?
How many visas revoked due to the holder being not woke enough? How many people were deported from the US for being insufficiently woke? And so on. "Woke" may not be what you meant. Whatever you meant, present your measure and data.
You will not change them, and everyone present already made up their mind on their behavior.
Speaking only positively about people distorts the reality.
Reputation guides your behavior toward that person. But they're no longer around. There is no behavior toward them. They're gone. Their reputation is no longer relevant.
It also culturally informs someone's perceived suitability as a role model. It doesn't matter to the dead person if they are held in high or low esteem, but it may matter to people in their formative stages deciding whose influence they follow and whose they shun.
> Why is their reputation relevant? They're dead.
I'd say calling him out as a racist is not exactly speaking ill of the dead in this case.
If that were true, how could it be anything but ok? Should I feel guilty because I evolved from monkeys and carry around the leftist equivalent of original sin? No thanks. Though, I suppose you could disagree and say that it's not intrinsic, but that's a really difficult argument to make.
Even if you're correct (I don't agree), consider other things: if you look at someone and your body has an instinctive desire to have sex with them, you are obligated to realize that just doing so without regard for consent or other things is not OK. If you don't realize that and proceed based on instinct, that's rape.
You can feel whatever instincts you want. If you feel bad or harmful ones, you should acknowledge it. It doesn't really matter if you feel guilty or shame or whatever you want to call it, but you should absolutely internally recognize that these things are *wrong*.
Civilization is nothing more than "lives in cities". That's it. That's what the science of anthropology has to say on the matter. It's not even that big of a deal, you'd much rather be involved with some hunter-gatherer living in a tent who had noble ideas and a sense of fairness than with most of the very "civilized" people who live in Oklahoma City. Why?
You don't share their values. Humanity, for all its potential, does not scale beyond Dunbar's number, and attempts to do so have resulted in horrors beyond comprehension on a regular, cyclical basis, for many thousands of years. You're quite certain that your values should win out and exterminate their values (and if they're not enlightened enough to just let their values be obliterated, they too can be exterminated with them... leftists are, right now, trying to work up the nerve to go on the attack, we've both seen the internet messages and not all of them are russian bots).
> If you feel bad or harmful ones, you should acknowledge it.
I do. I like to acknowledge it. I despise dishonesty, but most of all I despise self-deception. But sometimes I need to keep my mouth shut, because others would be quick to punish me for words. For spoken-aloud thoughts. And it causes distress.
>but you should absolutely internally recognize that these things are wrong.
Why? What makes those things wrong? Can you explain, objectively and empirically what makes it wrong? From the other set of values (see above), you're the one with wrong thoughts, wrong feelings, and wrong desires.
What you really mean, but don't have the words to say, is that you want me to be one with your group. To accept its set of group-beliefs, to espouse no dissent (or at least below some tiny, acceptable threshold), and to support your causes. But I've seen what sort of world you want to make, and I do not want to live in that world. I do not think your group survives, even should it win.
The world I want might well have room in it for other peoples. They could do as they want, peaceful (distant) coexistence. Your world doesn't have any room in it for me.
Your strategy of indoctrinating young children in public education was working. It was absolutely foolproof, I think, none could fight against it. But then someone managed to sneak in behind its armor, to drop the torpedo in that trench, and now your death star blew up. I'm not even sure anyone on the left has noticed how bad this is for your movement.
But to address the point. There may be base instincts to which we are all subject. But that doesn't mean we should embrace them or proudly wear them as a badge. Violence is entirely natural. And yet most will agree it should not be embraced. Someone proudly declaring themselves as violent will (and should!) be judged harshly. I say the same holds true for racism, whether it is "natural" or not.
Much (all?) of civilisational progress is characterised by moving away from the natural state to a higher strata. The civil part of civilization is entirely unnatural
>But that doesn't mean we should embrace them or proudly wear them as a badge.
Maybe. But it also means that I shouldn't be ashamed of them or try to suppress myself into neuroticism. And since the left has made a point of that for decades now, has tried to bully people into doing just that, the pendulum was primed to swing the other way. So yeh, I think I will be proud. It feels good.
>Violence is entirely natural.
It is, but also something to be avoided unless there is no other reasonable option. I would recommend not trying to drive an SUV over the top of me. That's caused some strife recently. I can remain nonviolent indefinitely.
I don't see subtlety here. As others pointed, the story of human civilization is one long arc of going against our base animal instincts in order to build a society that benefits everyone.
I'd add that it's cooperation and the ability to moderate impulsive behavior that, over the long term, differentiates us from our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzee.
