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.
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.
[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...
You are not the only person he did this kind of thing for: https://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2025/5/...
That's a great story. Thank you. I hope you've had the opportunity to give someone else a leg up.
Accepting that people change, and that people are inherently full of contradictions, is part of growing up... and changing.
Interesting that he basically called for a more idealistic version of the Green New Deal back then.
The Wayback Machine is an international treasure.
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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.
I had 100% the same experience. I thought they were stupid when I was young, after working in an office for a year or two I thought they were peak humor.
If you could share any links to DNRC related content, I'd love to see it. Can't find anything online, just broken links.
I still read coworkers as "cow-orkers"
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.
Unless it's about the moving forced perspective shot in Bilbo's home, right? That's impressive AF.
That didn't change if I enjoyed his strip, but it definitely made sure I didn't take anything else he said seriously.
In general, if an "entertainer" has no "offstage" persona, they're batshit and it's not a bit.
I try and also never actually listen to the lyrics of songs, like 90% of the time I'm disappointed and it ruins the song for me.
Opposite of my experience. I love reading the lyrics and Genius annotations on songs I like. Vampire Weekend has a lot of good lyrics. Reading the annotations for The Black Keys' Turn Blue album was kinda eye-opening, and Kanye has a lot of great memorable lyrics as well. I feel it helps me appreciate the songs more deeply on later listens. Also it kinda bugs me if I can't quite catch some words in a song in the live-listen.
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)
>bible story at the end
Unless they've revamped the format since I've last been, the bible stories (plural) are at the start and middle of mass.
This is not what a Catholic mass is. It’s a recapitulation of a Jewish Temple sacrifice.
Affirmations and law of attraction stuff are just repackaged version of prayers for the "not religious, but spiritual" crowd.
That book killed Dilbert for me. I enjoyed every Dilbert book up until that one, then it just faded away for me.
His theory of gravity (everything in the universe is exponentially growing in size at a continuous rate, shrinking the gaps between things) was a fascinating thought experiment for me as a kid and I enjoyed thinking through how it could work and why it wouldn't work. Finding out later that he at least at one point took it seriously as a potential explanation for how the universe works was very surprising to me.
> shrinking the gaps between things
Hubble showed the opposite is the case, though...
> and an _alternative theory of gravity_
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.
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!"
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.
Yes, people cry. I’ve had many friends cry while talking to me about hard things they are or have experienced - both men and women.
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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".
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.
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"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.
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.
Social manipulation has been around a lot longer than the books and movements attempting to redress it as "hypnosis".
I've pondered awhile on what hypnosis is. My current model is it's like prompting LLMs, the hypnotic commands are just stuff in the context window but not currently being talked about.
I’m interested. Especially if you can point to moments in your career or projects where it has worked.
AFAIK he tried it in addition to regular treatment but I could be wrong.
> The law of attraction
The Secret has sold 30 million copies.
And at the end of the day, it's prayer. 'Prayer helps, somehow' is a very common worldview.
>Adams had a normal range of beliefs.
Manifesting things into reality through writing them often enough is FAR from a normal belief. Dude was a bit looney from the get go
Most people in the industrialized world zealously believe what they are told to believe, even if it goes against what's in front of their own eyes. So making things true just by saying or writing them is not that odd.
>>> Manifesting things into reality through writing them often enough is FAR from a normal belief.
Hey, propaganda is a thing and it works. That's totally and example of manifesting things into reality through writing them often enough.
Prayer is basically that isn't it? Also, "the secret."
I think the commentor was talking about Adams's support for Trump. While maybe not normal on Reddit, HN or San Francisco, it's normal enough that more than half the voters agreed with Scott Adams.
Less than half. 49.8%, in fact.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
Hackernews readers have a habit of downvoting descriptive comments because they read them as normative
A lot of the people who comment here are techie provincials who literally have no understanding that the things they believe, or at least the things they recite as their beliefs, are ideas that might be analyzed and judged against reality.
What’s normal about bigotry? It’s brain damage.
There's some very, very rich irony in your comment.
Sadly it's quite common in the human population.
> What’s normal about bigotry?
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.
Leaded fuel existed for a few short decades. Bigotry and tribalism have existed since time immemorial.
> 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.
Has anyone take the time to prove that out? I was a fan of the comic for years and don't recall there being a lot of casual racism strewn in.
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.
Diversity initiatives are often racist or regressive, in which case they should be mocked, and he wasn’t in the wrong for doing so.
Funny enough, to get to actual representative diversity you need to explicitly hire underrepresented candidates and pass up on white dudes. Which Scott famously complained about.
Damned if you do damned if you don’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.
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."
If a show that mostly featured black people was cancelled due to "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 White audiences," would you so readily dismiss the creator at being miffed at that?
I'm not sure being against DEI stuff is completely off the rails.
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.
Yeah every once in awhile I’ll catch an old comedy special and it’s almost jarring how much of the content from some comics was “my wife is awful and she’s really dumb for expecting things from me”.
Neighbors of a certain age have that same mindset.. “Want to come over for a drink and get away from the ball and chain?” Or “After your done with the lawn, would your wife let you come over for a drink?”
I mean I wouldn’t mind grabbing a beer but your view of relationships is exceptionally weird.
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.
> Were there early signs?
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.
I wonder if any of his then-peers who were also white men got promoted? I'm betting it was non-zero.
> * 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.
Why would he work his ass off after that?
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.
> 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.
> Dunno if he's an unreliable narrator or was just smart enough to keep the white supremacy out the comics at first.
Or I don't know, maybe everyone hates corpo suit types no matter the race?
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.
Well... Scott Adams was on Art Bell Coast to Coast AM a few times, so that tracks.
That was when I stopped reading his blog.
It’s one thing to, say, acknowledge and respect the cleverness of a villain succeeding by pulling a trick and then deconstruct the trick.
It’s a totally different thing when you go beyond mere respect/acknowledgement and start incessantly praising the villain’s cleverness, professing your love for the villain, worshipping the villain, publicly fantasizing about having hot sex with the villain, etc.
Adams at first was vaguely alluding to do the first thing, but testing the waters showed him which side of the sandwich was buttered, and he went fully with the second.
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.
The misogyny has always been there.
The 6/11/1994 comic about sensitivity training comes to mind. "I can't find my keys" and "my blouse falls to the floor."
The lines were spoken by a man who imagined that he was a woman. Therefore, I think the comic strip was intended rather about how men can have a skewed perception of women.
The "people acknowledge my existence, people hold the door for me" is not about them being idiots. It's Scott arguing that women have it easy compared to men (which may or may not be true, feminists will disagree).
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.
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.
Perhaps?
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.
Some of it goes quite far back, even:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070222235609/http://dilbertblo...
If your feelings tend to skew in favour of people suggesting that the jewish death toll in the Shoah was pulled out of the ass by someone, perhaps you'd have some to gain from keeping them in check.
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I mean he tried treating his cancer with Ivermectin instead of seeking treatment from medical professionals.
“The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people“ -Scott Adams
Does that sound reasonable to you?
Telling to me was Scott Adams couldn't get laid in San Francisco in the 1980's.
Hard not to conclude women found him repellent.
If anyone cares about the truth he explained what happened in detail in an interview at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bv1jfYYu4
Reading sound takes like this vs seemingly everyone on reddit celebrating his death makes me quite sad.
> Most non-racists don’t need to spend 30 minutes on cable news explaining themselves to save face.
Most people never get interviewed on cable news at all, so that’s not a meaningful baseline. When someone is publicly accused, explaining yourself publicly is a predictable response, not evidence of guilt.
> Saying something publicly is an action. You can’t take it back.
Of course you can clarify or correct yourself—people misspeak all the time. Whether that matters depends on whether listeners are interested in understanding or just in cancelling someone they don't like.
> Why do you feel the need to defend him?
Because I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of Scott Adams over many years, and I’m confident I understand his views far better than people judging him from short, out-of-context clips.
I don’t get anything out of this except insisting that the truth matters. Even when the person involved is unpopular or dead.
> Most non-racists don’t need to spend 30 minutes on cable news explaining themselves to save face.
That's the sort of thing an Catholic inquisitor would say. Denial proves guilt!
It's hyperbole and in response to black people who don't think it's OK to be white.
Please spare us.
> think that white people are under attack
Yes, they think that.
> and that white people need to re-establish dominance. To them, equality is a threat
No. When a specific group is singled out and attacked, whether they’re white, black, or brown, man or woman, that can not be a basis for equality.
wow, racist much?
People of all races can have legitimate grievances and harms. Im sure some racist black people said "black is beautiful", but that isnt a reason to forbid anyone from saying it.
Best to listen him directly: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-2885723/Video-D...
1. Poll says black people are not ok with with white people
2. Which makes them racist
3. Get away from racists
Turning this 180 degrees around is insanity.
So let's criticize the Rasmussen Reports then
> how many people on HN are just overtly racist
Like most people actually are... https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40124781
Regardless. Funny how quickly people of kindest hearts, tops of the virtue pyramid are to cancel someone for single misinterpreted wild sentence.
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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...
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.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/scott-ad...
> How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand.
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.
His 18yo son overdosed on fentanyl in 2018.
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
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.
That is awful.
But his (first) divorce was in 2014 and his blog posts already seemed bitter around that time.
Edit: as another comment points out, it was a few years even earlier than that so I stand corrected.
His (in)famous sockpuppetry on Metafilter happened back in 2011, so he was a bit off well before his divorce or stepson's death.
his posts on that site are fantastic! Also, someone replied "Welcome to Metafilter Scott" on his first post.
He was already quite vocally pro-Trump during the primaries and 2016 presidential run.
His explanation why he endorsed Hillary Clinton was pretty lunatic though.
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 that having a family and knowing that blowback from your behavior will affect them is a moderating factor for a lot of people.
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.
I did. Different genetic expressions. The intelligence to realize language is just memes, not truth.
Scott Adams put himself on a pedestal above anyone else in his comics; he was Dilbert. The only smart person in the room. He was always a celebrity obsessed with his own existence. Little difference between him and Tim the Toolman or a Kardashian.
Low effort contributor whose work people laughed at due to social desirability bias. No big loss.
> 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.
He has plenty of fans right up to the end, it's amazing how people think someone went "off the rails" just because he has a different political opinion.
What is having fans and going of the rails have to do with each other?
Saying Republicans were going to be hunted down in the street if Biden won is a little more than just having a different political opinion.
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Utter nonsense.
I don't think Adams represents a particularly uncommon archetype in the engineering world.
I'm an engineer and I don't exactly know a lot of engineers who think you can manifest alternative realities into existence with the power of quantum physics, on account of most of us having passed a physics class or two
He always seemed like the archetypal "Californian creative who fried his brain with psychedelics and new age woo-woo in the 70s" type
How many of his Coffee with Scott Adams broadcasts did you watch before forming the "off the rails" opinion?
Sometimes people just get to retirement age, realize they don't have much longer to go and choose to stop hiding who they are. Morrissey of The Smiths is another guy who's alienated his audience. Moe Tucker, drummer in the legendary NYC '60s counterculture band The Velvet Underground was picketing at a Tea Party rally in 2009 and saying "Obama is destroying America from the inside".
> Sometimes people just get to retirement age, realize they don't have much longer to go and choose to stop hiding who they are
Personality changes over time, it's not necessarily about hiding.
> How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand
He explains it himself, if you are open to primary source material.
A crazy person's account of how they went crazy should not generally be considered reliable.
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'.
It's one way. Another is to simply observe his words and actions.
I started paying attention to him when he got sick. He seemed very reasonable about most things, and extremely insightful about many things. I certainly don’t think he deserved the posthumous label “crazy person.”
What book was that? All his books published prior to the 2000s were Dilbert compilations, so you might have the wrong date or the wrong person.
I started paying attention to him in the 90s and he was already crazy then. The only difference is that he was the fun kind of crazy, talking nonsense about quantum mechanics and such, rather than the disturbing racist crazy he became later on.
If I understand you correctly, you are considering Adams to be "off the rails" crazy and therefore you are condemning him, for having opinions?
No, no. It’s more nuanced than that. They were opinions that were different from my own.
I had similar feelings of perplexity until one day it dawned on me that Adams' self-insert wasn't Dilbert, but Dogbert.
Behind the bastards did an interesting episode on him. He was always kind of kooky: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6ZlIuEIgLRNxfJWxiv4asn?si=w...
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.
>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.
Have you read anything of his from that era like Win Bigly?
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.
This is a kind and generous take. I couldn’t agree more.
I'll just say that I didn't know until now that he was under cancer treatment and I wouldn't wish Cancer on 99.9999999% of the population. I have my opinions on home but he does not not meet that prestigious landmark.
>How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand.
The key is that it seemed like he was Dilbert when he actually always thought of himself as Dogbert.
My impression of Adams, based on his writings on science and more, is that he turned out to be more of a Pointy-Haired Boss
That's true, but he thought of himself as Dogbert, a superintelligent being superior to everyone around him.
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.
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.
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.
Aging is lonelier and more stressful than ever. The aging brain is already less flexible and there is a net loss of synapses and brain mass.
The internet has become a more unkind and manipulative place that ever. It is making people into the worst version of themselves, to serve the ends of groups that benefit from division.
I mourn many things with this news today. RIP Scott Adams.
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 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.
Can you define “hill climbing”? Is it a metaphor?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing <-- applying this for getting more and more engagement
Ahh, so that's what I've internally called "The Sharpiro Effect" really is. Though it's still a bigger shame that a philosophy professor would need to resort to this compared to a newpaper cartoonist.
> ...will be elected president
But Trump was elected president. Twice. So maybe Adams was right? Or what did you mean with "hill climbing controversy"?
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
https://gizmodo.com/dilbert-creator-claims-he-taught-chatgpt...
Scott Adams taught ChatGPT to put humans into an instant bliss-state. "Seems at least plausible"?
> “deeply off the rails”
How sheltered are you people? Scott Adams was a pretty standard non-woke boomer. Do you think that just because you don’t hear certain opinions in the workplace or the faculty or the Atlantic podcast, that they aren’t widely held by members of the public? Do you think everyone’s into DEI, BLM, trans-rights, multi-culturalism etc?
It's somewhat ironic to claim someone (who spoke every day for an hour about his thoughts) went "off the rails" on the same exact day an attorney representing the country's most prestigious civil-rights organization argued gender discrimination to the Supreme Court and yet was unable to provide a way to distinguish men from women.
You say the end of his life was sad, meanwhile he wrote of an "amazing life" in his final note and expressed immense joy in positively impacting thousands of people.
It's so strange how people like you classify other people's experiences that you actually know nothing about.
Asking someone to give a sharp dividing line in a multi-dimensional bimodal but not discontinuous distribution is just nonsense.
In particular, being unable to give that strict difference (that does not exist) is not proof of not believing that the general bimodal groups exist, nor acknowledging that existence, nor saying that there is not general differences between the groups. It is not the gotcha that elementary school biology suggests it would be.
And you're essentially demonstrating my point. Your long, complicated, meaningless comment here - which boils down to sex being impossible to define - is now widely accepted (and is the basis of a Supreme Court case), while someone like Scott Adams who would claim that chromosomes or sex organs (at birth) are indeed sufficient in defining one's sex, is perceived to be "off the rails". It's absurd.
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.
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> How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails
Why? People all say that but it is never stated how or what he said.
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.
As John Scalzi once said, "The failure mode of clever is asshole." [1]
That has prevented me from posting what I thought was a clever or cheeky response in case it didn't come across the way I wanted.
---
[1] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-...
The irony is that Scott Adam's himself wouldn't have been in favour of policing one's own thoughts. /tongue-firmly-in-cheek
I love that guy. Never having been an avid reader, I’m trying to read more, and my mission now is to read through most of his books.
That's a great quote; over the years I've internalized something similar which is why I try to be less clever on the internet than in person.
thanks for sharing, I think I needed to read this
For what it's worth, banter on social media with someone you're not familiar with is almost always playing with fire. It's really easy for something to come across wrong or just be kind of exhausting, and this effect is magnified the more of a spotlight that person has. You're just one of thousands of interactions they've had that day/week/month, and so unless you know they enjoy that kind of playfulness, I find it's worth assuming they don't. This is, ironically, especially true with people who publicly post in that tone, because they get it coming back at them all the more frequently.
It really doesn't have to. I thought I was being clever when in a thread I likened something Michael Godwin said to being Nazi, because I thought it was a funny self-reference, and he just gave me the Twitter equivalent of an eye roll and moved on.