If we were just our base instincts and nothing more, we wouldn't be having this conversation as we'd likely have died out, because our ability to accept and work together with each other allowed us to flourish despite the threats of predation, climate change, natural disasters and other challenges.
As such, making the argument that we're "hardwired" to hate and fear our fellow humans doesn't make sense, whether that argument is an intellectual one or an evolutionary one.
I feel sorry for folks who feel so isolated that they can't understand just how closely related we all are. It must be quite lonely.
I think that there's a gap between "how can it be anything but OK" and "should I feel guilty." There are plenty of things that aren't OK, but about which you don't need to feel guilty. Should you feel guilty that your body intrinsically craves foods that aren't good for you? I'd say that no purpose is served by feeling that way, but that doesn't mean that it's healthy to indulge those cravings.
But no, don't let me stop you from justifying your hatred of certain people through the ever-convenient excuse of "evolution".
also no, racism is not genetic
I agree with your conclusion, but not with your premise.
We can't "do" anything for the dead. They're dead. What's more, since they're dead they don't care what we do or say because they're, you know, dead.
Anything we might do or say in reference to dead folks is for the benefit of the living and has nothing to do with the dead.
That said, you're absolutely right. We should remember folks for who they were -- warts and all -- to give the living perspective both on the dead and the dead past.
When someone I know dies, I speak frankly about them, good or bad, because to do otherwise is a lie, and the most disrespectful thing to do is to misrepresent a person who no longer can represent themselves.
Scott Adams did what he did, that's surely not in question. Honor his life by speaking frankly about how he affected oneself and others, good or bad. Let the chips fall where they may.
I posit that self-reflection might be a better avenue to understanding this world where Steven Miller is in the White House, at least in the immediate. Personally, I stopped reading Dilbert quite a while before he cancelled himself, just because it wasn't available in a medium that worked for me. I do have a couple books on the shelf of old Dilbert comics and I considered getting rid of them when the racism came out. I cracked one open and laughed out loud at a handful of the comics and so the books are still in my house. I abhor racism, but he already got my money. At least for me, and maybe I'm damaged, I still laugh at some of the comics, even after I knew he was a jerk. I think if one of my black friends told me he was offended that I had those books, I'd get rid of them.
How about Harry Potter? I'm certain that there are some folks here who have been hurt by Rowling's statements and I'm also certain that there are some folks here that would sacrifice a limb to live in the Harry Potter universe. Do you separate the artist from the art or what's the rational thing? I have the Harry Potter books on my shelf, I've actually read them out loud to my children. They also are aware of LGTBQ issues, they know and are around LGTBQ people and we have had conversations about those issues. Is that enough? Should one of my kids pick up the Dilbert books, I have a conversation locked and loaded and I already know that I've raised them to be anti-racism. I don't know that I'm super eager to put more money in to J. K.'s pocket, I probably won't go to Disney Harry Potter Land or whatever they come up with but I've bought and read the books and I haven't burned them.
And make no mistake, had I known he was a biggot in 1995, I don't think I would have continued reading Dilbert or ever bought books. The problem is it made me laugh, then years later I found out he was a jerk and I still laugh at the comics, I remember laughing the first time I read some of them, and I think of that more when I re-read them than I think about Scott Adams. Fact is, he still made me laugh all those years ago, I can't put that back in the bottle, it happened.
I would argue it has not in fact been useful, that making it shameful hasn't reduced it, and that calling it out in death is not useful in reducing it. I think we do it because it's easier than doing something useful and it makes us feel good.
I hate bigotry as well. I encourage to do something IRL about it.
There is immense value in acknowledging and learning from the mistakes of others, yes, even after their deaths.
In the last 10 years, the modern black lives matter movement has triggered similar violent backlashes, with every public gathering drawing a militarized police response and hateful counter-protesters. On a policy level, even the most milquetoast corporate initiatives to consider applications and promotions from diverse candidates of equal merit are now being slandered and attacked. In education, acknowledgment of historical racial and gender inequality is under heavy censorship pressure.
It really does seem like the more effective we are at acting IRL, the greater the backlash is going to be.
Are you saying that Scott Adams was right and, say, white people _should_ avoid black people? Or are you saying that we shouldn't remember how awful people were once they die?
We have made our society shameless. Pornographers, gamblers, and truly creepy people are told that it's fine to be what they are. I dunno, maybe that really is the case. But having abandoned shame as a method of social cohesion, you don't get to resurrect it for those things you dislike. The two-edged sword cuts both ways.
I did not follow the Scott Adams brouhaha when it happened, and vaguely I somehow get the impression it's like the Orson Scott Card thing. I'm afraid to check for fear that when I do I will find there was nothing he should've been ashamed for. People use the word "bigot" to mean things I can't seem to categories as bigotry.