I've seen this before where physical illness can deeply affect a person to the point their personality seems to do a 180. There's no difference between physical and mental health, it's all interconnected.
Confession:
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.
Do you maybe have too little slack in your life? If you have too little emotional energy 'in your tank', compassion and empathy and such naturally go down as there are less 'resources' to spend on empathizing with others.
As I grew older I changed from being a person who never got angry, to having very distressing bouts of rage.
I gave up caffeine, and the rages completely vanished.
Worth a try?
I've grown increasingly grumpy with age, and I only ever drink water, so results may vary. Still, nothing to lose by trying it.
As you get older time is more precious so you want to waste less of it. This is a factor, how much of a factor it is differs from person to person.
As they say - "I don't suffer fools gladly"
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.
>Perhaps him acting aggressively and blocking you was a misunderstood attempt at humor.
People who are being hyperbolic for humor tend to follow you back not block you
There is much to learn about human psychology from animal indeed.
The only lesson here is not to idolize people that create content you like.
Don't overcomplicate it.
> 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.
Chronic diseases (of which aging is one) can do nasty things to people and animals. The lesson here (which I think you picked up on) is to try and be kinder. It may not always work.
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.
Dilbert's Desktop Games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert%27s_Desktop_Games) was part of my childhood. As a slightly older kid in Ukraine, while I hadn't heard of Dilbert, I could understand the setting with my knowledge of English and some idea of how tech companies worked. (I already wanted to be a programmer.) I thought Techno Raiders was a pretty cool game, but also, this game collection was an introduction to the idea that the world of office work was kind of ridiculous and people were kind of incompetent.
> 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.
My very first job in tech I had a cubicle, but that was the only time. I’m also not a fan of open floor plans, but seems like they’re standard now. Feels like a “careful what you wish for” situation since everyone hated the idea of “cubicle farms” and wanted them gone (like the famous scene in Office Space), but somehow open floor plan is actually worse.
I actually had an office at my first tech job. It was more like a cubicle that went to the ceiling, with a sliding door. I didn't know how good I had it.
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.
I have a Catbert doll in my kitchen. I think an HR person I knew gave it to me at a going away party at a long-ago job.
“Engineers, Scientists and other odd people” chapter in the book “The Dilbert Principle” is one of the funniest things I have ever read
"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.
It depends on the population you are taking from. Being the top quartile embedded C developer in the world is perhaps unimpressive (there are up to 2 billion people better than you at embedded C programming), but being the top quartile embedded C developer within the population of professional embedded C developers is much more impressive.
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.
It's (obviously) a random number pulled out from someone's ass. However, I think top 25% isn't that off. It means top 25% of people who actually tried.
If it still sounds easy, try to reach top 25% rank of a video game that you are not familiar with (diamond in Starcraft II or whatever). You'll find it's literally the workload of a full-time job.
He wrote that 20 years ago. I think today, it's more like top 10% in 3 or more things.
a [chemist, biologist, mathematician, DSP researcher] who can code at a professional level (that 25%) is worth far more to the right position than either of those skills individually.
Okay, make it two useful things then. Be a top 25% marketeer and a top 25% programmer and you are worth so much more than either separately.
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.
That concept of merging skills stuck with me.
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.
Steve Martin said that after 60 years of playing, he considered himself to be a pretty good banjo player. But then he saw Eric Clapton play guitar and thought “This guy’s not funny at all!”
A.J. Liebling wrote: “I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.”
Guess he never met Tom Lehrer
A fair point but still, Tim Minchin is the GOAT.
He absolutely is—but without any disrespect—it feels as though Tim Minchin has already given society all of his overlapping talents in music, comedy, and storytelling. Perhaps he has more to offer, but his recent work seems increasingly self-referential and less genuinely novel. He could retire now with undisputed GOAT honours within his niche, and I wouldn’t feel a sense of loss over what went unrealised. The symphonic tours and Matilda would stand as his magnum opii. For the talents of one man, it is more than enough.
(That being said, to be proven wrong would be the greatest delight.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Personal_life
> He has described a method he has used that he says gave him success: he pictured in his mind what he wanted and wrote it down 15 times a day on a piece of paper
I somehow read about him doing this when I was 18, and it was something that I used to help me excel in my university exams. For 7 years I did this during my exam period, and each time I got the exact grades I wanted.
He gave immense focus to a kid with back-then undiagnosed ADHD, and helped me structure my life in general.
I am very grateful to him.
I got the same from patio11's blog posts too.
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.
Came here to say this, I really appreciated "How to Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big".
I'm not here to judge the man or everything he did, I'm here to say thanks for the stuff I loved.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
"Everything expanding at the same rate" sounds vaguely similar to the truth that what we feel as gravity (standing on earth) is us and everything around us accelerating upwards from the center of the gravity well - and what we feel as "pressure" on our feet is from the earth "holding us up" (in crude terms). So, it sounds crazy but it's not too distant from the truth.
Minus the expanding clause, you are describing Newtonian vs. Einsteinian physics.
I also remember this, and in fact I found an old Dilbert newsletter from 1996 ("Dogbert's New Ruling Class") where he describes it:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdb/1996Mar/0000.ht...
The simplest objection I can see is orbital mechanics.
from the same newsletter. How to be Funny.
> 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..."
Thanks for finding this!
I just watched a Veritisium video that said the same thing: https://youtu.be/XRr1kaXKBsU
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.
I don’t know Scott’s theory, but gravity as a force indeed doesn’t exist. That’s a classical physics concept.
For the last century, the accepted theory is that gravity is indeed not a force but a manifestation of the space-time curvature. That’s one of the main points of general relativity.
My physics is very rusty and very basic, but I don't think classical physics said gravity was a force either. eg in Newton's 2nd law or engineering mechanics, gravity is the "a" or the "g" not the "F".
:) I see your confusion. But the F is caused by gravity there. The special case you are refering to (I think you are thinking about the Weight = g * mass of body) comes from a more universal expression.
If you look at the proper expression that calculates it's force, it becomes clear:
F = G * m1 * m2/ r^2 (so, gravity is the force between masses).
P.S. G is the universal constant of Gravity here, not the gravity itself.
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.
The VP who "raises issues" reminded me perfectly of someone at a prior workplace.
IIRC he did get a lot of ideas from fans talking about their own workplaces …
There were a number of Motorola-inspired ideas that made their way to Dilbert while I was working there in the late 90s.
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.
Farewell Scott, you are now God's debris.
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.
I know three things about Scott Adams. He wrote comics, he wrote management books, he was passionate about his politics. He clearly very much wanted his politics to be part of his public persona, why is it wrong to make it part of the three things one eulogizes about him?
Because they're not eulogising him through his politics or eulogising his politics, and they're not really talking about him when they do it.
>It's like a bunch of people were conditioned or brainwashed into reflexibly regurgitation nonsense.
Has happened on a grander scale in the past in China, Germany, Russian and others. This is hardly anything.
How is one supposed to just accept this as part and parcel in the free world itself.
Humanity is imperfect/flawed…that’s how.
It's quite bizarre I agree. The fact that the only comment I've read that doesn't follow the pattern was this one is disheartening.
It's an elephant in the room and a default instinct to address it
Because Adams views were crap.
What did he do that you object to?
We're talking about his political views, try to keep up.
One way or another, this is saying a lot about you.
read the rest of the comments?
As the CATO Institute put it: racism
https://www.cato.org/commentary/dilbert-cartoonist-scott-ada...
> It’s worth noting that Adams, once a moderate libertarian/ Republican but more recently a purveyor of far-right paranoia, has long reveled in provocative statements (for instance, that a Joe Biden victory in the 2020 election would lead to Republicans being hunted down). In this case, he was responding to a Rasmussen poll asking whether people agreed with the statement, “It’s okay to be white.” Among Black respondents, 26% said they disagreed either strongly or somewhat, while 21% weren’t sure. From this, Adams deduced that nearly half of all Black Americans don’t think it’s okay to be white and presumably hate white people.
> In fact, in addition to doubts about Rasmussen’s sampling methods, the question itself is misleading. “It’s okay to be white” is a slogan long used as a seemingly innocuous “code” by white supremacists and popularized by internet trolls a few years ago. Most likely, many Black people in the survey had some vague knowledge of this background or realized they were being asked a trick question of sorts. More than one in four white respondents (27%) also declined to endorse the statement.
> Adams could have acknowledged his error. Instead, he dug in his heels, improbably claimed that he was using “hyperbole” to illustrate that it’s wrong to generalize about people by race, and seemed to take pride in his “cancellation” (which he can afford financially). He has also found a troubling number of more or less mainstream conservative defenders, including Twitter owner Elon Musk and highly popular commentator Ben Shapiro. On Twitter, Shapiro acknowledged that Adams’ rant was racist — only to add that “if you substituted the word ‘white’ for ‘black’ ” in it, you would get “a top editorial post at the New York Times.”
> Racial double standards are a complicated issue. While most of us will agree that expressions of racial, ethnic or other group antagonism are somewhat less abhorrent when coming from a historically oppressed minority group, that doesn’t mean we should condone them. Yet in recent years, progressive discourse has often normalized rhetoric that treats “white” as a pejorative. This pattern contributes to overall toxicity around racial identity, and it absolutely should be criticized. But if you invoke it as “whataboutery” in response to a blatantly racist rant about Black Americans, this inevitably comes across as excuse-making.
> As for “cancel culture,” almost no one disagrees that some odious views and statements call for shunning. Problems start when people are “canceled” for expressing controversial but debatable opinions or making trivial missteps, such as uttering a racial slur while quoting someone else’s words. In an open society, the lines demarcating views “beyond the pale” should be very carefully and narrowly drawn. But overt racism is certainly on the wrong side of that line.
> By Cathy Young
I'm not above ad hominem, so I'll point out that Young's own views are also not without obvious political leanings.
A much better point about the poll was made in Slate[1]:
> Rasmussen said 13 percent of poll respondents were Black, so about 130 people. If we take the results entirely at face value—which I’d discourage—that means it found about 34 Black people who answered “disagree” or “strongly disagree” with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” We have no more information about why.
Although they also allow people the benefit of the doubt by presuming they know the context behind a catchphrase that a) knowledge of is a sign of being online far more than the average, and b) is designed to show bias in anyone who opposes it. That's how biased these journalists are, they don't even notice the trap, they stand in it and brazenly opine on it.
Pinch of salt liberally applied.
[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/02/dilbert-scott-ad...
Brainwashed, you say…
All you need is
A cup or a mug or a glass
A tankard chalace or stein
A cantine jug or flask
A vessel of any kind
Fill it with your favorite liquid, I like coffee
And join me now for the unparalled pleasure
The dopamine hit if the day
The thing that makes everything better
Its called the similtaneous sip
And it happens now
it's an internet comment section, reflexive regurgitation is literally what they are for
Because Adam was a spawn of a greater society.
It's better to read of what he thought of and learn from that, than to try to align oneself to the weird anti-human reaction his passing has raised from the woodwork.
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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.
younger folks may not realize how many of his strips were cut out of the newspaper and taped to fridges, cubicles, and office breakrooms.
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.
I worked for a Pointy-Haired Boss who used to pass out Dilbert strips he himself found funny and relevant to that person. Sadly, he could not recognize the PHB in himself.
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)
I suspect there was a healthy medium: none meant cultural issues, while too many meant the entire company was dysfunctional to an extreme.
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.
Back then it was possible for authors and artists to maintain a mystique about who they were. What you saw was what you got and that was it. Making social media a necessity for product marketing changed that forever.
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.
And yes, the norm was already pretty bad.
A fine time to acknowledge Scott Adams’ remarkably simple and clear financial advice: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/scott-adams-financial-advice/
I think it is pretty good.
You can, of course, debate it - and HN being HN people probably will.
Here it is, unabridged
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.
Unless you work for Enron, where the retirement fund went down with the company.
There is not percentage limit, it's a flat number that increases annually https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/401k-limit-increases-to-24500-f...
I max my 401k because not taking advantage of tax-advantaged income is leaving money on the table.
No, if you can, max the 401k, as long as you've set up emergency fund and other stuff. After maxing the 401k, then go to taxable brokerage.
The personal finance reddit goes like, fund it up to the match is basic, but if you can, max it.
You reduce your taxable income and the money doesn't pay capital gains when you pull it out.
> You reduce your taxable income and the money doesn't pay capital gains when you pull it out.
You do pay income tax on it when you pull it out though. Whether or not you come out ahead depends at least partially on your marginal tax rates before and after retirement.
So if your company doesn't match your contribution then contribute nothing to 401k?
This is incorrect. First off, you do control your retirement funds. The amount of control varies, but at the very least you are offered dozens of mutual funds, indexed funds and bond funds to choose from. Some companies allow offer Fidelity BrokerageLink which allow you to invest in anything including individual stocks.
Secondly, as far as "another tax shelter" there aren't any. For most people the only tax shelter available is 401(k). And the tax shelter is a very good reason to contribute to 401(k), even if there is no company match.
Every 401K I've been in has had some choice in investments. Even if they don't, you'd have to assume that you could do better actively managing your own funds in another tax shelter than the "S&P 500 index" or whatever the 401K is doing. For most people, this is unlikely.
Tacking on, in evangelical circles Dave Ramsey's financial peace university talks about saving 15% of retirement when getting out of debt and generally working through that list, then once you have paid off the house, build more retirement wealth as you desire...most of us don't get to that point until later in life.
70% in a stock fund is extremely risky if you are close to retirement. You will not have fresh income to dollar-cost-average your way back into the black in the event of another market crash.
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.
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."
No idea how true it is of course.
He always had dubious takes (he was anti-evolution for as long as I can remember) but that doesn't make Dilbert any less good.
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.
Now that you mention it, I indeed cannot remember a single strip where unionization would be mentioned, despite it always being a relevant topic in the critique of office jobs
I don’t see the supposed hypocrisy of mocking the absurd and incompetent ways in which downsizing is handled, yet acknowledging that it is sometimes a net benefit to carry out.
I didn’t say he was a hypocrite. In his pro-corporate positions, he was very open and consistent. He saw his readers that believed otherwise as suckers.
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.
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 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
Oh wow. First time I’ve seen that shit.
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 on a livestream either yesterday or the day before, and was still interacting with people.
He was generous with his time to the end.
this moved me, too
I love the music of Michael Jackson, the comedy of Bill Cosby, and the biting brilliance of Scott Adams’ comics.
I also accept the uncomfortable reality that each of these men had deeply ugly sides. That knowledge hasn’t erased my appreciation for their work, even if it has complicated how I see the people behind it.
I reconcile these two aspects, by deploying them in separate Docker containers in my brain, air-gapped, sandboxed, and blocked by multiple layers of mental compliance checks.
Prostate cancer loves to metastasize into bones. Same thing happened to my father.
And my uncle as well. He died at 65, mentally he was still sharp as a tack, it was so sad to see him gone so soon.
Take this as your reminder to get it checked. Takes a morning, lasts for 10 years.
If you already had a relative with it (like a father) you need to check PSA more than every 10 years, and I personally think its not wise for any middle-aged man to wait that long between tests, considering PSA is just a blood test.
My Dad had PC at 65. My older brother got a PSA test at age 41, was a bit over 1.0. Waited 10 years before getting another PSA (his doc was telling him to get one but he didn't), then it was 14. Had surgery, but its now metastatic.
There are also forms of PC that don't raise PSA, though they mostly affect non-caucasians. A Urologist can do a physical test for it. Primary docs can do that test too, but since they do it it less often they can miss it.
I wonder if he had a BRCA mutation. That manifests in men as a much higher chance of prostate cancer, and of aggressive prostate cancer.
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.
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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.
You don't need to know him personally when he was out there telling everyone who he was.
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It takes very little work to discover how shitty a person Adams was before he died. Hell, ask your favorite chatbot.
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.
I worked in a large company in the 90s and it really felt like Scott was spying on us with the comics he wrote. Such a great comic strip, and I liked his book the Dilbert principle. I followed his blog for quite a while then things started going off the rails a bit and I stopped following, I also ended up in smaller companies and Dilbert felt less relevant and I haven't really been following what has been happening with him. Kind of glad I didn't. I'm appreciative of the years of humor Dilbert provided in the 90s.