Ok, fair, even I couldn't keep a straight face typing that out. Touche.
Let's not act like this is some case of out of context quotes. Here's the actual quote for people to decide for themselves:
"I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off. I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying. I'm not saying start a war or do anything bad. Nothing like that. I'm just saying get away. Just get away."
It continues to have prominance in our society due to inertia and the fact that some people want a positive legacy to endure long after they pass regardless of whether or not they did anything in life to deserve that kind of legacy.
As the person you're replying to wrote it better than I ever could I'll write what they just shared becauase I think it's worth repeating, "taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest."
We should strive for honesty in these kinds of discussions over sensitivity.
Now, Adams had plenty of opportunities to defend/explain his comments on certain issues, and he did not satisfy many people with those or perhaps dug himself in deeper (I myself really only know him from Dilbert in the 1990s, and am only superficially aware of anything controversial he did/said outside of that).
But I don't see anyone saying anything about him now that was not being said when he was alive.
If the person/people you're speaking with, already followed this public figure, or was forced by society to be aware of the life of this public figure at all times — and so were surely also aware of the bad turn that person's career/life took — then to your audience, the ugliness would have already been long acknowledged. To your audience, the ugliness may be the only thing anyone has spoken about in reference to the public figure for a long time.
And, for an audience who became aware of the public figure a bit later on in their lives, the bad stuff might be all they know about them! (Honestly, there are more than a few celebrities that I personally know only as a subject of ongoing public resentment, with no understanding of what made them a celebrity in the first place.)
In both of these cases, if this is your audience, then there's no point to carrying on the "this is a bad person" reminders during the (usually very short!) mourning period that a public figure gets. They already know.
On the other hand, if you presume someone who has no idea who a certain person is, and who is only hearing about them in the context of their death — then yes, sure, remind away.
I think, given the audience of "people in a comment thread on Hacker News about the death of Scott Adams", people here are likely extremely aware of who Scott Adams is.
---
That said, on another note, I have a personal philosophy around "celebrations of life", that I formed after deciding how to respond to the death of my own father, himself a very complicated man.
People generally take the period immediately after someone's death as a chance to put any kind of ongoing negative feelings toward someone on pause for just a moment, to celebrate whatever positive contributions a person made, and extract whatever positive lessons can be learned from those contributions.
Note that the dead have no way of benefitting from this. They're dead!
If you pay close attention, most of a community does after the death of one of its members, or a society does after the death of a public figure... isn't really a veneration; there is no respect or face given. Rather, what we're doing with our words, is something very much like what the deceased's family are doing with their hands: digging through the estate of the deceased to find things of value to keep, while discarding the rest. Finding the pearls amongst the mud, washing them off, and taking them home.
Certainly, sometimes the only pearl that can be found is a lesson about the kind of person you should strive not to be. But often, there's at least something useful you can take from someone's life — something society doesn't deserve to lose grasp of, just because it was made by or associated with someone we had become soured on.
I think it's important to note that if we don't manage to agree to a specific moment to all mutually be okay with doing this "examination of the positive products of this person's life" — which especially implies "staying temporarily silent about the person's shortcomings so as to make space for that examination"... then that moment can never happen. And that's what leads to a great cultural loss of those things that, due to their association with the person, were gradually becoming forgotten.
Nobody (save for perhaps a few devoutly religious people) argues that you should never speak ill of the dead. People really just want that one moment — perhaps a week or two long? — to calmly dredge up and leaf through the deceased's legacy like it's a discount bin at a record store, without having to defend themselves at each step of that process from constant accusations that they're "celebrating a bad person."
And it is our current societal policy that "right after you die" is when people should be allowed that one moment.
Feel free to call out Adams' bigotry a week from now! The story will still be fresh on people's minds even then.
But by giving them a moment first, people will be able to find the space to finally feel it's safe to reminisce about how e.g. they have a fond memory of being gifted a page-a-day Dilbert calendar by their uncle — fundamentally a story about how that helped them to understand and bond with their uncle, not a story about Adams — which wouldn't normally be able to be aired, because it would nevertheless summon someone to remind everyone that the author is a bigot.
And I was responding to a comment that suggested avoiding that by saying that we shouldn't. Hardly random.
As for US politics - it's quite obvious that ignoring or tolerating racism and xenophobia has lead to more bigots and assholes feeling comfortable expressing their views publicly. I think we should shame them out of the public sphere again. That includes talking about someone's abject vileness when they die, like with Scott Adams.
You, on the other hand, bring up a random unrelated website. Which is random?
You would prefer that, noted. But many would not.
I don't really want to study fluctuating levels of religious bigotry in Bach's life when I listen to his works.
- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who died hundreds of years ago, whose work is in the public domain, who does not materially benefit from your spectatorship (what with them being dead and all)
- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who is alive today, whose work they have ownership of, who materially benefits from your spectatorship
- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who died mere minutes ago, whose work is owned by their estate, whose heirs materially benefit from your spectatorship
I think the first category is fine, the second category is unambiguously not fine, and the third category is ambiguous, but I would err on the side of "don't consume".
I don't think I ever paid for a Dilbert comics strip, though I never downloaded them from somewhere illegal either.
I'm not -your- conscience, I can only explain my own. To me? No, that's not fine.
You can’t burn a woman at the stake today and say ”oh well, 300 years ago it was normal so”.
People knew slavery was wrong when slavery was happening. People knew child labor was wrong when child labor was happening. People knew segregation was wrong when segregation was happening. Those people were not rewarded by society.
FWIW, I use to be a big fan of Crystal Castles (like listening to 4+ hours a day for close to a decade). It was a core part of my culture diet. Once it was known that Ethan Kath was a sexual predator that groomed teenage girls, I simply stopped listening or talking about them ever.
Why is this hard? IDK, it really feels like people put too much of their identity into cultural objects when they lack real communities and people in their lives.
Also throwing it out there, I don't really know much about Scott Adams (or his work for that matter). Dilbert comics weren't widespread memes on the phpBB forums I'd post on throughout the 00s and 10s.
edit: spelling
The thing that is wrong about it is that the purity spiral may get out of control and result in wholesale purging of art, Iconoclast-style (or perhaps Cultural Revolution-style).
I don't trust people with an instinct to purge history. They rarely know when to stop.
Plus, standards change a lot. Picasso had a teenage mistress. It wasn't as scandalous back then. Should we really be so arrogant as to push our current standards on the entire humanity that once was? If yes, we will be obliterated by the next generation that applies the same logic to us, only with a different set of taboos.
We're allowed to avoid consuming the work of artists we think are horrible humans. We're allowed to encourage others to do that too even. None of that is purging or censorship.
You can still stream all of Crystal Castles songs on every platform, you can still buy their music, their albums still have hundreds of seeders on trackers. Just as I'm sure you can buy your Dilbert books.
Telling people to maybe look up to better humans, which it needs to be stated have always existed and aren't a modern invention, should be encouraged.
One of the other threads in here an OP states that we should use this moment to reflect and do better in our own lives, what is wrong with this viewpoint?
We've seen countless examples of people getting sucked into social media holes and I've yet to encounter a single case where this has ever led to healthy outcomes.
Even calling for a boycott or lack of commercialization of something is not purging from history.
Adams was a mediocre bureaucrat who discovered he could make a living as a competent comedian. His success at that persuaded him that he was an Important Moral Authority.
He started as a banker and ended as a self-harming prosperity preacher - not exactly a rare archetype in the US.
The funny parts were funny. The rest, not so much.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oG5EpzGmAtA&pp=0gcJCTIBo7VqN5t...
My TL;DR Choosing not to financially support a creator for ethical seasons makes sense as an ethical stance. But that doesn't mean the media we like needs to always reflect our values.
It is shameful to have those views. But perhaps we can bring it up tomorrow rather than right this minute.
All of that said... RIP, Mr. Adams.
Scott Adams stuck out to me because his cartoons were funny and sarcastic. His books felt like he was letting me in behind the scenes. He talked to me, the reader about dealing with large amounts (for the time) traffic to his website in a honest, funny and simple way.
His books also had a link to his website, which was pretty unique for a non-technical book at the time.
I also quite liked his TV show.
I stopped reading them regularly as I grew up. I would see the odd salient dilbert in slack or email.
during the trump primary, thats when I bumped into his other side. It was heart breaking to see someone who made what I thought was such observant cartoons shit out such bile.
Your Dilbert era was scary with how accurate it portrayed real life.
And your Coffee With Scott Adams era was impressive in explaining the goings on of life.
You will be missed!
From Wikipedia:
"In November 2025, he said his health was suddenly declining rapidly again, and took to social media to ask President Trump for help to get access to the cancer drug Pluvicto. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. replied saying "How do I reach you? The President wants to help." The following month he said he was paralyzed below the waist and had been undergoing radiation therapy."
"On January 1, 2026, Adams said on his podcast that he had talked with his radiologist and that it was "all bad news." He said there was no chance he would get feeling back in his legs and that he also had ongoing heart failure. He told viewers they should prepare themselves "that January will probably be a month of transition, one way or another." On January 12, Adams' first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, told TMZ that Adams was in hospice at his home in Northern California."