"The Day You Became A Better Writer" is still my favorite piece on writing. Short, simple, useful. Worth saving: https://archive.ph/yomrs
There was a time when his insight was relevant and spoke to a lot of people. I hope he finds peace in whatever is next.
Regardless of his political views, Dilbert was truly brilliant.
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 discovered Dilbert because Omega Instruments distributed collections of his comics on individual cards.
Scott had prostate cancer, probably for a few years since by the time he publicly announced having it (May 2025) there were signs of the cancer spread to his hip and lower vertebrae. Rather than treating it immediately with surgery, drugs, or traditional cancer therapy, he took ivermectin and other de-worming medication. He was begging RFK jr / trump to grant him access to an "experimental" cancer treatment in November. After being paralyzed and starting radiation therapy because the cancer had spread into his spine. The man's life is a prime example of how modern conservatism will rot your brain. Prostate cancer is one of the most survivable cancers in adults (especially men over the age of 60), and he died painfully over the course of years because he believed in grifters over doctors.
That’s not modern conservatism. It’s just stupidity. Conservatism is misinterpreted as extremism and stupidity.
A family member has been living with prostate cancer for around a decade. Get screened and get treated.
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One of my emails to Scott ended up in his first book; I was the one who emailed about carrying ice.
Fair winds and following seas, Scott.
RIP Scott Adams. His humor was always slightly outside my realm but as I get older I appreciate it more. Mr. Adams was young too. RIP Mr. Adams. Thank you for your deep unreliquishing jabs at society.
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.
> 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.
That's something.
Both things can be true. Dilbert was a great comic strip and Scott Adams was a piece of shit.
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?
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At 10:25am ET, HN is more up-to-date than Wikipedia (article hasn't been updated yet to reflect his passing).
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.
However, it is a decent news aggregator.
Wikipedia is waiting for news sources to confirm things.
> 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.
Jesus christ.
> Republicans will be hunted" if Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election
I don't know how he got there from Biden's literal pitch to donors that "nothing will fundamentally change".
Projection. The Republican pitch was to start hunting their enemies, so he and a lot of other people assumed the reverse applied too.
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.
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Why?
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this is still a thing?
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.
Unfortunately, examples abound.
May he rest in peace. His characters were quite charming and funny.
He, on the other hand, was an absolute piece of shit.
Thanks for the laughs, Mr. Adams. May you rest in peace.
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.)
He recently announced his plan to convert to Christianity, appearing to invoke Pascal's wager: https://youtu.be/ldiij_z3mUY?t=717
I wonder if he managed to do it in time.
According to the letter read by his ex wife, yes.
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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.
Never has so much goodwill been squandered so completely.
Sadly, there are a great many contenders for that crown. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Cosby
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.
Rest in peace, Scott.
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!
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.
I don't think it's by design. I think it is by its nature.
Most people crave social interaction, and when others engage with them it triggers that dopamine hit. As you say, we all have need for social validation. Even HN has that effect, and it's not engineered to elicit it as far as I know.
Even USENET had that pull, and people would waste hours on it, engage in flamewars, etc.
Now platforms like TikTok and Instagram might optimize for it but even if they didn't, they would have that addictive quality.
I don't think there's any way to do social media that would avoid this.
The effect is much stronger than it has to be due to how these services have been optimized for increasing engagement at the cost of all else.
In more traditional places of online discussion, things like flamebait is at minimum penalized and often deleted. Posters with strong tendency towards incivility and outright falsehoods get banned. Participating with one’s lizard brain at the wheel is strongly discouraged.
There’s no reason why that can’t be true of social media, too. It could be tuned to elevate content that doesn’t pull people into a degenerative cycle, but that’s not nearly as profitable and so it’s not.
Both X and Meta have at various points in time hired addiction medicine specialists. They weren't hired to decrease user attention to their properties.
He gave a tour of his house on YouTube a long time ago and on every tv in nearly every room he has Fox News playing.
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."
Narrator: “It was nailed on Fox News.”
I think the "TV in every room" is far more concerning than the choice of station. That cannot be good for the mind.
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Who has a TV in every room that's constantly on? That's pretty weird.
I have no television in any room. Having a tv in nearly every room sounds like a nightmare. Doubly so if playing Fox News.
Scott Adams would've approved, I think.
I own three colanders.
If so, you do not tie with me. ;)
How many rooms in your home though? These are crucial details.
Social media is a poison and Mr. Adams drank deep from the well. It's a shame.
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.
> 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.
In general this is not true, for example if you win the lottery the correct path is not normally to spend all of your money on more lottery tickets.
There are definitely other valid reasons to take unconventional paths though.
This was recorded before he publicly came out as racist[1] and anti-vaccine[2]: https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/scott-adams-...
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/02/23/dilberts-scott-adams-...
[2] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jan/26/scott-adam...
On [2] he said that natural immunity from getting covid-19 is better than getting the vaccine alone, which is factually correct, as many studies demonstrated (note: may vary by strains, but was particularly the case in 2021/2022). There's nothing crazy about this, and it's very reasonable to say you prefer to evaluate the risk/benefit and take the vaccine accordingly, instead of mandating this for every demographic.
People tend to fall back on tribalism and slap labels on others instead of engaging with nuance or complexity.
> You are not giving a metric here so I can not tell why you think it is better
The studies:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/191/8/1420/6556183
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8627252/
There are many more.
Several 2021–2022 studies, especially Delta-focused, suggested natural immunity provided robust or superior protection against reinfection compared to two-dose vaccination alone.
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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".
Is this the video? Scott Adams talks about losing friends, money, etc. around the 3:35 mark: https://youtu.be/HFUr6Px99aQ?t=215
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?
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.
> 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.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OafCPy7K05k
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdvJSGc14xA
Edit: clarifications
My point is he made these claims on the campaign trail, which I cited; he had a real domain expert on his team, which I cited; and it became evident even a year in that his administration wouldn't deliver on that plan according to his own domain expert.
That's a fairly standard case of an ineffective politician casually jettisoning campaign promises once he's in office. And he jettisoned them because he couldn't sell the Republicans on a trillion dollar infrastructure package.
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.”
I’m a believer in the idea of “twitter poisoning”, but of course it applies to all social media.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...
Part of his arc was posting about himself on Reddit using sockpuppets, calling himself a genius:
https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpupp...
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.
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.
This is a fascinating development. Did he talk about this regularly?
I think the world was better with him in it despite his controversies. Dilbert was great. Rest in peace
I never pegged him for a liar though. He believed what he said, unlike so many political commentators.
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.
Does it matter?
How can you tell anyway?
That's the most important thing that matters, when choosing whose words to even allow to enter one's ears.
Consistency of explanations and of the underlying logic.
He started supporting Trump in 2015-2016 when it was deeply unfashionable in his local context, at personal cost.
He actually believed Trump would normalize relations with DPRK and send special forces to take out fentanyl factories in mainland China?
Of all the things people believe(d) Trump will/would do this one would not make top-100 list :)
Fair, those were just some of my more memorable ones.
Considering the rest of his persuasion (tm) nonsense, it'd be extremely consistent for him to be an outright liar rather than a kool aid guzzler.
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.
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.
> It wasn't too long ago criticizing someone on their obituary was considered classless.
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.
The implication is that you are attacking the defenseless. There is none more defenseless than the dead.
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.
No one is less tolerant of attacks than the dead.
Godwin's law approaching
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Uh, leftists were throwing fireworks at the memorial of Charlie Kirk? Leftists called Renee Good names? Sorry I might confuse the sides here.
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.
Heh... do you realize that your comment undermines itself?
> 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.
yes, posts like these do not look like they were made by a mentally stable individual https://bsky.app/profile/dell.bsky.social/post/3mccx32hklc2f
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.
[1] 4-panel comics
He "mainlined" Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. That is pure poison for the soul.
Notch too.
I never understood the urge to self destruct online. Jesus, take the money and fame and disappear like Tom of myspace.
Eh. I don't think Notch can really self-destruct. Was made a billionaire with the sale of Mojang to Microsoft. People may not like him, but I don't think it can ever truly affect him.
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See also: JK Rowling.
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!
Sadly I suspect many people aren’t really driven by ideology as much as they wave around ideology when they think it gets them something they want.
Outside that… ideology is out the window.
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.
Someone described it as Calvinball. The rules keep changing and if you don't keep up you're out. Meanwhile, the contradictions keep piling up...
It's a long list. Sadly, Dawkins is also on there. And I'd argue Elon fits the bill, too.
To argue that, you’d have to find someone who disagrees.
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It's so weird.
She's still convinced that woman boxer is secretly trans.
Or how the primary concern TERFs like her have is that men will dress up as women to rape them in the women's room, instead of what they do now, which is rape women including in places that are women's rooms.
It's fascinating (in a horrid way) what they consider important.
It's also fascinating how the person who wrote "Fight Fascists as a teenager" thinks is really important we eliminate a tiny subset of people from the population.
Are you referring to Imane Khelif? The allegation is not that she is transgender, but that she is male. And based on what is publicly known now, this almost certainly true. JK Rowling was right.
(There is a bit of confusion around this topic, due to how different groups use the term transgender. Gender activists generally use transgender to mean anyone who identifies as a different gender than the one assigned at birth; laypeople tend to use the term to mean any person who identifies as a different gender than their sex at birth. The difference matters in cases where a biological male is assigned female at birth [or vice versa], as is likely the case for Imane Khelif: in that case, gender activists would consider Khelif intersex but not transgender, since her gender identity as a woman matches her gender assigned at birth, despite the fact that she is biologically male.)
To recap for those who have not been following along: Imane Khelif is an Algerian boxer who was assigned female at birth and raised as a girl. She was disqualified from the female division by the International Boxing Association (IBA) after failing two gender verification tests, performed in Turkey and India. The IBA has ties to Russia, and amidst sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) cut ties with the IBA, and no longer recognized their eligibility judgments. Since the IOC does not perform sex tests of their own, Khelif was allowed to compete and win gold in the women's division at the 2024 Olympics.
The argument that the IBA was lying about the sex tests was always quite weak, since it's not clear what the motivation would be: Algeria has traditionally been an ally of Russia rather than the West.
But the confirmation that the IBA was right came in 2025, when Imane Khelif refused to take the sex test required to participate in the 2025 world championships. Those were held in the UK and organized by World Boxing, an American organization that is also recognized by the IOC. They also required participants to undergo a sex test (specifically, a noninvasive PCR test to detect presence of the Y chromosone) performed either by the home country or the UK, so no corrupt Russians in the loop. If Khelif was in fact female, this would be the perfect opportunity for her to clear her name and prove to the world once and for all that she was not a male.
Of course, the opposite happened. She refused to take the test, and instead filed a lawsuit, claiming that it was unfair that she was required to undergo sex testing (even though all women had to undergo the same simple PCR test) and demanding that she be allowed to participate without a sex test. Her appeal was denied.
To any reasonable person this should prove with nigh-certainty that Khelif is male. Exactly as J.K. Rowling asserted based on the more limited evidence available in 2024.
> It's fascinating (in a horrid way) what they consider important.
It's fascinating (in a horrid way) how gender ideologues are willing to distort and deny reality. Truly Orwellian stuff.
And as to importance: this cuts both ways. Why is it so important for gender activists to allow males with DSDs to compete against biological women?
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There's "becoming more conservative," and then there's what happened to Scott Adams.
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It's super easy to discover why people found him offensive. Why are you feigning ignorance?
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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.
> while also recognizing that there were aspects of him they didn’t like
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.
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.
Of course! I agree there's no requirement to be objective and the "insanity" take is not unreasonable.
My issue comes someone says they "don't have a dog in the fight" and then proceeds to be highly subjective with paraphrasing.
Adams was the one who refused to put his politics aside, this thread is simply a reflection of that.
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Perhaps people can decide by themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Political_views
Or in his own words.... many many many hours of them
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.
Maybe you could share some of his well-reasoned positions with us, then? :)
That's fair, but also maybe don't base an opinion on 4 paragraphs from wikipedia on topics obviously nuanced.
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.
Maybe, but I'm not sure authoritarianism has anything to do with what we're discussing here unless I'm wrong
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.
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So like slavery? The thing once considered good?
I am not the standard, that's my whole point.
The world does not agree on what is good and bad.
That's the problem.
Truths and morals have changed for all of human history.
Some people still think the earth is flat.
Some people still think, raping captured women (what the right hand possesses) is good.
Like trying to treat his cancer with ivermectin?
Doesn't seem to have worked.
How many times did you have terminal cancer?
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.
> 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
> I wish society talked about death and mortality more often and openly,
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
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
Thank you, yes we are well! Things have only been getting better for several years 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]
It's not just *in vitro.
Per article (and not arguing it's effective for human oncology), there are also studies with mice showing effectiveness.
He tried for a month, next to his regular treatments and then called Makis who is currently promoting it a quack.
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
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”.
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Not my job to teach someone why the water is wet.
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?
It's certainly not filled with hate or resentment. Scott spoke at length about his stepson's death and it was always with sadness and regret.
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.
> Scott had well reasoned opinions and was consistently aware of both sides of issues and news.
[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]"
Wow, what a scathing retort. I hope the original poster realizes he was staring into the abyss for so long it started staring back into him.
His body isn’t even cold yet and the character assassinations are already pouring in. The „empathy havers“, allegedly.
People have been talking about this for years.
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.
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.
Since some years, we call this dialogue. Other, evil people, call it canceling /s
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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?
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Its really not enough to say that Adams simply had different views. He was incredibly hyperbolic, attention seeking, and intentionally inflammatory.
He treated his cancer with the anti-threadworm medication Ivermectin.
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.
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.
He tried for a month, next to his regular treatments and then called Makis who is currently promoting it a quack.
Pretty sure he tried everything, not just that, wouldn't you?
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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.
See also: Elon Musk
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let's just ignore the time he threw a straight-up Heil Donald at the inauguration I guess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
and did you know Wikipedia has an entire page on his politics? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_Elon_M...
i’ve actually read both of those WP pages before.
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.
>straight-up Heil Donald
New thing for me to practice.
A bold claim
It shouldn’t be, it’s factual. :(
The partisan brawling in the USA is to me most tiresome mostly because neither of the factions seems particularly interested in the truth anymore.
Come on.
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.
Dilbert was BARELY satire.
And that’s enough out of me.
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.
You’ll get no argument from me. Dilbert did accurately skewer corporate culture. But what was its solution? Unstated, but omnipresent, was that workers and bosses just needed to be more efficient. Not a whisper of unionization or anything that might threaten profits. This was a deliberate choice by Adams and he proudly bragged about it in interviews.
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.
His politics were not insane just because you disagreed with him.
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
Seems like he aligned pretty perfectly with the Fox News/Newsmax echo chamber.
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> His politics were not insane just because you disagreed with him.
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.
What a distasteful comment. The man did way more good than harm to everyone around him.
He also just passed away, show some respect.
>He also just passed away, show some respect.
It takes more than dying to earn respect.
No. You show respect for those who have just died, period. It's proper manners to do so.
All humans get a certain amount of respect, Scott Adams included.
What level of respect do you think dying earns you, above and beyond that? And why would being dead earn you more respect than you had in life?
Right, be like the US president!
Based on his later years I think the best way to honor him is with an internet shitshow and simping for Donald Trump. I volunteer for the former.
> "terminally online"
Bad choice of words.
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”.
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Why shouldn’t you speak ill of the dead?
Good question.
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 disagree. I say speak against the ideas, not the person, as the person dies, except Jesus who people continue to invoke his name, which probably means he transcends an idea or belief.
I have a terrible toxic belief troubles you. Can I be a member of society just because I believe pineapple on pizza is acceptable? If you associate me as a person with that belief instead of someone who believes, I suddenly become a problem, and not the belief. Jesus said to love your enemies. He also spoke against ideas, not people.
[dead]
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.
Actions, inactions, same difference.
It's mostly because the dead cannot defend themselves. You are attacking someone who you have no fear of reprisal from.
Outside of Scott Adams and all of that. And I think public figures, especially those whose major schtick was to engender reaction, are a different story.
But it's basically getting the last word in because the other party is unable to respond. It's seen as a little uncouth.
On reddit, it's kind of like those people who respond, then block you to make sure you can't respond. They aren't there to make an argument or convince you, they just want to get the last word and they're doing it in a way where you cannot respond.
Like I said, I don't entirely agree with "don't speak ill of the dead". Especially for figures who used their platform to elicit responses. But that's one of the reasons behind the sentiment. Right, wrong, that's for you to decide.
And that is fair. I was just explaining why people feel you shouldn't.
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.
Kind of crazy your original post got flagged, it was completely reasonable.
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> which ironically I think Scott would have liked
Agreed, RIP.
> 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.
I'm a grown up. I can handle it if someone has different views from my own, it's not a big deal.
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.”
This is even encoded in our laws. It is definitionally impossible to defame the dead, for example.
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).
You can’t have a middle ground when your tenets offer up personal harm to a significant portion of the population.
RIP Scott Adams
I recently purchased his 2026 calendar for a family member who works in the consultancy world, they really enjoy it.
Starting my dev career in a big corporate telecom I used to attach Dilbert strips to the end of my presentations, sometimes people would laugh, others, normally execs didn't get the irony or commentary.
Then when I went to more modern and cool startups the same Dilbert comic strips still apply which I found hilarious.
A lot of our influences or heroes have faults and I hope we can all put them to rest and just remember Scott's great achievements with Dilbert and his many books on Management or Psychology.
I will just leave this scene from the Dilbert TV show, that describes the engineering curse:
"The Knack" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8vHhgh6oM0
Thank you for the several decades of smiles over human foibles.
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.
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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.
from Scott you learn to separate the idea from the person.
biggest impact was probably talent stacking + affirmations
I say this as a black person
I read every Scott Adams book as a kid - insightful and approachable.
As someone who enjoyed 'Dilbert' at times long ago, I offer my condolences with a sense of appreciation for the work itself
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 :)
Once upon a time, you could enjoy the works of a creative person at face value; mainly because you didn't know much of anything about their personal life.
That seems to have all changed in this age of the Internet; where every aspect of your life is exposed for all the world to judge (at least if you are famous). All your words (written or spoken) are presented as proof positive that you and your works are not to be tolerated; even if they are from your teenage years.
It seems like you cannot say anything these days without offending a large number of people; some of whom will try to lead a boycott against you.
I generally like to enjoy a good book, movie, blog, or comic strip without letting politics get in the way.
Scott Adams intentionally made it his entire online persona. Im all for letting people be people, but if you’re literally going to do everything in your power to prevent me from ignoring it…
> Once upon a time, you could enjoy the works of a creative person at face value; mainly because you didn't know much of anything about their personal life.
This is a strawman and absolutely not backed by historical evidence.
Look into the lives of Caravaggio, Milton, Voltaire, Wilde, Verlaine, Goya, Balzac, Courbet, Rimbaud, Schubert, Manet, Wagner, Dickens, Zola, Tolstoy... and see how their personal lives and/or political views/positions negatively affected their standing despite the huge recognition their creative work had.
> Once upon a time, you could enjoy the works of a creative person at face value; mainly because you didn't know much of anything about their personal life.
Don't let anyone tell you you can't.
> I generally like to enjoy a good book, movie, blog, or comic strip without letting politics get in the way.
It's certainly easier once they're dead. I can't speak for everyone, but part of the issue is that we don't want to financially support anyone who is doing bad stuff, so once they're dead I don't have to worry about funding them.
Hyperbolic example; suppose David Duke wrote a fantasy novel. Let's even assume that this fantasy novel had nothing to do with race or politics and was purely just about elves and gnomes and shit. Let's also assume that the novel is "good" by any objective measure you're like to use.
I would still not want to buy it, because I would be afraid that my money is going to something I don't agree with. David Duke is a known racist, neo-Nazi, and former leader of the KKK, and if I were to give him cash then it's likely that some percentage of this will end up towards a cause that I think is very actively harmful.
Now, if you go too deep with this, then of course you can't ever consume anything; virtually every piece of media involves multiple people, often dozens or even hundreds, many of which are perfectly fine people and some of which are assholes, so unless you want to go live in a Unabomber shack then everything devolves into my favorite Sonic quote [1].
So you draw a line somewhere, and I think people more or less have drawn the line at "authorship".
[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
Feels like an appropriate time to remind folks of one of his stranger pieces of work, this board game commissioned by Lockheed Martin: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/60686/the-ethics-challen...
Looks like a office worker themed version of Clue
Brave putting that on youtube. Guaranteed not to be the most nuanced of responses.
Enjoyed Dilbert growing up. Everything else? Not so much ...
No further comment.
Scott taught many how to think, which saved the United States.
Care to elaborate?
Wow this really tops everyone else for insane hyperbole. It was a comic strip.
So satire can't have a large cultural impact? Very interesting theory without much support.
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 think in the end he’ll mostly be remembered for his support of trump and his abhorrent political views. He had a great comic strip that reasonated with people. He also wrote some interesting books. It’s a good reminder that your accomplishments can easily be wiped out by bad choices.
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I don't believe he had the easily curable kind, or that there's evidence that he completely ditched conventional medicine --- he publicly appealed to Trump for Pluvicto, which treats mCRPC. In several unusual but not ultra-rare cases, CRPC among them, prostate cancer is a nightmare diagnosis. Worse, the kinds of prostate cancer most easily caught by screening tend not to be the aggressive kind, meaning aggressive cases tend to get caught in advanced stages.
Respectfully, I don't think comments like yours are a good idea. I don't think RFKJ had much of anything to do with what happened to Adams.
RFK Jr isn't part of this, nobody mentioned him, and nobody claimed he completely ditched conventional medicine either. I'm not saying this to take on a confrontational tone, but this is a sensitive issue and it's worth keeping these things in mind.
The ivermectin hysteria has been going on since 2020. There are still large political bubbles where people believe ivermectin is a cure-all, and he was in that bubble when he was diagnosed.
The evidence is in his public statements. He is on video on the matter, and he has publicly stated elsewhere he that he tried ivermectin and fenbendazole at first. (They didn't work.) Here is him describing how he rejected ADT at first, and how taking it worked a lot: https://x.com/jayplemons/status/1939769665527718024
(I can't view the above video myself, since I have X blocked on my network, and the transcript is too long to post here. In short, he notes that he rejected ADT, but then started it when he realized it would ease his symptoms even if not cure him. He found his symptoms did indeed ease.)
The problem isn't that he completely ditched conventional medicine, it's that he didn't start conventional medicine immediately. And his appeal for Pluvicto only came in November.
Cancer is more survivable the earlier treatment starts. He delayed it for no reason at all. If he didn't start treatment at all, he probably have died earlier. If he didn't reject treatment at all, he probably would still be alive today, possibly even cancer-free.
I am not unfamiliar with that dynamic myself. But the crucial point is that he turned to alt-medicine as a first resort, not as a last resort. This is decisionmaking that leads to deaths which were avoidable.
For those that want to know more context about his comments about race, it was based on a poll [0].
Make you're own mind up.
YouTube is being unprecise with the start of link. Starts at 13m 20sec
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/live/K6TnAn7qV1s?si=sfYWC6w0Hgf3m9cd...
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.
Be useful.
And please know I loved you all to the end.
Scott Adams
Interestingly he left out the episodes with his second wife, the young insta model, which he was very proud of then. Kristina Basham (now married to another guy)
Thank you for sharing that. I cannot fathom what it must feel like to write one’s own post-humous press-release.
Scott Adams is dead, but Dilbert will be alive forever: https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com
Prostate cancer. 68yo.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
"We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again"
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.
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.
No, I think my stance is pretty clear.
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.
Your stance isn't clear at all. Do you have any specifics?
I'm sure I disagree with Willard on just about everything but we can disagree without being rude.
wow you really like just making stuff up about people
did someone pull the plug and your brain drained away?
Out of respect for your effort to keep it civil, I'll answer some of that:
I'm a liberal as defined up until 2012 or so.
Never been socially conservative at all. I'm not a libertarian, as I do support some social safety nets. That being the case, I am strongly against open borders and unchecked fraud.
You're actually right about a lot of the rest (minus the snark.)
> These things are balancing out lately
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.
Sure. People only lost their jobs and what not ( which in US means.. well, slow, and without health insurance, likely unpleasant demise ). Totally different. On this very forum, I had someone tell me in a very subtle way that it is a good idea that I stay quiet if I know what is good to me. But pendulum swings. It always does. Only difference is,we are forcing people to live up to the world they have ushered in. I hope you said thank you, because wokeness got you to this very spot.
On the one hand ~1,000,000 deaths and on the other hand some people lost their jobs and you got a mean comment online?
> lost their jobs ... which in US means ... slow, and without health insurance, likely unpleasant demise
Those you would label "woke" are famously supporters of universal health care. Universal as in would cover everyone including every single Jan 6 participant. On the one hand people striving for health care for all. On the other hand https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/nov/20/hospitals-s...
> we are forcing people to live up to the world they have ushered in
No, wht you are doing is supporting an administration killing ~1,000,000 people and taking away health care from everyone, including people in the group you identify with.
The thinking is that not "speaking ill of the dead" is not just respect, but doing anything else is pointless.
You will not change them, and everyone present already made up their mind on their behavior.
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.
Why is their reputation relevant? They're dead.
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.
I'm not saying it's right to not "speak ill of the dead". Just that that's the reasoning I've seen in my family.
Adams stated he was racist and thought that was aok.
I'd say calling him out as a racist is not exactly speaking ill of the dead in this case.
For anyone else reading this comment, know that it is a blatant lie. I suggest you look into it for yourself.
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>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.
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.
> 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.
ah, hacker news. Such a reliable source of the dumbest fucking takes on the entire Internet.
But no, don't let me stop you from justifying your hatred of certain people through the ever-convenient excuse of "evolution".
It's not OK to poop on the floor yet humans had no toilets for tens of thousands of years. Try doing some more thinking on this one
also no, racism is not genetic
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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.
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
>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.
So, no need to speak of them at all
The mendacious speaking that Scott Adams did of the living was a hell of a lot worse that speaking factually about him after he died.
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.
One good reason to avoid it is because you're probably wrong.
Wrong about what?
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.
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.
> I think if one of my black friends told me he was offended that I had those books, I'd get rid of them.
Don't be so hard on your friends, let them be offended if they want.
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.
> Is "calling out the bigotry" useful?
There is immense value in acknowledging and learning from the mistakes of others, yes, even after their deaths.
Making the bigotry known is helpful, because while it might not cause a reduction, it is valuable information for all members of society.
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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.
Did you support Scott Adams when he called out bigotry? Why / why not?
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."
Also, no one even tries to argue that he's wrong. Does one "race" trying to "help" another ever really "pay off"? Debating that question would actually be pretty interesting.
>We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again,
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.
The difference is Orson Scott Card only seemed to have been called out for being a bog-standard Mormon, at least as far as I know.
That's the best I can tell. But mormonism is supposed to change their doctrine to follow the left's social standards.
Ok, fair, even I couldn't keep a straight face typing that out. Touche.
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.
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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.
Ah, yes. Trump and friends are in the White House because nobody called them racist. Excellent political analysis.
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“Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit^WBluesky. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.”
What specifically does that mean?
People who are grievance farming basically, looking for ways to be upset at and complain about things, overreliance on the pathos, diminishing logos
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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?
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Well, mostly it's because you're turning an artist's death into a struggle session. Talk about yikes.
In replying to someone who was all "oh, let's just ignore the awful parts" about someone who turned their _entire persona_ into awful parts. C'mon.
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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.
By this standard, many, of not most of the artists that lived prior to the Civil Rights Era are to be thrown out.
I don't really want to study fluctuating levels of religious bigotry in Bach's life when I listen to his works.
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".
Is it fine to pirate such works, then?
I don't think I ever paid for a Dilbert comics strip, though I never downloaded them from somewhere illegal either.
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.
We can hold people today to modern standards.
You can’t burn a woman at the stake today and say ”oh well, 300 years ago it was normal so”.
I can agree with this when it comes to actual violent actions, but not with regard to words or thoughts.
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.
People also "knew" that being gay was wrong, being atheist was wrong, universal suffrage was wrong or consuming marijuana was wrong.
This isn't a reliable method of determining morality.
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.
edit: spelling
Why is it so difficult to separate the work from its creator?
Without the creator no work. Can i like the work and hate the creator? Absolutely.
"What's wrong with this tho?"
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.
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.
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.
Personally I think this (admittedly long) video makes a good agument on the subject.
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.
'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.
We've done this with our kid(s). Saying "you're being bad" or "you are bad" is very different from "You're choosing to do bad 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 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.
He was just 'trolling' for leftist Democrats. So no ugliness. There.
Sad news. Rest in peace.
A racist died today... ok.
Quote > “The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people.”
Oh sexist too:
Quote > In a 2011 blog post he wrote: “The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone.”
Source: https://www.britannica.com/question/Why-was-Scott-Adams-cont...
I'm not feeling particularly upset.
RIP to Scott Adams, I'm much younger than most here talking about his work (I didn't enter the work force until the 2010s) but I still found Dilbert interesting.
I saw him most as a victim of cancel culture with people attacking him for things he wasn't and exaggerating his minor issues into much larger ones. There are billions of people in the world with views that are probably worse than Scott Adams' but people always feel the need to attack the nail that sticks out.
Praise to his ex wife Shelly Miles for supporting him through his hospice and final days.
Scott Adams was a great guy, who seemed candid, approachable, funny and exceedingly sharp.
Life is a gift. I pray he passed without too much suffering, and he's with God now.
Rest in Peace Scott Adams.
side note to those who scorn him. Think about movies like Star Wars where the fallen resurrect as their younger image. In the 90s/early 2ks geeks all loved Dilbert & Scott Adams. It wasn't until the Trump campaign that folks became resentful. Maybe take this moment to put ill feelings aside and remember him as we all did -- as Dilbert's Dad.
Here is the video of the comments he made which people are referring to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKx9_TceBMQ
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A wonderful person !
This makes me extremely sad. He'll make heaven a better place. RIP
Hugely enjoyed his work when I was younger. RIP to a great artist.
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.
There's a saying in investing that a lot of analysts get famous for being right "once in a row."
Same question to you: did you read his blog and arguments in detail?
Or it’s survivorship bias
Genuine question: did you read his blog and arguments in detail?
Not OC, but:
> Adams wrote about the incident (indirect link, via the Metatalk thread). He wrote that he makes contrarian predictions as calculated bets that in the unlikely event they pan out, he would get credit. [0]
Also to add - from Adams’ wiki[1], there are more examples of a bunch of bold contrarian takes that never became true.
I see you fulfilled one of his dreams and credited to him one of the guesses.
[0] from another comment in this thread, exposing how Adams was praising himself from third character.
Link to comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46604240
Direct link from comment to source: https://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams?wprov=sfti1#Politi...
Further, he didn't just make multiple contrarian predictions in the hope he'd be credited -- he had a way of making predictions in ways that could be interpreted multiple ways later.
I both (A) found this infuriating and (B) found his understanding of what Trump is to be deeply insightful.
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].
[1] https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1993-11-09
(Edit: url)
Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1993-11-09>
Thanks! Edited.
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.
All of that said... RIP, Mr. Adams.
His comics were often funny, and bleakly real. His politics and opinions were unfortunate. Bye Scott.
For those that liked Scott Adams might like some Lofi-like music by the artist "Akira The Don". He sampled some videos from Scott against Japanese anime.
https://www.youtube.com/@akirathedon/search?query=scott%20ad...
I grew up with Scott Adams.
My very fist job as a junior dev in a corporation, pre dot-com, his comics resonated with me and my co-workers. My proudest achievement was finding a way through the corporate firewall to get his comics off the internet and post them internally.
As I grew older his work became less interesting and less relevant as I moved to the pointy haired side. But as a natural skeptic his impact helped shape me and my career. It worked for me!
I don't understand what causes such successful people to take a hard turn toward apparent bigotry. As you age you have to reconcile change and your place in history. I'll try to take lessons from Scott Adams and my other would-be heroes as I go and hope to leave the world better off in my small way.
I loved Dilbert in the 90s, and had no idea that Scott Adams got himself embroiled in controversy towards the end. Another funny guy that let his right leaning views become his entire personality.
I don't think he let his right-leaning views become his entire personality. Getting embroiled in controversy is something that happens because of the way other people react to your views, not directly because of those views themselves.
For diversity of opinion's sake: The man who died unapologetically spread his message of hate, and enabled a vile worldview in too many. I won't keep his name in my memory. May history forget him. If not that, may his memory always be stained.
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Since there are many fans here, perhaps people can share some of their favourite comics for the others.
Very sad news.
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.
I hope his legacy lives on - it will in me.