I don’t have an estate to get in order, so to speak. Then again, I also won’t pass along a house full of a lifetime of “collections” or “mementos” with little to no monetary value. The oncoming secondary market is about to be awash in Boomer junk. Nobody wants to send their precious collections to the dump or recycling.
One of my biggest mental hiccups to work through of late is the changing nature of collective memories, fame, and idols. Scott is a great example who was “big in the 90s” and 30 years later his method (print cartoons and books) is basically dead and can’t be folllowed. Gen Z will be spared Scott, and probably Elvis and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, ABBA, and Garth Brooks comparatively speaking.
This is a meandering way to note how fast we can be poof gone and life will move on with a pace quite breakneck.
Maybe, maybe not. My mother died a couple years ago, and while she was too old to be a boomer, she still had plenty of accumulated possessions in her estate. We sold as much as we could, kept the few things we wanted and had space for, and the rest went to recycling or the dump. I'd guess 90% went to the dump.
The owner of that stuff may not want to send it to the dump. My mom would be mortified to hear some of the things she treasured held no value for anyone else, but when you're dead, you aren't making those decisions. The next generation probably isn't that sentimental about it.
A Final Message From Scott Adams
If you are reading this, things did not go well for me.
I have a few things to say before I go.
My body failed before my brain. I am of sound mind as I write this, January 1st, 2026. If you wonder about any of my choices for my estate, or anything else, please know I am free of any coercion or inappropriate influence of any sort. I promise.
Next, many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I'm not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So, here I go:
I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. I won't need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified for entry.
With your permission, I'd like to explain something about my life.
For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent, as a way to find meaning. That worked. But marriages don't always last forever, and mine eventually ended, in a highly amicable way. I'm grateful for those years and for the people I came to call my family.
Once the marriage unwound, I needed a new focus. A new meaning. And so I donated myself to "the world," literally speaking the words out loud in my otherwise silent home. From that point on, I looked for ways I could add the most to people's lives, one way or another.
That marked the start of my evolution from Dilbertcartoonist to an author of - what I hoped would be useful books. By then, I believed I had amassed enough life lessons that I could start passing them on. I continued making Dilbert comics, of course.
As luck would have it, I'm a good writer. My first book in the "useful" genre was How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. That book turned out to be a huge success, often imitated, and influencing a wide variety of people. I still hear every day how much that book changed lives. My plan to be useful was working.
I followed up with my book Win Bigly, that trained an army of citizens how to be more persuasive, which they correctly saw as a minor super power. I know that book changed lives because I hear it often.
You'll probably never know the impact the book had on the world, but I know, and it pleases me while giving me a sense of meaning that is impossible to describe.
My next book, Loserthink, tried to teach people how to think better, especially if they were displaying their thinking on social media. That one didn't put much of a dent in the universe, but I tried.
Finally, my book Reframe Your Brain taught readers how to program their own thoughts to make their personal and professional lives better. I was surprised and delighted at how much positive impact that book is having.
I also started podcasting a live show called Coffee With Scott Adams, dedicated to helping people think about the world, and their lives, in a more productive way. I didn't plan it this way, but it ended up helping lots of lonely people find a community that made them feel less lonely. Again, that had great meaning for me.
I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my work, I'm asking you to pay it forward as best you can. That is the legacy I want.
Be useful.
And please know I loved you all to the end.
Scott Adams
he was one of those people who was attacked during COVID and labeled and propagandized against as a scapegoat for the failings of our unaccountable leadership - the cancel culture was unfair and unwelcome towards him. I resonated with that too.
I hope his legacy lives on - it will in me.
Another one was the one where he went to work in Marketing, and they were doing their research by yelling questions into a well. But I can't find that one.
interesting...
The comments here are very unfortunate. When someone dies, it is appropriate to speak of what you appreciated about them.
That's it. That's all you need to say. And you aren't required to say anything at all.
Apologizing for liking him because of x or y or explaining that you liked him despite z is in poor taste and, frankly, cowardly.
I appreciated Scott Adams, and am sad he has passed away.
Next, many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I'm not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So, here I go:
I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. I won't need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified for entry.
I recall having a "huh?" moment when I once saw the titular character say that there's no evidence for climate change.
The strangest thing is that I hail from a particularly conservative region of the world and I've met many such Scotts Adamses in college (some of whom went on to work in FAANG companies). I don't share these views and I could never wrap my head around the idea that a clearly intelligent and often otherwise kind person could be like this.
Since I get a paywall and it looks like no one has posted such a link yet.
FWIW, I think the Inc article is better: https://www.inc.com/jennifer-conrad/scott-adams-dilbert-dies...