Weird, he was a huge fan of that unaccountable leadership.
There's more unaccountable leadership than just the side you follow.
R.I.P Mr.Adam
I will forever love the Dilbert cartoons. They were a masterpiece.
I emailed him twice and he replied both times.
One was an incident involving expense reports in a large company.
The other was my manager's pep talk where he urged us to "increase our acceleration while keeping our momentum constant."
Your manager called you fat and suggested you lose weight ?
Nasty.
Don't quit your day job.
Bit late for that advice, can't say I ever had any conventional form of "day job".
Do you know of any other feasible interpretation of the phrase "increase acceleration while keeping momentum constant"?
Very sad news, RIP Scott.
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.
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 think it's time hn added obituaries.
Here lays YC...
The amount of closeted racism and blind defense in this comment section while knowing this is the peak represention of our industry makes me ashamed to be an engineer.
I am glad he came to Jesus before the end.
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'm positive he was trolling.
Seems a bit off, but I don't say that in a judgmental way.
If a person presented themselves for the Catholic/Orthodox catechumenate with the caveat "I'm not a believer but...", a director with a good humor would reply with something like: "Of course you're not, not yet, supernatural faith is a gift received in Holy Baptism."
Now, if at the end of the catechumenate (several months) the person admits they can't really offer intellectual assent to what they've been taught, that it boils down to their wanting to hedge their bets and that's all, then the director is going to speak to the priest of the parish, and more than likely the priest is going to meet with the person and tell them they're not prepared for baptism.
There are time crunched situations and emergency baptisms, for sure, but even then for an adult asking to be baptized, there generally needs to be a profession of intellectual assent ("I believe...") and an express openness to the gift of faith.
Someone I know recently joined the Catholic Church, in the setting of a community that uses the "pre Vatican 2" forms. Here are the questions-answers that are asked in the public setting (liturgy/rite) of the Sacrament of Holy Baptism in the older form:
What are you asking of God’s church?
Faith.
What does faith hold out to you?
Everlasting life.
If, then, you wish to inherit everlasting life, keep the commandments, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments depend the whole law and the prophets. Now faith demands that you worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in unity, neither confusing the Persons one with the other, nor making a distinction in their nature. For the Father is a distinct Person, so also the Son, so also the Holy Spirit; yet all Three possess the one nature, the one Godhead.
Do you renounce Satan?
I do renounce him.
And all his works?
I do renounce them.
And all his attractions?
I do renounce them.
Do you believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth?
I do believe.
Do you believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was born into this world and suffered for us?
I do believe.
Do you also believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting?
I do believe.
Receive the sign of the cross on your brow and on your heart. Put your whole trust in the heavenly teachings. And lead a life that will truly fit you to be a dwelling place for God. On entering God’s Church acknowledge with joy that you have escaped the clutches of death. Worship God the Father almighty, and Jesus Christ, His only-begotten Son, our Lord, who is coming to judge both the living and the dead and the world by fire.
Let us pray. I entreat you, blessed Lord and Father, almighty and everlasting God, to point out the way of truth and godly knowledge to these servants of yours who grope in uncertainty and doubt in the darkness of this world. Open their inner sight, the better to see you as the one God, the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father, in union with the Holy Spirit. May it be their good fortune to enjoy the fruit of this avowal both now and forevermore; through Christ our Lord.
I sign you on the brow that you may take up the cross of our Lord. I sign you on the ears that you may listen to the heavenly teachings. I sign you on the eyes that you may see the grandeur of God. I sign you on the nostrils that you may sense the sweet fragrance of Christ. I sign you on the mouth that you may proclaim the word of life. I sign you on the breast that you may believe in God. I sign you on the shoulders that you may take on you the yoke of His service. I sign you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, that you may come to your eternal destiny and have life without end.
[ Many more prayers and blessings ]
Do you wish to be baptized?
I do.
I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, has caused you to be born over again of water and the Holy Spirit and pardoned you all your sins. May he now anoint you with the chrism that sanctifies in Christ Jesus our Lord, and bring you to everlasting life. Take this white robe and keep it spotless until you arrive at the judgment seat of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you may be rewarded with everlasting life. Take this burning candle as a reminder to keep your baptismal innocence. Obey God’s commandments, so that when our Lord comes for the joyous wedding feast you may go forth to meet Him with all the saints in the halls of heaven, and be happy with Him forevermore. Go in peace, and may the Lord be with you.
You can read the full text here: https://latinmassbaptism.com/rite-of-baptism-for-adults/
The text of the rite is given fully in Latin, and then fully in English, so keep scrolling. Seems like their TLS cert is expired, but the website is okay.
We should pray for the repose of Scott's soul, full of confidence in God's mercy.
Surely Jesus understands nuance and will give an all clear heaven's pass to someone who is an atheist but still an essentially good guy? Or is he mean and dictatorial and say 'thou shall worship me else you will rot in hell' ?
The Bible (at least as far as the New Testament is concerned) is absolutely and explicitly clear on the matter. Being an "essentially good guy" doesn't matter, nor does being an amoral bastard - if you sincerely accept Christ you go to heaven, otherwise you burn in hell.
A. Pascal’s wager
B. Pretty sure, last I checked anyhow, is that accepting Jesus is pretty much the big requirement in the New Testament.
I think you are correct, going by the NT and OT more so) , it does appear that God/Jesus does has some wanting-to-be-validated-by-acceptance issues...
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.
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.
There's something very revealing about the need to caveat an expression of admiration for someone's work with "of course, he was a terrible man", and it's not revealing about the man in question.
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.
Cancers a terrible way to go.
This is one of my favorite strips of his: https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/...
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.
how does that have anything to do with hackers
No more Dilbert. :(
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.
Rest in Peace Scott. Thanks for everything!
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...
I mean no disrespect by this but when I saw the headline on HN I immediately thought it was about Scott Adams the text adventure guy. And then I started watching the video and was a bit confused at first before it all clicked.
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.
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.
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.
RIP. You will be missed.
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.
An old, Dilbert-related comment of mine seems relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034220
RIP Scott Adams.
Famously hard-hitting People magazine goes with "Scott Adams, Disgraced Dilbert Creator, Dies at 68".
Whenever I heard of Adams, I always remember that time in 2011 when he made a sockpuppet account on metafilter to pseudonymously praise himself. https://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos
Why in the hell is there so much social signaling? "I really enjoyed his work for <reasons and experience here>, but <you don't need to include literally any of this because it's taking a moral high horse and trying to promote ones ego/values>"
Now. When my company got double-dilberted (eaten by bigger company that got eaten by even bigger one) and became corporate bullshit. When the whole world goes Dilbert. Very bad news.
I respect the work of Scott Adams as one of the greatest cartoonists of my lifetime, and I wish his family and friends the strength to move forward and to keep the good memories of him in their hearts and thoughts until they hopefully meet again. Everyone we lose to cancer is a tragedy.
My very limited personal memories of him are not the one of a kind person, though.
He might have had just a very bad day, but I had to endure this guy on a six-hour flight in the early 2000s, and after he insulted basically everyone from Hispanic people to people of colour and even shushed the lady behind us when she said she can’t listen to his bullshit anymore, I took a deep breath, looked him in the eyes, and told him I fought in two wars, and the only thing that happens if you keep hate for your "enemies" in your heart is that it will eat you from the inside. Let it go.
I wished him the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.
He laughed right in my face and told me I don’t get it and that he is going to die of old age. He was for sure a fighter and stubborn of his own views.
But in the end, he died at a young age, with hate-fuelled cancer inside his prostate and bones suffering from the same mental condition millions of people on the Internet do day by day.
People are disturbed not by things but by their view of things. And People already knew 1846 years ago it is how it is.
Marcus Aurelius started each day telling himself: ‘I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable people.’
Nothing has changed but the Theater.
People now decide to be disturbed by their view of things over the internet, things that will not matter in their whole lifetime for them personally in real life, and Scott Adams is unfortunately the perfect example.
He was disturbed by his view, that half of people of colour in the US were ungrateful and "anti-white", tho he lived to the age of 68 without ever being harmed by a single black person in his life, as far as I know.
The death of Scott Adams is many things at once. A tragedy, a warning, and a foreshadowing of what happens if you cannot accept the world as it is and just be happy with what you got.
Life is precious. Don’t throw it away keeping hate in your heart and enemies in your head, trying to change how the world works or what our species is, a bunch of assholes all sharing the same fate.
Deal with it or die miserably like Scott. You have a choice here. Choose your friends, enemies and fights wisely is all the advise I can give anyone.
Good god this is not good news. I knew Dilbert as long as I could read. The man as a thinker only fairly recently. To no loss.
The world is less without him.
at age 68, which is relatively young
Fuck cancer.
Well put
Bye, nobody will miss you.
I’m trans, I’m autistic, and I caught on how bad he was day one, as his comics had a very specific slant to them that felt less like truly looking at workplace dynamics, and more acting misanthropic and aggrieved.
I get you might have not caught on so soon - I’d call myself lucky - but you had plenty of time to figure out that not only he isn’t good, but also never was.
There are literally dozens of people in this very HN conversation that are missing him.
RIP.
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.
Well.. RIP.
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.
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.
https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/02/scott-adams-prostate-can... / https://archive.is/W57Vg
> 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.
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Sad to hear, RIP
I hate cancer.
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.
Goodbye to our thought-provoking jester. There will never be another quite like him.
I did a quick look at Wikipedia - he has racist views, a vaccine denier, and to top it all off, of course, a Holocaust denier...
I tried reading his comics—just some run-of-the-mill jumble for a corporate audience.
So who is he? And why are there so much praise in the comments?
> In a 2006 blog post, Adams asked if official figures of the number of deaths in The Holocaust were based on methodologically sound research
This is probably a result of contracting brainrot by adjacency, but I wouldn't outright call this holocaust denial.
Dilbert is an iconic comic, and perhaps the most culturally impactful "office humor"
Hacker news is full of people who worked in tech in the 90s and vibed with the comic.
And Hacker news has its share of racists, anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers for whom Scott Adams became not just a prophet but a soldier on their side of the culture war.
NYT obituary:
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...
I appreciated Scott Adams, and am sad he has passed away. I learned a lot from him and his perspective helped me through difficult times.
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.
Scott Adams was an unrepentant racist.
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.
I don't think I'll ever understand Scott Adams.
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.
I find him neither confident, charismatic, nor attractive. I still don't understand how anyone can believe such a blatant liar. Or like such a terrible excuse of a human being. But clearly there's something about what he does and how he acts and talks, that appeals to some people. Mass hypnosis is as good an explanation as any, if you ask me.
But that's not my point. My point is that Scott Adams identified it, which to me sounds like recognizing it as fake and manipulation. And yet he supported the guy. That's the thing I really don't get. Then again, JD Vance called him the American Hitler and is now his VP. Many of his most loyal lackeys have called him terrible things. People are easily corruptible, I guess. Or recognize in him a useful tool for their own worst goals.
> Supremely confident, charismatic people are very attractive.
They're very attractive to vast masses of sheep, yes.
They're not attractive to everybody.
> They're very attractive to vast masses of sheep
And these are the people who elect them.
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 loved his work and still do but he put himself front and center over his work and some of his fans like me realized he was actually a vile person.
The best cartoonist is invisible like Banksy and the guy who did the Cow cartoons and Calvin & Hobbes.
Scott Adams exemplifies both sides of my personal maxim that "Good things can be created by Bad people."
IMO, it doesn't diminish the quality of the Good things.
Going to miss you Clott Adams. Your self-depreciating humor is a benchmark we really need, especially in the black community, which to it's detriment, has been gassed up to the point were self-reflection is very difficult. Mysterious forces prefer it to be this way and despite us knowing that "black pride," like any kind of pride is a sin, it doesn't seem to be allowed to be addressed. Despite the internet building many places for such discussion, instead we get censorship in various forms including spam, bots, well poisoning, deboosting, filter bubbles, ineffective search, dark patterns, and so on.
A cyberattack targeting an oncology journal has taken it offline that published a peer-reviewed study from Tufts and Brown University exploring links of COVID injections to newly diagnosed or rapidly worsened cancer shortly after COVID injections. Did this have anything to do with your cancer? It doesn't seem like this kind of question is allowed to be entertained either.
In the early 2000s we would say that the Internet sees censorship as a network failure and routes around it. Now we see that was wishful thinking. The Network Effect prefers centralization and the government prefers subtle control and liability shields held by corporations.
What a hilarious comment
> A cyberattack targeting an oncology journal has taken it offline that published a peer-reviewed study from Tufts and Brown University exploring links of COVID injections to newly diagnosed or rapidly worsened cancer shortly after COVID injections. Did this have anything to do with your cancer? It doesn't seem like this kind of question is allowed to be entertained either.
We had billions of COVID shots. Even if there was a weak correlation with 1% of the people going on to get rapidly worsening cancer we'd be seeing cancer spikes everywhere. Do we have anything remotely close to that in real life?
Why'd you call him Clott Adams?
Seeing them and hearing about them in the media are different things. You have to look for data yourself - it won't come to you.
I met several people working in cancer medicine, and they tell me that they're seeing the spikes. And some statistics showed very early that something is wrong. But chances are low you'll read anything about that in the media.
Look around and see who is dying. It's an old saying about wars that people will not bother to check if something is going wrong before not at least 5-10% of the population have died.
He was a brilliant observer and reporter on the behaviors of humanity.
He will be missed.
Maybe his corpse can identify as 'living'?
If you think that's repugnant, then I refer you to his comic where he parodies a black engineer as white.
https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/uh21my/scott_adams_...
The guy had a point about 1990s business culture, but lost that narrative down extremism and conspiracy theories. Guy was pure trash for the last 10 years.
> Maybe his corpse can identify as 'living'?
Kind of like the opposite of spending a year dead for tax purposes?
It’s not hilarious, but it’s a fair take on how seriously and stupidly non-falsifiable declarations are in a society that only functions on the objectivity of its laws.
Its DEI and post-modernism colliding. That’s a fair take.
Scott Adams is yet another example of the need to separate a person's work from their qualities as a person. It's just something we have to accept: Bad people can make great things.
An example that I like (that doesn't include WWII Germans) is William Shockley. He was a pretty horrible person all told. He didn't kill anyone, he was just a shitty guy. And yet the world owes him a debt for accurately describing how semiconductors work at the atomic level. Silicon Valley basically wouldn't exist without him.
Adams is like that as well. His work was funny and insightful, his politics were abhorrent. He will always have an asterisk next to his name in the history books because of it.
(Not that anyone will care about Dilbert in another decade or so. Much of it today is already about a moment in business that is long past).
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.
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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.
Look at the entirety of this thread. You are trying to reason with reptiles. The more you try to appeal to their humanity or decency, the harder they will double down on their psychotic behaviour.
René Girard explained this mechanism in his mimetic theory and the scapegoat mechanism. People here on hacker news are generally not fully formed human beings, and they instinctively believe that the more they group together in hate against different individuals, the more they will personally benefit. You see it here in every thread, no matter what subject.
I hope that people remember me for exactly who I was, especially if I'm ever as terrible as Scott Adams was.
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>horrible twisting little wretched creature like 99% of humanity
You sound awfully like me. (no, I'm not being sarcastic)
k, keep me posted
Scott Adams: Yes, I'm a racist. Avoid black people. Women shouldn't be president. Was the Holocaust really that bad?
Me: Don't remember horrible people as better than they were just because they died.
You: You two are the same.
> he also died slowly and painfully of cancer
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.
I'm not obliged to mourn someone that spread hatred against the group of people I belonged to, even moreso when they didn't show any regret about their words at the end of their lifetimes
>Scott Adams said some really stupid, poorly thought out things about minorities and women, and he faced real world consequences for his actions
Or may be he did know that there would be consequences? Many people who are financially secure do make provocative statements. I think he did many of us a favor, because many of us still have to earn a living and cannot speak out.
Wait, so you would personally say things like "Black people are a hate group", except that you need to stay employed?
That is exactly what I mean about making bigotry shameful again. You should worry about losing your job, and your friends and family, for that.
If you stay quiet about your hateful views, then others are more likely too, and maybe some day we can eventually, slowly, move past all of you.
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Do you have his grave location by chance?
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Mods - see above - here’s a really low hanging fruit for bannable accounts
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> However, Scott Adams as an individual was deeply problematic
Can you talk about your conversations with him?
He had a YouTube channel where he often (3071 episodes as of this count) opined on… well. Everything.
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Or not.
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Can’t have a black bar for someone with near genocidal views.
That is news to me. Source? Controversial yes but he was a character.
“Get the hell away from black people” is close to suggesting next steps after that.
It’s an opinion against a backdrop of this stuff physically being manifested on a governmental scale in the real world. The maliciousness in this case taints everything he has done.
If she had stayed away from Russian men none of this would have happened. You can turn anything racist which you’re choosing to do.
I sort of think the degree of unacceptability people find that quote is proportional to their own history.
Agreed. Lets get the black bar. The times he made us laugh and think during the 90s and 2000s!
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Why didn't you make this comment from your main account I wonder?
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Because a horrible racist died and we don't want his vileness whitewashed.
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How brave of you
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> Why is this post being shadowbanned?
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.
Shadowban is not the same as a traditional ban. It is a selective ban.
This topic is not on the front page for me, yet it was on the front page for you.
That is shadowban.
> 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46603431 - The link in case you want to keep avoiding the front page.
Youtube links always have gotten downweighting. Enough votes can overcome it, but there are a few domains that HN penalizes.
Scott deserves respect
And here we find a far larger amount of people agreeing that he should be respected.
Respect has to be earned.
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I believe it was written in a tongue-in-cheek manner.
Eh, it's hard to find fault with someone staring eternity in the eye and getting a little nervous.
There are no atheists in the foxhole... I'll bet most people do in the end. Me. You. And most people in that situation.
You're going to find out all too late that pascals wager was correct. But it was Quetzalcoatl you should have been worshipping.
Pascal’s Wager is a refinement of Marcus Aurelius’ views; were you aware of that?
Why should anyone care?
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Promoting racism, bigotry, and hate is not trolling and should not be treated as lightly as you imply.
What did he say that was racist?
"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."
Adams was responding to a poll where a large amount of black americans gave bigoted responses about white people.
“The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people” -Scott Adams
It’s even worse in context.
It’s not even logical advice if you believe him that there really is a climate of hatred against white people.
The logical advice to respond to that climate would be to act with dignity and treat other people like you’d like to be treated. To reach out and integrate, and build community. Doing that eventually solves the problem, even if it takes time and energy.
“Staying away” just ensures perpetual hate and division. It’s stupid advice. America literally tried that already and it didn’t work.
And this is all before we unpack the factual validity of these claims, and the underlying causes of that climate if those claims are really true.
I’m amazed at how many people are jumping to this guy’s defense. He doesn’t need his reputation defended, he dug his own hole.
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."
Do the Thumper thing. If you can't find something nice to say, then don't say anything at all.
No. Racism and bigotry must always be pro-actively confronted.
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.
TFA has a clear example.
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Silence is how fascism rises.
No, Adams was a big trump supporter.
Anyone who claims they turned to fascism because they're angry people insulted fascists is not arguing in good faith.
Silence allows the messages of hatred to spread more loudly and more rapidly; if you leave fascists along they become emboldened and push the lines even further. We've seen this over and over, both historically and in America today.
That was him. The past 10 years have only emboldened certain people into taking their masks off.
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.
You must be one of the people he hypnotized to have the strongest possible orgasm.
https://www.tumblr.com/manlethotline/616428804059086848/hey-...
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.
I guess whitewashing is appropriate for the guy who said "stay the hell away from black people".
Context?
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/02/23/dilberts-scott-adams-...
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.
What context would make that statement acceptable?
I'm sympathetic to the idea there was some trolling, but it certainly wasn't all, so this becomes a moot point to hinge on.
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"Here's a man who gave so much to the world."
Let's not go overboard here. He wrote a comic strip that was less popular than "Garfield." Not exactly a stunning achievement.
What exactly did you contribute to the experiment that is humanity?
Ooh you got me. I have never written a comic strip in which the protagonist, clearly my alter ego, is to all evidence an utterly unremarkable staffer at a large corporation who has a completely inexplicable superiority complex the size of a battleship. I'll carry this failing with me to my grave.
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Good riddance! He was a nasty bigot who promoted racism and misogyny.
His comic was never that good.
His cultural influence as a celebrity has been massively, disgustingly negative. The world is better off without him.
Downvoted. You seem like a pretty bitter person. People are allowed to have opinions, just like your "crazy" uncle with whom you'd rather not discuss politics at thanksgiving.
He wrote a funny comic that pilloried the absurdities of corporate life and terrible bosses.
And then he went crazy. Racist. The full throated support for Trump meant I stopped by thinking about him.
Somehow dying of ass cancer seems like cosmic karma somehow.
He soared to great heights and then threw it all away later in life. Such a shame.
I'm having steak and salad for dinner.
Speaking of evil trolls: The EVIL Scott Adams should not be confused with the GOOD Scott Adams who made Adventures for microcomputers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)
I found a great bug in Zork, the original one on MIT-DM, and it was also in the Infocom version. The troll that confronted you under the white house would gobble anything you gave to him. And he had an axe that he menaced you with. So I tried "GIVE AXE TO TROLL", and he ate his own axe, then cowered in the corner! So then I tried "GIVE TROLL TO TROLL" and he unceremoniously ate himself and POOF disappeared in a puff of logic.
Unfortunately it forgot to clear the troll flag, and whenever I tried to exit the room, the troll would reappear, block me from exiting, and disappear. Decades later the Zork source code was leaked and I was able to verify that yes, there WAS a troll flag.
Let's hope the EVIL Scott Adam's troll flag was cleared, and he doesn't ever reappear to menace innocent people, like he accused Black people of being a hate group, and said White people should stay the hell away from Black people!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23108936
#ROOM {"MTROL"
"You are in a small room with passages off in all directions.
Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the
walls."
"The Troll Room"
%<> #EXIT {"WEST" "CELLA"
"EAST" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "CRAW4" %,TCHOMP}
"NORTH" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "PASS1" %,TCHOMP}
"SOUTH" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "MAZE1" %,TCHOMP}}
(#FIND-OBJ {"TROLL"})}
<PSETG TCHOMP "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture.">What I've gleaned from reading this thread is that as long as I show an act of kindness to a few people who will post about it on social media, I can be as bigoted or hateful as I want to be.
What a world we live in eh?
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.
Adams seemed to me to have made a career out of a 'smartest guy in the room' schtick. Someone is always too smart to go along with the norms, such as Dogbert. They see through to what the normies can not. In 'The Religion Wars' there's explicitly 'The Smartest Guy In the World'. It's a version of a Mary Sue.
The problems come when the author believes this about themselves. They probably are smart, and Adams' work is enjoyed because he cleverly recognizes and points out stuff that resonates with people. When this is strongly reinforced, too much, too long, I think it's really unhealthy for some people. Adams seemed to need to show that his thought could not be constrained by convention. He got strong, addictive attention for this. He wanted to be thought of as smart, rather than good.
I think the antidote, or at least a protective, to this is being surrounded by people who impress you more than you impress yourself.
[Edit: removed a couple of examples of other smart people to avoid stimulating their fans and haters]
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.
Loved Dilbert anyway.
The creator of Dilbert, a comic strip about a man who hates his job, written by a man who hated everyone, has died. Hacker News convenes an emergency session of its Philosophy Department to determine the optimal framework for grieving a racist cartoonist.
The philosophy department of our post-political/ly illiterate community seem to mostly boil down to the question if his vile opinions and speech should matter, failing to comprehend the associated real world consequences of this bigotry. Particularly ironic considering he died of an illness he refused to be treated for due to his anti-scientific bogus medical beliefs, presently mirrored by the person in charge of health care in the fascist US government.
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!
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.
I think it’s interesting how many responses to this comment seem to have interpreted it fairly differently to my own reading.
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.
Ironically, a whole bunch of people have spent their formative years in a cancel-culture world and this now shapes their actions.
But at an art gallery, Picasso is near worshipped despite his torrid misogyny and abuse in his personal life which was terrible even by the standards of his day. The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.
Realising:
- everyone has performed good and bad actions
- having performed a good action doesn't "make up for or cancel out" a bad action. You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.
- you can be appreciated for your good actions while your bad actions still stand.
: all these take some life experience and perhaps significant thought on the concepts.
> You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.
I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed.
As much as I may agree, however, it's probably the most damaging and destructive moral framework you can possibly have, because it just consumes anything positive.
Where are you drawing the line? It's relatively easy to have a black & white ideological framework regarding murder - but what about lesser crimes, like beating someone up and causing serious, but not life-threatening injuries? What about being a witness to a crime but never reporting it? Does the motivation ever come into play? Can people who commit a crime never "redeem" themselves by performing positive deeds going forward? Isn't that the point of rehabilitation?
There is no line. Killing one person while saving a thousand is just as bad as killing one person.
forget about murder, you make a terrible comment or single mistake in your young adulthood and you are done for ever. Kids are not allowed to make mistakes anymore.
People have always told me I'm too hard on myself.
Then again, I've made mistakes to know I wasn't hard enough on myself.
If you're worried about causing a negative effect on someone and then you do, the solution isn't to not worry about that.
> because it just consumes anything positive.
I was perhaps not as clear as I'd wish. The next dot point after you quoted me was meant to convey that equally, the good actions cannot be cancelled/consumed by bad ones.
Life is a complex thing.
I guess my point is you will always be bad as a result of doing this very bad thing, no amount of karma can counter it.
Moral distance is an interesting concept, because it implies two acts are comparable at some level.
If someone cured cancer, do you think they couldn't be tried for murder?
How would you compare the two? I think no matter what the good was, you're still left with "yeah, but x happened".
In the eyes of the law, it clearly does.
> I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed.
I think there's a hole in the thought somewhere.
If you save thousands of people and murder one, you should serve time for that murder, but you should still be appreciated for your other work.
The error is thinking of actions and life like a karmic account balance, even though it's an appealing metaphor, people are complex beings and seeing them reductively as good or bad is probably wrong.
Scott Adams was an asshat in later life. I don't know all the controversy he stirred because I drifted away from paying attention to him years ago. He gave me a lot of laughs, he had some great, fun insights into office life, he has some weird pseudo-scientific ideas in his books, and then he devolved into a bit of a dick. Maybe a lot of a dick. His is a life that touched mine, that I appreciate in some ways and am sad for in others.
Bye Scott, thanks for all the laughs, thanks for nurturing my cynicism, but it's a shame about what happened with you after twitter came along.
First off "cancel culture" is way too unserious a phrase to warrant a response, but I will anyway.
> The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.
No they weren't. "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist, but despite your assertion that he was terrible "even for his day", I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.
John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery. Now you can get "cancelled" for supporting it. The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest. It's actually one of the best times to be a horrible person. Hell, you can be president.
Blackballing, in Victorian English society, strictly meant to vote against a proposed member joining a club (above the working classes club memberships carried great weight wrt social standing).
It was also synonymous with ostracism, to be excluded from society, to have little to no chance of regular financing or loans, to have debts called, to be fired and have little hope of being employed.
It was socially networked suppression, operating at the speed of club dinners and afternoon teas.
Such things go back in time in many societies, wherever there was a hierarchy, whispers, and others to advance or to tread down.
> cancel culture is a modern phenomenon that is facilitated by modern media formats -- it could not have existed earlier.
> shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow.
Eiji Yoshikawa's 1939 novel depicts a woman who follows Musashi around Japan waging a campaign to smear him over something he didn't do, ultimately preventing him from being hired into a lord's retinue.
Riiiiiiiight, because a child eating a cookie is equivalent to an adult using a massive platform to spread anti-human views and epithets which often incite real world harassment.
It seems that you're not very familiar with what actually happened. The phrase "It's okay to be white" had become associated with white supremacists, And black people's responses to the pole had nothing to do with their opinions of white people as a whole. You, as well as Scott Adams, decided to misinterpret it. Scott Adams took things a step further and decided that he wanted nothing to do with black people on the simple basis of this poll, which is absolutely wild.
If that’s the ‘only’ thing he was canceled for, then how do you explain content of the comics he started making after he was called out, once the mask came off?
Do you think he was driven to that by cancel culture? Or do you think he just got tired of pretending to care, and started ‘telling it like it is?’
> Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said.
Nah, he continued to grift off the right wing while saying more and more unhinged shit until he shuffled off this mortal coil.
> Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them.
Could it perhaps have anything to do with the fact that that's a 4chan-originated dogwhistle that was hyper-viral at the time? Why do you think they were asking about it in the first place? It was in the context of the fact that the ADL had identified it as secret hate speech, in the same line of the 14 words.
> If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.
The president of the most powerful country on earth and the richest man in the world say things like that all the time. Why the victim complex?
> The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob.
what would your alternative be?
Cancel culture is simply social consequence. That's it. It can be harsh and at times probably too harsh. But I don't see how you can't have cancel culture w/o also not greatly limiting free speech.
> They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech.
I say this with sincerity: I have met precisely zero young people who I think come anywhere close to this description over the last decade.
I’ve seen it in the online world, yes, but this tends to amplify the very very small minority who (on the surface) appear to fit your description. And I see it across all age ranges and political persuasions.
I'm still upset over the canceling of Socrates. Never forget.
> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist
I want to reinforce this fact. Consider the origins of the term "ostracism", where a sufficiently objectionable individual could be literally voted out of the village. If that doesn't count as being "cancelled" I don't know what does.
No one is entitled to being rich or famous.
I generally agree with your post, but:
> But at an art gallery, Picasso is near worshipped despite his torrid misogyny and abuse in his personal life which was terrible even by the standards of his day.
Picasso's work is the thing that is generally venerated, not so much the (rather loathsome) man himself. Similarly for Eric Gill, who produced great artistic work despite being an truly awful human being.
Scott Adams seems to have confined himself to merely expressing prejudiced views, amplified somewhat by his modest fame. But then his creative work doesn't in any way match Picasso's or Gill's either.
Not from the USA so I don't know exactly how this cancel culture is working but do they have his books banned from libraries cause I have seen a list of books banned or cancelled and the organization chasing them but can not find his works and there are comics like "Maus"
Also:
- What actions are good and bad is much more subjective than activists want you to believe.
- It's beyond absurd to discount someone simply for expressing an opinion even if you vehemently disagree with that opinion.
There's a song called "Cancer culture" by Decapitated - I recommend
> You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.
Not if you murder someone to save a thousand people ;)
(though you might still get one as you need to prove that there was no other way to save them)
This took me a long time to work through:
1. People’s beliefs are strongly shaped by upbringing and social environment.
2. A belief feeling “natural” or common does not make it correct or benign.
3. What’s most commendable is the effort to examine and revise inherited beliefs, especially when they cause harm.
4. This framework lets me understand how any individual arrived at their views without endorsing those views.
I think this is why responses often split: some treat explanation as endorsement, others don’t. Both reactions are understandable, but the tension disappears once you treat explanation and moral evaluation as separate and compatible steps.
this is a great way of articulating it; something I've felt for a long time as a transplant from the Bible Belt who occasionally has to listen to New Englanders sweepingly denigrate the South or Midwest.
What do you say/think/feel when you hear people from the Bible Belt denigrate New Englanders?
Great thinking framework. And there are many roads leading to some very similar realizations. I guess it's all about what truly really works.
Generally the idiom "like family" implies very close and durable bonds of friendship and loyalty. That you'd drive several hours to help them bury a body, if they asked.
The idiomatic use is a much higher standard than literal family - members of the same family can hate each other.
As jchallis used the idiomatic term in the latter, more literal sense, I can understand people getting confused.
> "As jchallis used the idiomatic term in the latter, more literal sense, I can understand people getting confused."
Well... one cannot choose family for one is always bound to them by biology. Does that matter? No. One's life is more than that. One can leave family in the dust, a choice many of Adam's targets had to make to continue living, while others never even got to make that choice. Either way, equating (and let's be frank: most often elevating) yesterday's "hero" to family status certainly is a choice.
In this spirit: "Here's a nickel kid, buy yourself a better eulogy."
My therapist frames this as "family of origin" (FOO) vs "family of choice" (FOC).
Apparently there isnt much to back that up.
Writing in the 1990s and 2000s, author Albert Jack[18] and Messianic minister Richard Pustelniak,[19] claim that the original meaning of the expression was that the ties between people who have made a blood covenant (or have shed blood together in battle) were stronger than ties formed by "the water of the womb", thus "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb". Neither of the authors cites any sources to support his claim.[18][19]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water
Somewhat tangential, but from what I can see, the idea that "the blood of the covenant..." is the full version of the saying is a fairly modern invention.