But the link posted to HackerNews isn't the one getting the discussion traffic.
But then the way he dealt with his cancer make me reconsider. Adams publicly acknowledged trying ivermectin and fenbendazole as alternative cancer treatments, which he later declared ineffective, before pursuing conventional medical care in his final months. Unfortunately by then it's too late.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo
Something is wrong with us engineers. We need to have less magical thinking. More scientific and mathematical education.
I'm not going to gloat, nor am I going to consider him even remotely a good person based on things he's said and done. I will never know him outside of his works and the things he's said and done, so I can only judge on those merits.
I guess all I can really do is shake my head and wonder what could have been had he not completely lost his way; his death by cancer was likely (not guaranteed, but there's always some hope if treated early and properly) preventable, but he made a choice.
I guess I'll just remember the early, funny, too-true-to-life material and try not to think too much about what happened after that.
People are saying that he said some bad things. I just want to encourage people to look past the ramblings of a dying man, even in our hyperpolarized age.
Then, I had my own startup, and as a manager of people, had to come to terms with a bunch of personality defects I brought in that I was blind to. Those blind spots really made me a bad manager. I'm grateful I got to learn about myself in that way.
But, then I started to view Dilbert differently. It felt like only some of the characters deserved empathy. I bet Scott Adams would hate that I used that word to critique his comics.
Is it just me? I always felt like half of the people were stupid no matter what the situation. Did I miss a more complex part of Dilbert?
I haven't been able to separate who Scott Adams was, or more specifically, the racist things he said, from his cultural commentary, no matter what insights there are. And, I can't admire "4d chess" because it feels like it is bragging that you can predict the winner if you throw an alligator and Stephen J Hawking into a pen together.
No, a lot of characters were clearly meant to be unlikable, but based on a kind of person that exists in real life. I don't think you were meant to care much for e.g. Topper.
I was a child and had just read and enjoyed one of his older books, maybe the Dilbert Principle. I came from a religious household and I was surprised by something in the book that revealed him to be an atheist.
I looked up his email, or maybe it was in the back of the book, and wrote him a quick message about how and why he should convert. He replied to me (unconvinced) and I replied back, at which point he realized I was a child and the conversation ended.
When I heard he was dying of cancer I wrote him another email, again offering my own unsolicited thoughts, this time on cancer and experimental treatments. He did not reply, but I thought there was a kind of symmetry to it -- I wrote him towards the start of my life and again towards the end of his.
Interesting guy, I've enjoyed several of his books and the comics for many years. He had a big impact. Tough way to die.
Back when Dilbert was massive my company ran the following ad in cinemas in Silicon Valley: https://imgur.com/a/ZPVJau8 Everyone seeing that ad knew what we were referring to.
IMO, it doesn't diminish the quality of the Good things.
After a couple of years his jokes became repetitive, formulaic, obvious,...
For some people that might be a good thing. Chuckling at an old joke is like trying again the food or music they used to love when they were young. Being funny or revealing isn't the point, being familiar and reassuring is what matters.
He had a moment at his time. A few more years and no one will remember him.
Cancers a terrible way to go.
His son died of a fentanyl drug overdose which is really tragic. Scott Adams was definitely a crazy person by the end of his time with all sorts of rants on this and that. But I always viewed this stage with pity rather than outrage. Being crazy after losing your child is perhaps just how things are.
It’s just unfortunate that others treated him as sane.
> In his May stream announcing his cancer, he said he’d used anti-parasitic medications ivermectin and fenbendazole to treat himself, but they didn’t work. There’s no evidence that ivermectin works as a cancer treatment.
I don't really think bureaucracy was his downfall.
I'm not sure about the hypnotism and manifesting beliefs, but that might have been the start of some deeper mental health issue too.
I was a Kaiser Northern California member and yes their scheduling system was dysfunctional — they were the better of the options my employer offered. However, if you’re in need of treatment that is already approved, one phone call was always all you had to do book. Surgery was harder to book than anything, particularly for rare conditions.
Irrespective of any political views, or whatsoever be it as a human, a brilliant creator has gone from the face of the Earth!
I have always enjoyed Dilbert! Thanks for that!
Fuck cancer...
Fuck any disease that takes away human lives...
RIP Scott Adams.
I remember how he predicted Trump's victory all the way back in 2015, early in the primaries. He argues that Trump (and Kanye, for that matter) were super-convincers who used mass hypnosis techniques. Sounds utterly bizarre, and yet mass hypnosis struck me as the only possible explanation of Trump's popularity. Because there were certainly no rational arguments for it.
And yet, this seemingly critical (if unhinged) thinker who claimed to see through those alleged hypnosis techniques, somehow fell for it.