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Maybe.
Or maybe people are just REALLY fed-up with assholes.
Hard to say.
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You're ignoring the family metaphor. GP is painting Adams as the old racist uncle everyone tolerates at family dinners. It's excusing Adams' racist behavior, in the same way you excuse your racist uncle to a partner the first time they come to dinner.
It's not okay, and it's not okay to pretend it's okay.
There are a lot of racist uncles in tech.
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> 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.
There’s a mean-spiritedness to even many of the early strips that, at the time, I thought was part of the gag - a sort of self-knowing nod to and mockery of the mean parts of office and engineering culture. In the spirit of ‘laughing with not laughing at’.
I’m not sure if Adams’ later real-life self-superiority and mean spiritedness evolved from that over time, or if he was always like that inside and we just didn’t see it, but I find myself unable to laugh with the strips in the same way now nevertheless.
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 if they're still alive you're still basically saying "look you're a piece of shit but here's a couple of bucks anyways".
That's a pretty lazy analysis. As an easy counterpoint, no one pays to look at Facebook or Instagram posts, but both Meta and (at least some) individual influencers are able to run profitable businesses based on that media consumption (and you could say the same of some bloggers in the late 00s/early 10s, for that matter). More speculatively, I think there is also an argument to be made that even gratis media consumption gives cultural weight to a work which is then available for monetization, especially in this age of tentpole franchises and granularly tracked personal behavior.
Eyeballs increase ad revenue, just because you're not paying money doesn't mean the artist isn't making money.
It's true, piracy does get around the whole monetary side of the equation.
If you (the royal you) thought it was unethical to buy a Dilbert book because the person who stood to make something like $4 off of it had some views you disagree with, you are a broken person. Even if Adams agreed with every single opinion you had, it's a statistical certainty that a dozen people who also make money off that book have views you find reprehensible.
Still depends on where the money ultimately goes.
That makes a certain kind of sense.
Then again looking at the table, laptop, and protein drink in front of me, I know that many people were involved in making and shipping them. Some were quite possibly rapists, racists and/or worse.
And I don't find myself caring at all.
This is something special about art, isn't it?
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.
Interesting. I showed my right leaning 83 year old mom the full version of Leon last year, she loved it.
The long cut implies reciprocation of the girl's crush and that casts further shade on Leon's backstory.
> Luke Beson
Luc Besson.
I can't agree with that. While unwavering determination is definitely necessary to overcome lack of success, there are other ways to achieve that.
And as was once put to me, the reason that some artists are not appreciated until after their death isn't just a matter of not meeting your heroes, but because they understood something about the present moment that the public was not yet prepared to reflect upon. That we appreciate them in retrospect because they tell us something we are not yet ready to hear. That requires a degree of empathy for humanity that is not well represented in a strictly narcissistic diagnosis.
I refuse to accept that a genius in their field cannot be a decent human being. If that makes me naive, so be it.
Seems like quite some assumptions are being made there. Can't work be done for intrinsic reasons? Can't artists (creators more generally) be insular or even reclusive?
The outfit she's forced into by Jabba? And then she kills him?
>but Leia's slave costume is something giving off pretty bad vibes from today's viewpoint.
It's less revealing than a bikini. It was tame enough for the 1970s and from today's viewpoint it's practically stodgy.
"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.
Meh. I liked Dilbert and it was a part of my childhood. I don't watch it anymore. Much like I no 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.
Well, it depends. I admit (at risk of cancellation maybe?) that I check in on Stonetoss from time to time, and sometimes I laugh at it. He's made some genuinely funny non-political comics. Also some which are so terribly over the top rihht wing that its fun in a Ben Garrison/Jack Chick kind of way. Very rarely, he even makes a funny political point I sort of agree with (his politics, while messed up, don't map neatly on to the political spectrum, he's not a fan of Trump for instance).
But adblock stays on, thank you. He can make money on his crypto grifting, or whatever it is he does.
But there are others, whose coming out as right wingers are a lot more saddening. First and foremost of these would be Tom "Geowizard" Davies, the guy most responsible for popularizing geoguessr, the inventor of the straight line mission, and a seemingly very wholesome geography lover. Not only did he come out as supporting Nigel Farage recently, but one of his dreamy bedroom pop songs apparently is about the great replacement theory?! I even bought that album! And I didn't even notice the lyrics, because the idea that that would be what he meant was so far out left field as they say. But yeah, he apparently thinks the white race is dying out?! What the hell, man? "We are the last ones in a very long line"? No, Tom, we objectively are not, whoever you include in "we"!
Somehow, trollish assholes like Adams are easier to accept than that.
After hearing his vitriol over the years I do see his comics and writing very differently now. As someone else said, he views everyone as idiots or below him, and needs an out group to target. Dilbert read in that light just seems hateful more than insightful or relatable. I never plan on reading any Scott Adams material for the rest of my life or introducing anyone else to it.
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.
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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.
> The racism and the provocations were always there
Were they? Can you cite an example? Because I also grew up with Dilbert, and I was never aware of it.
It's in Chapter 1 of his autobiography. He used to work at a bank in the 80s, and was turned down for a managerial or executive position (can't remember) which went to an Asian candidate. He was certain it was due to DEI (in the 80s!) and quit the corporate world to become a cartoonist.
The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white".
> He was certain it was due to DEI
He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men.
> The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white".
That wasn't what got him dropped, he did an interview with Chris Cuomo where he explained what actually happened and why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_bv1jfYYu4
> Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit?
For years, many organizations wrongly assumed that anti-discrimination laws didn’t protect white men. Recent Supreme Court rulings—especially Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—have made clear that assumption was false, prompting companies to rapidly rethink or abandon DEI programs.
> Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit?
The 1980s were not the 2020s. I can probably drop a half dozen working anecdotes from that time that would blow your mind…on all sorts of things.
How many times have we read about managers that explicitly tells women they won't get promoted because they are expected to get pregnant and later leave? Sometimes the conversation even get recorded on tape.
Managers being explicit raciest and sexists are not that uncommon.
Im not suprised.
As recently as 2024, my own fortune 50 company had a policy where manager bonuses were determined POC hiring rates.
Ive been told by recruiters that they arent hiring white men in the 2020's.
In the 2000's I was also turned down by a fortune 50 defense contractor who said they needed more women to secure better federal contracts.
People did all kinds of crazy shit at work (and everywhere else too) in the 80s before everyone lawyered up - guys would literally pinch a girl's ass, people used slurs to each other regularly (and often laughed about it), they smoked and drank all the time. A manager somewhere telling a rejected candidate straight up "sorry man but I've got to hire a <<insert minority>> this time" is not at all difficult to believe.
It's because the boss was lying to him
If we’re talking about what he believes, I’m not sure how else you’d determine that besides listening to what he’s said.
I believe the correct statement is "believe victims"
People get this a lot. They want a woman to fill the role or quota, or they want X attribute to shore up "representation". In South Africa people will be openly told that they will never get a promotion because of their race and sex.
Even if we believed that, why is one such experience an understandable trigger to turn to fascism? It is nice double standard, because those who are not white men are expected to accept similar unfairness without becoming fascists themselves.
How is this racism? It's a complaint about alleged racism and a pun on corporate "Identifies as black" DEI events. He is not saying anything negative about asian candidate or black character.
Maybe this is a generational thing, but that first sentence is nonsensical to me. DEI wants to enshrine race differences, so mocking DEI is… racist?
Reads more like it makes fun of trans people to me.
> He was certain it was due to DEI (in the 80s!)
Why wouldn’t it have been that in that decade? The concept of DEI (whether or not it was specifically called as such) has been around at least far back as the 1980s. I think it actually goes back even to the 1960s.
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If you want to dig down deeper into his past, you can listen to a 2 part episode of "Behind the Bastards" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nyEkHqP65c
Dilbert May 2, 2022 is provocative.
Can't argue with that, but Dilbert first appeared in 1989, and Adams publicly jumped the shark in February 2023. So May 2022 is hardly "always there".
I think you are right on the "wasn't always there" front, though perhaps the commenter making the claim has some early work in mind.
Personally, the Reddit AMAs (including sock puppets) were a pre-2023 indicator of his enKanyefication. Endorsing Donald Trump (who encompasses the stupidity and lack of self-awareness of the Dilbert antagonists) was another, though this may have been driven by a need for money/relevance.
Didn't he get dropped a year after that? The quote "the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people, just get the f*k away... because there is no fixing this" happened in 2023.
Huh. I would have thought something like that would be in response to Rachel Dolezal, but the Wikipedia page for "Transracial (identity)" says her fifteen minutes of fame was way back in 2015.
What was it?
Provocative, yes. Can someone ELI5 for me why this is racist?
I read it as mostly anti-trans (or at the very least, anti-"you pick your pronouns").
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=The+One+joke
>You don’t choose family
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.
At my age, he was about as close to family as you can get without being physically there. I grew up reading his comics in our newspaper while eating family breakfast. His work was a part of our family morning ritual. His work was part of pre-internet America when our channels were limited. Our thought and worldview were to some degree shaped by these limited channels.
The op didn't get to decide that Scott's work would be so important for him, or have as much influence on him as it did. There are a lot of things you don't choose, family being one of them.
Right - and he wasn't family.
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.
Humans have a lot of trouble with realizing people aren't binary. People hate the idea that bad people can do good things.
My favorite (or perhaps most regrettable) example of this is Albert Einstein.
Obviously brilliant, but a real piece of shit when it came to women and fatherhood.
Still, I can appreciate his scientific work nonetheless.
Is that really true? Young children perhaps. IME most folks learn that people are complicated at least by adolescence once they realize their parents are imperfect.
Of course there is the ever present temptation to resort to tribalism, which is pretty binary: in or out.
For example, the general attitude shift about Elon Musk following that cave rescue incident. Before that he could do no wrong, and after that he could do no right.
If taking heroic doses of ketamine on a regular basis is wrong, I don't want to be right.
Neuralink is incredibly cool and that's just the first thing that comes to mind. You might be struggling to realise people aren't binary.
You don't choose the family that you are born into but you definitely choose which ones of them you keep around for the longer term.
Do you though? I guess it depends on how you define family. There's family that you rarely see and you call them family because of the social (even if weak) ties. And then there's family you grew up knowing. The impact of family early in you, never goes away. Your family early in life shapes us in ways we probably can't comprehend. Reading Scott's work was a family ritual at the breakfast table. I'm sure his work had some part in shaping me in a way that I can't delete.
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.
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.
“Thus, the Communist and Cultural Revolutions represent some of the most radical attempts in human history to eliminate the advantages of the elite, and to eradicate inequality in wealth and formal education.”
http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/revolutions_draft.pdf
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. :-/
Are you talking about Iran-Contra? Because that's quaint by today's standards. Trump could do Iran-Contra on a Tuesday and people would be done talking about it by Thursday.
Nope, I knew about Iran-Contra years back. I'm thinking of the economic policy, the AIDS mishandling, the rest of the middle east shenanigans, the various military escapades, and on and on.
RE ".....Ronald Reagan -- a president who did many questionable/bad things..."
Not being in the common demographic of this site , I had to google this - as I was not aware of any ..... It educated me. It made me immedicably wonder where the current president would fit into ... since the google also had questions and claimed answers/OPINIONS too " who was worst US president etc... The current presidents situation is still being played out - obviously ...
I'm just glad Dilbert's creator is in the same thread as Chairman Mao
It's a shame he's not around to get really upset about it.
He'd probably be flattered, Mao was one of histories greatest influencer of minds after all.
Of nothing else, he was impressive at melting down.
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.
> This comment reminds me of when I talked to a few Chinese friends about their thoughts on Mao.
There has been a push under Xi's leadership to whitewash a lot of the past, especially involving Mao. As Xi has been positioning himself as a somewhat father figure of the nation. This has resulted in a revival of Mao policies, like the little red book.
So do not be surprised about uncle figure statement...
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.
Not very different. In fact, both endpoints seem very similar, even though the starts were different.
If anything, the US is still far away from as bad as China.
> China is plain speaking and cares, openly and transparently, about its interests
Hum... Are you from the US or Europe?
The amount of propaganda circulating worldwide about how China is helping propel all developing nations into modernity with infrastructure investment is just ridiculous. (And yeah, there's half a truth in it, like all useful propaganda.)
> The USA is much worse than China - to foreigners
The USA is such a hellhole that millions want to come here, legally or otherwise.
>China is plain speaking and cares, openly and transparently, about its interests
What???????
Sounds like what some American will say in two or three years, except for the excuse about being drunk.
That's because they've been indoctrinated - Mao was a complete disaster in every way but admitting that is a step too far for the CCP. The cultural revolution was the worst thing to ever happen to Chinese cultural history and connection to the past (since destroying that was the entire aim of it). Sun Yat-Sen is a far better example of someone worth venerating as a moderniser who didn't want to destroy everything from the past.
Pride made it worth it?!
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.
They're rarely that kind to their enablers either.
I don't think the "Down to the Countryside Movement" was what the Red Guard were expecting as their reward for supporting the revolution.
The current agitators in the West need to remember that the latitude they currently have to dissent and protest isn't likely to exist after the actual revolution.
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.
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.
This is very lightly said. You probably should have said, "without killing 70 millions".
That's not how it happened so talking about alternatives is conjecture and a fantasy. It's not productive here.
And the USA did just that.
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.
China spent a century being invaded and oppressed by the outside world, culminating in a massive war against a much smaller country that killed maybe 20 million of their people and which was only won due to a huge amount of outside help.
Today, China is the first or second richest and most powerful country in the world.
That trajectory changed when Mao came into power. Maybe it could have been done better, but he's the one who did it.
Them and every other country. American kids are taught how the founding fathers cast off the yoke of british imperialism. I think every country has a national origin story they drill into their citizens to justify the state.
It’s historically incorrect though.
After the 1911 Revolution imperial possessions were a few stripes of land in Shanghai.
It was mostly civil war after that until 1937, and KMT fighting the Japanese.
Then another civil war in 1945.
Mao could be viewed as unifying the country under one government, but fighting imperialism? The CCP played a small role.
They were building an imperium themselves before and after.
Might you elaborate? My slight understanding is that the 1911 Xinhai Revolution ended Qing imperial rule - leading to a chaotic period, then Chiang Kai-shek's brutal consolidation of power in the late 1920's. He was able to reduce most foreign imperialism in the following decade...except for the <cough/> small matter of the Imperial Japanese Army invading China. And by siding with the often-vile local gentry to help consolidate power over the peasants - he repeated a "deal with the devil" which had previously been made by the Qing, when putting down the White Lotus Rebellion.
Post-WWII, Chiang Kai-shek was far too friendly with the defeated, disgraced, and oft-hated Japanese military. And the blatantly racist Americans. Vs. Mao was friendly with (if often made out to be a tool of) the Soviets - hardly nice people, but in China far less ill-behaved or loathed. Since Mao won the Chinese Civil War - with considerable help from the Soviets, and far more help from the cruelty, corruption, and poor company of the Nationalist regime - then "dialed back" Soviet power and influence over the following decades, he'd seem the obvious winner of the "Freed China from Foreign Domination" crown.
Huh? Mao didn't even found the CCP. Arguably, Chiang Kai-shek had more to do with "throwing off imperialism" than Mao.
More like a sober uncle who killed other family members.
What parasocial relationship does to a mf
> You don’t choose family
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.
>> You don’t choose family
> 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.
> I'm sorry you had that experience.
I'm not, it was something I did on my own volition, I wasn't kicked out, I moved out. So don't be sorry about it, my life would also look 100% different than it is if I didn't, and I love my life, it's better than 99.99% of the rest of yours :)
> We just can't go through life changing our people whenever they don't live up to what we want them to be.
You can, if you stop "wanting them to be" anything at all, and just treat people like they are instead. And if they're still "bad people", you leave.
> As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.
Respectfully, no. That's not the kind of relationship I want with other people, I want people who doesn't love me unconditionally but can tell me straight when I'm doing bad stuff, etc. "Unconditional love" removes that.
I'm glad to have found the people I've found, and stuck with those since we became close. They're hard to find though, and I've met only one such person after turning 30. But I rather have this small group of 4-5 people I can trust to help me bury a body if needed, than spending time with people who feel they have to love me unconditionally. Life just gets easier that way.
> 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.