I don't think I'll ever understand Scott Adams.
He went from Illinois state senator (7 years) to US senator (4 years) to President. A prodigious rise, but hardly non-traditional or inexperienced. The equivalent of a new grad at a FAANG becoming a director or VP within a decade.
They're very attractive to vast masses of sheep, yes.
They're not attractive to everybody.
Yes, Trump IS very good at persuation. But that is no justification to support him. No, he supported Trump because he liked the things that Trump says and does. Everything else is just trying to make himself sound less bad.
What a long and unpredictable path his life took. Too bad he isn't still with us.
I really loved Dilbert (the Gen X defining comic), and especially his first couple books.
The best cartoonist is invisible like Banksy and the guy who did the Cow cartoons and Calvin & Hobbes.
Where's the black bar?
For shame.
Scott Adams, Audacious Creator of the ‘Dilbert’ Comic Strip, Dies at 68
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/arts/scott-adams-dead.htm...
non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/arts/scott-adams-dead.htm...
Things changed drastically in 2020 (or probably even 2014). People started picking specific events to showcase black hatred. Some kind of specific moment where a cop killed a black person. That stuff happens and it does suck. But again, all of the people being accused of black hate literally loved "in living color" just a couple decades before.
A family friend's husband was shot to death because he didn't open a door to the police as he was going through an "episode" in his bedroom. His wife had called the police because he was yelling threatening things at her. The couple was white. Why didn't that make the news - it didn't fit all the narratives.
I would say most people on the left are in a cult created by the mainstream media and told exactly what to think in all these situations. The leftist cult needs to enrage people to support its causes. It's causes are linked to pulling at your empathy, not at pulling at good policies. Even if there is a grain of truth to "climate change", the selling of it was designed to get votes. The other side of it all has been reactionary. At this point people on the right are just like - ok, what's the new rage going to be this month, and why do I even care anymore. And for the most part its because every rage cycle is entirely predicated on the right combination of ingredients they can mix together to whip people into emotional thinking.
You don't have to EXCUSE Scott Adams for knowing this truth and then start speaking it.
Did AOC get leftist backlash as large as Good when she said to stop chanting for Hamas the other day? That's what the right has been saying for 3 fucking years.
Did Iran protests where reports of 12k people dead get encampments on the lawn of Columbia?
What about when Hamas murdered a bunch of Palestinians on a video a few months ago?
What FAKE rage cycle do you all want to keep participating in?
However, Scott Adams as an individual was deeply problematic and I would not ever stand him up as a role model for my children or behavior in general.
Of course, I wouldn't do the same for a vast number of famous people, politics aside.
The "problem" (which is in scare quotes because it's not a discrete identifiable sole-source issue but a complex and dynamic phenomenon that permeates every aspect of our modern-day life) is that we have collectively determined that if you're good at your art, you must be a person we should listen to for topics outside of your art.
To use an inflammatory but real-life example: Donald Trump is a great showman. He knows how to incite a crowd, and he knows how to feed into this modern-day mess we've made of our world. He is objectively a terrible manager of a country, and objectively a terrible human being.
But, for some reasons that have to do with politics, and some reasons that have to do with identity, folks who like Donald Trump as a showman are unable to disassociate his showmanship from his policies. To the point that if you were to write down the actual actions taken and attribute them to a leader of the other side (famous examples: Biden, Obama) as their policies, the same folks who are loudly cheering Donald Trump on would immediately castigate those actions if taken by someone on the "left".
It's a problem with no easy solution, and it requires more growth from humanity than we are at this moment exhibiting we possess. Scott Adams is a shining example of both this problem and our reaction to it, and while I mourn the passing of his art, I do not mourn his passing, and reading this comment section instead mourn our present state of wrapping ourselves in the cloth of identity politics while not engaging seriously on the fundamental underlying problems we face as a people.
If it were shadowbanned we wouldn't be able to comment on it. People have flagged it, it triggered the flamewar detector, or both. That's why it got downranked.
If you think the topic of his death has been "shadowbanned" (for some non-standard definition of shadowbanned), check the front page. There's another discussion there about it.
This topic is not on the front page for me, yet it was on the front page for you.
That is shadowban.
I'd suggest checking again. It's around #12 right now. I suspect you didn't actually look and just wanted to make something up to complain about. Which is a strange thing to do, but there are stranger things people do on this site.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46603431 - The link in case you want to keep avoiding the front page.
This was someone who called all Black people a "hate group"; said that parents of troubled boys could only watch them kill other people, or kill their sons themselves; and opposed women presidential candidates because they would negatively affect men.