Oh gosh, yes, I agree, it's best to severely limit your contact. I hope your experience with your built family lasts for the rest of your life.
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.
Sure. And I know people who have gained "chosen family" in that first 20 years of life.
> there is a very strong anthropological connection wired into us that doesn't go away when the situation changes.
I have not found this to be true.
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.
Mr. White, is that you?
I need a new belt for my SuctionMaster Pro 9000, urgently.
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.
> 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
My grandfather barely had a net worth when he passed away. It amazed me how awful some people became, seemingly overnight.
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.
Crabs in a bucket.
It's exactly the same mindset that says that other people shouldn't get healthcare or welfare.
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.
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.
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 don't see what's icky about refusing to ignore Adams problematic views. He's not excusing or overlooking them, which you seem to be implying.
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?
I feel similar.
Dilbert came out a bit before I was born, so from my perspective it always existed. Even before I had ever had any kind of office job, I was reading the Dilbert comics and watching the cartoon series, and had even read The Dilbert Principle.
It was upsetting that he ended up with such horrible viewpoints later in his life, and they aren’t really forgivable, but as you stated it’s sort of like a relative you grew up with dying.
I really hate my grandmother, because she has repeatedly said very racist stuff to my wife, so I haven’t talked to her in since 2018, and the only communication that I have had with her was a series of increasingly nasty emails we exchanged after she called my mother a “terrible parent” because my sister is gay, where I eventually told her that she “will die sad and alone with her only friend being Fox News”.
It is likely that I will never say anything to her ever again; she is in her 90s now, and not in the greatest health from my understanding. When she kicks the bucket in a few years, I think I am going to have similar conflicts.
Despite me hating her now, it’s not like all my memories with her were bad. There are plenty of happy memories too, and I am glad to have those, but it doesn’t automatically forgive the horrible shit she has said to my wife and mother and sister.
I have thought about reaching out, but I cannot apologize for anything I said because I am not sorry for anything I said, and I do not apologize for things unless I actually regret them.
Dunno, relationships and psychology are complex and I can’t pretend to say I understand a damn thing about how my brain works.
Nice to read such a graceful comment, I saved it.
Life and people are complicated and messy. It’s not easy to reduce people to good or bad.
Celebrate the good in life, it’s too short to focus and well on the negative.
Dwelling on the negative is one thing. Acknowledging the bad with the good is often the point of obituaries and threads like this one.
We don't need to whitewash the world to enjoy the good parts.
Personally, I disassociate with racist family when they refuse to acknowledge and work on their beliefs
Dillbert was too passive, it really was annoying.
Peter from Office Space was more liberating.
He wasn't family. He created a product for money and you consumed it. Your relationship with Scott Adams was entirely transactional.
Caring about the man this much is like caring about Colonel Sanders or Tony the Tiger, it's weird and kind of gross.
We have personal relationships with the authors whose work we read.
Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Dostoyevsky have changed my life. Just as much as family.
You can loudly say “no” and I’m loudly saying “yes.”
> We have personal relationships with the authors whose work we read.
To the extent that is arguably true (and I’d argue it mostly is not, there may be a one-way effect and/or a parasocial attachment, but “personal relationship” requires two-way interaction, and confusing a parasocial attachment for a personal relationship is the start of...lots of bad things) those relationships quite literally do not share the “you don’t choose family” aspect that applies to (a subset of) family relationships.
This has to be one of the more insane takes in the thread. Colonel Sanders and Tony the Tiger aren’t real people, Scott Adams is (was?) a real person.
I listen to an artist who I feel changed my life with her music. When I heard she had attempted suicide I was deeply saddened. I had this irrational but deep feeling like I should have done something to help her, without knowing what that possibly could have been, since I don’t actually know her at all.
Is that “weird and kind of gross” too? To care about people suffering and dying even if you don’t know them personally?
>Is that “weird and kind of gross” too? To care about people suffering and dying even if you don’t know them personally?
I promise almost no one one here spent so much as a second being concerned about Scott Adam's health until this thread came along, and now people are acting like they lost a parent. But what they're really mourning isn't the death of a person, but the death of a brand.
Meanwhile ICE is shooting people in the face, the US is sponsoring genocide in Palestine, and real suffering and death abound but as far as Hacker News is concerned all of it's just "politics" that doesn't stimulate the intellect or curious conversation.
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.
It's not just political views, though.
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.
> The latter are core moral views, and we should not be so quick to dismiss them as merely political.
Morality and politics and religion all have significant overlap.
I knew he was a loonie, but thought that you're exaggerating.
Nope.
Quote [1]:
While I’m being politically incorrect, let me describe to you the mind of a teenage boy. Our frontal lobes aren’t complete. We don’t imagine the future. Our bodies want sex more than we want to stay alive. Literally. Lonely boys tend to be suicidal when the odds of future female companionship are low.
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.
There's a lot to unpack here, starting with equating female companionship to sex, and ending with the dichotomy between having sex and murdering people.
I started looking for a source of his hypnosis quote, and stumbled into [2].
Umm. Not going to quote it.
[3] is a higher level overview of Scott Adams' hypnotism. It didn't make me any happier.
Ugh. I used to like Dilbert in the 90s as a kid. Wish I knew about Scott Adams now as much as I knew then.
That's to say, wish he wasn't such a horrible person.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160116140056/http://blog.dilbe...
[2] https://www.tumblr.com/manlethotline/616428804059086848/hey-...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelschein/2018/06/20/dilber...
I say everything is political and that there are political views that are just plain wrong and aren't compatible with life in society.
I don't think political views are beyond contestation. People become bad for believing in bad ideas.
And, boy, his ideas were bad.
> 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.
Love the art, not the artist.
I loved reading the Belgariad as a young teen and was shocked upon learning more about the author as an adult.
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.
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.
“De gustibus non disputandum est” - no arguing taste. Art is like family.
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!
As someone who actively avoided cancel culture hysteria in the 2010s, can we have some context here?
What did the guy say that has everyone stumbling over themselves to vaguely allude to it?
"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
The first is a (totally legitimate) dig at 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 disagrees 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.
> 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".
The context of that poll was an alt-right uplifting of the phrase "it's OK to be white", as though they were being oppressed and were finally removing the yoke of hatred they'd endured. A similar poll might ask about the phrases "not all men" or "me too". In isolation, who could possibly have a problem with either of those?, but these things aren't taken in isolation.
I'd be curious about a followup question like "is it acceptable for someone to be white", which is asking the exact same question, on the surface, but in context is asking something completely different.
I'm curious how you would rate the statement: "I'm unsure it's ok to be Black".
Why just in the corporate world? Is Kamala Harris not an example? Or do we think being an unimpressive DA in San Francisco who dropped out before Iowa, merited the vice presidency AND the presidential nomination that she also got handed to her?
To call the whole "it's ok to be white" thing "code" is a reach. The whole point of it was to call out the hypocrisy and, potentially, racism of anyone who was offended by such a benign statement. That's not code, and it was extremely obvious at the time the intent.
Wow, as someone who has always heard he's a raging racist, that (with context in other comment) is just.... not super racist? It's much less bad than I expected.
I am Korean-American. If 47% of any group of people were unsure if it's "okay to be Asian" I would sure as hell avoid that group of people.
the context was black people hating and attacking white people so he’s like “ok then I’ll stay out of your way” and somehow that was racist, I think if you’re not aware that some culture pockets and mindsets like this do exist it might seem more racist because it would seem like he’s talking about everyone on earth just for being black but that’s clearly absurd and he was always a smart analytical guy so there’s no way that’s what he meant
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There's a lot of context around stuff he said. It seems to me that people are very eager to tag people with labels from others. I don't get the impression that others have seen many of his YouTube videos.
It's valuable to maybe watch the episodes and make your own mind up.
To be fair (RIP my fake internet points) - we spent the better part of the last 15 years hearing about how we needed special “safe spaces” for all the minorities. So if they are asking for self-segregation what are we to conclude? The sword cuts both ways…
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>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.
Wow, what a coincidence! Everyone who doesn't agree with me is uninformed and has poor judgement too!
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It’s linked to in the first sentence of the OP.
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."
You missed a few:
"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
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with more than a whiff of neo-colonialist "why aren't they greeting us as liberators?" thinking.
I'm not sure if the whole thing isn't a bit unfair. Lots of people in America want to live in fancy low crime neighbourhoods rather than getto like but know not say a lot of their thinking so as to not be cancelled. The "ok to be white" thing was based on some dumb 4chan trolling, and quite likely got misinterpreted.
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.
It's obviously racist - but people have to stop assuming that word means one thing.
In that statement, it's not disdain for another group, it's disdain and resignation over racial politics.
He seems to in fact have empathy, but has become maligned for some reason.
He's seems to be 'giving up' on the cause and suggesting people go their separate ways.
It's frankly much more cynical than it is racist.
That's nothing near a traditional racist view.
It's the posture of a cynical, old angry man - not some kind of White Nationlist.
I'm not justifying anything but I am indicating that these thins are obviously nuanced.
That said - I'm reflecting on a single comment, not his entire body of ugly commentary.
Black person here, and I too am finding this thread confusing.
Adams here was doing one of two things, either being blatantly racist or (perhaps the more generous, and perhaps more likely) being extremely bad at comedy?
It is of course "possible" to comedically play around with "what team am I on," but you have to be good at it or you look like -- if not racist -- a completely oblivious weirdo, and he was obviously one of the two here?
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). 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. So his reaction is that of someone who's upset and disappointed at learning that he's despised by some group of people for his ethnicity, and advises to just stay away from those who harbour these sentiments.
/whoosh
> the clarity of thought
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.
Having clear insight in some areas and big blind spots (or worse) in others isn't just typical, it's basically all but universal (if we leave aside people who have no particular insight into anything).
I know what you mean. I really liked Dilbert, but I don’t think I read any of his other books.
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.
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It is interesting to see how much nuance gets applied to understanding troubled people, and by whom.
We feel automatic sympathy for those who look like us, and we have an easier time imagining them as a person with conflicting impulses and values. Some people would not acknowledge that about themselves.
> Shouldn't we reject these people entirely?
Probably, but humanity doesn't seem to have the luxury of rejecting anything in total, and I'm not convinced the attempts are working.
When Scott was rejected he was immediately given a platform by Fox news. Our current regime was rejected quite thoroughly across a number of platforms (the Republican primary, Twitter, Congress, etc.) but here we stand.
I don't think that's exclusive to white men at all. We have seen a number of concerning anti-Semitic statements from Black NBA players and one particular Arab podcaster. The general rule seems to be something like "Rich / famous people are allowed to only mildly reject -isms that are common in the community in which they grew up."
Hell yeah. Better to support artists who don't champion racism.
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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.
If you have reductive views of entire races that is literally the definition of racism
> They're kidnapping people off the street and out of their homes and cars
Don't forget the murder.
I don't necessarily agree with calling it "kidnapping" but the current administration is different in their use of profiling (racial and otherwise). That is new, previous court rulings had blocked that kind of behavior.
They haven't been indicted for kidnapping because it's the government itself doing it with federally deputized agents. What, is Trump's DOJ going to prosecute its own law enforcement agents for executing Trump's policy? No, that's utterly laughable.
Additionally, Obama's use of ICE was far different from what's going on today in that Obama used targeted enforcement prioritizing criminals. ICE today in Minneapolis is just driving around grabbing anyone they think could, possibly, maybe be illegal. US citizens are being swept up by anonymous, violent and poorly trained agents with virtually no accountability. It's causing terror in the community in a way Obama never even came close to. To suggest these are similar is extremely disingenuous.
You are asking why the fascist administration isn't holding its own secret police accountable
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The comment does not say to ignore the ugliness.
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Do you suppose there's any connection between how LLMs write and how humans write?
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I find AI replies to generally be less annoying and more constructive than comments like this, TBH.
I didn't think that was AI writing at all. It used em-dashes, yes, but AI isn't capable of expressing such deeply human thoughts
GGGP normally uses '-' when they write comments.
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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”?
What is "that situation" in the second quote?
https://web.archive.org/web/20160116140056/http://blog.dilbe...
I wouldn't expect to hear back. GP is either a troll or a cultist or both.
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.
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can you share the prompt and model for study here
Claude Opus 4.5. My family runs an electrical contracting business—nobody asks if my dad used power tools or did the wiring with his bare hands. The sentiment is mine, the craft got assistance. Scott would probably appreciate the systems-over-goals irony: I used a tool to do the job better.
I like to keep track of which models still have a fairly distinct voice (for curiosity if nothing else), but I'd also like to see the prompt to know which part is your own sentiment and which part is fluff added in post. It's kind of like someone photoshopping every selfie because they're worried about minor flaws to me.
> You don't choose family.
> That also felt like family [emphasis added]
See the problem?
"Chosen family" is chosen. You weren't recruited.
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.
Unlike Scott Adams, no struggle sessioner cares what black people actually think. They’ve been promised lordship over other men and today line up at his wake to collect.
Confused between morality and ethics, their true use is in driving passive alienation, which serves those in power. I think white leaders learned from the Civil Rights movement to keep their distance from blacks and won’t make the same mistake twice.
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Ahh yes being politically correct aka not being a racist maga
I can't find any evidence of him saying those exact words, that black people are "inherently dangerous".
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."
Can you clue me in? I only knew about Dilbert, and “drilbert”
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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.
What should we call the color of walls when they are painted white?
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.
Agreed. But you're fighting a losing battle. "Calling a spade a spade" is similar. Has nothing to do with race, but can't use it in modern context.
I want to like your message but I can't help think you generated this using AI and I can't upvote AI slop.
> You don’t choose family
Hard disagree. Blood is not thicker than water, though the original proverb is correct.
You can choose to remove shitty racist people from your family. "Pineapple belongs on pizza" is an opinion we can all debate around the dinner table. "Brown people don't deserve human rights" is not. Nor should it be accepted and overlooked.
Opinions like "white people are the only good people" are not acceptable. Saying and thinking that makes you a bad person. Accepting those views also makes you a bad person.
Non-white people's rights are not a matter of opinion, nor is it up for debate.
Put very plainly, you either believe that all people deserve the same rights and respect by default, or you're a racist and a bad person. There's no gray area, no "maybe both sides". All humans deserve the same basic rights. You either agree, or you're a bad person who does not deserve to participate in polite society.
>For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution.
This is the only issue I have with your statement.
I have a lot of favourite creators who are noteworthy for something bad or another. I like their stuff. The bad stuff doesnt particularly affect me. We get on fine. I read Howard and Lovecraft. I enjoy the heck out of them. I used to watch reruns of the Dilbert cartoon.
The issue here is sort of the implication that family is a net positive despite bad behaviours. Thats bs. Anyone who has had to push shitty assholes from their family isn't happy that they existed, or made better through their existence. Scott Adams is just a niche internet microcelebrity who made some funny comics and said some shitty things on his podcast. Blocking him is a lot easier than getting rid of an abusive family member, and his net effect on someone is going to be a lot lower.
Why do you need to prompt chatgpt into writing an Eulogy? Are you just a bot or a real person?
I don't think a machine can care about someone's death
Adam's arguing over a phrase "it's okay to be white" is ironic for an author, when the core misinterpretation was whether 'white' was an adjective or a verb.
He thought it was a label for who he was, while others saw it as a certain way of acting.
“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.”
Maybe I’m getting cynical, yet every time I see an mdash and rules of 3, it triggers the feeling of “This sounds like AI” …
Here’s another example:
“ I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.”
I've been a heavy emdash user for decades. I have never and will never pass AI writing off as my own -- it defeats the whole purpose for me. Please realize that many of us have been using them for a long time. I really don't want to stop.
I'm also not saying that the parent is AI generated. Just, that the text triggered for me my "Might be AI" alert. It's not only the em dash but the combination of em dash and rules of three (plus a couple of other hints).
I get it, and for all I know this may actually be AI generated. Mine was as much a plea to the masses. But it's a lost cause, I find myself editing to explicitly sound human all the time now.
I've had more than one person think my personal communication was written by an LLM. It's such a strange and unexpected problem to have.
I think your instinct is very likely correct - I also immediately tripped on the language.
LLM writing is bleeding back into normal peoples' styles. I've been having to catch myself from starting comments with some variation of "great point, let's drill down into that".
AI learned from human writing -- stuff like what I write all the time.
this plus the word "quiet" also triggered my "maybe AI" alarm
> 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.
Again, not a real family member.