Scott Adams said some really stupid, poorly thought out things about minorities and women, and he faced real world consequences for his actions. But he also died slowly and painfully of cancer, and he died crying out for help very publicly. That’s objectively very sad, and if you should ever share the same fate I truly and genuinely hope your loved ones are there and with you, and choose to forgive you of any of your perceived sins.
I guess he got the death that he wished, personally and seriously, upon some large fraction of the Earth's population
https://web.archive.org/web/20131203003037/http://dilbert.co...I promise you that maybe nobody speaks up to you, but I’ve heard people like you on the street. I overhear you in a cafe, at a restaurant, I work with you, I’ve gone to school with you. People will not remember you based on how you think they should. They will remember you based on how you actually were. Surely I will forget this interaction in a few hours as the tandem of a typical day creeps back in, but know that I have personally assessed you to be a horrible person, and if you’re anything like this behind the screen other people in your life have too!
Hope this helps.
Me: Don't remember horrible people as better than they were just because they died.
You: You two are the same.
He will be missed.
Let’s not pretend it’s wrong to shit on this man’s grave just because he wasn’t an asshole for the first part of his life.
Good riddance you racist cunt.
I liked Dilbert for a long time, but Adams's Trump Dementia became so bad in the last decade that it completely tainted his legacy for me. His role in enabling Donald Trump to rise to power is undeniable, and his death makes me wish I had reserved a bottle of sparkling wine for the occasion.
I yearn for the time when it was possible to never meet your idols.
It is hard to remember how thoroughly Trump's presidential run was seen as a joke in 2015. I bet most people can't remember and somehow think they always knew Trump stood a real chance. That is likely a lie.
Scott made specific, reasoned, unique arguments about why Trump would win, with high conviction. This was at a time when it was about as non-consensus and unpopular as possible to do so (it wasn't just that people didn't want Trump to win, there was a complete dismissal of the possibility from both sides of the aisle).
The fact that Scott was right, and continued to be right when forecasting much about politics, taught me a lot about the nature of the world we live in. Scott clearly understood something important that I did not at the time.
In his later life he was clearly trolling and dabbling in stirring up social media for fun, and it was hard to tell where the lines between that and his personal identity were.
Goodbye born entertainer and funny dork.
It’s even worse in context.
I forget which video it is and don't want to re-watch it anyways. I Googled the specific quote and it sounds about right with my memory (which admittedly could be faulty):
"I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people."
"Just get the f— away. Wherever you have to go, just get away".
I guess we could discuss whether this is straight up racist, but it sounds pretty bad to me.
https://www.tumblr.com/manlethotline/616428804059086848/hey-...
Adams was talking about a poll:
> He said it revealed that 26% of Black respondents said it’s “not OK to be White” and 21% said “they weren’t sure.” With a degree of amazement, Adams said: “That’s 47% of Blacks not willing to say it’s OK to be White. That’s like a real poll. This just happened.”
> Adams said that the poll demonstrated that there is “no fixing” current racial tensions in America, which is why White people should live in largely segregated neighborhoods.
> “Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people,” the 65-year-old author exclaimed. “Just get the (expletive) away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.”
...
> “I’ve been identifying as Black for a while because I like to be on the winning team,” Adams continued. “And I like to help. I always thought if you help the Black community, that’s sort of the biggest lever, you could find, the biggest benefit.”
> “But it turns out that nearly half of that team doesn’t think I’m okay to be White,” Adams said.
> Given the poll results, Adams said he’s now “going to re-identify as White,” arguing that he doesn’t “want to be a member of a hate group,” which he claimed he had “accidentally joined” with his supposed Black identification.
The reality is that there are tens of millions of racists in the United States. In fact, they put a group of Christian Nationalist (Nat-C) white supremacists in the White House.
It's not a Scott Adams problem in particular, and trying to make the issue just about him is a cop out.
Loved Dilbert anyway.
He was the creator of Dilbert, a comic strip that became a cultural touchstone for corporate life in the 1990s and 2000s. Through satire, Adams articulated the frustrations of office workers and popularized ideas about systems thinking, incentives, and the gap between organizational rhetoric and reality. For many in the technology and business sectors, Dilbert functioned as a shared language for workplace dysfunction.
In later years, Adams became increasingly known for provocative and polarizing commentary. His public statements grew more strident over time, culminating in remarks in 2023 that led to the widespread removal of Dilbert from newspapers. These comments were widely criticized as racist and effectively ended the strip’s mainstream publication.
Adams’ legacy is a complicated one. His early work influenced how a generation understood corporate systems and personal habits, while his later conduct overshadowed those contributions. Assessing that full record requires holding both facts at once, without simplification.