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The Dilbert Afterlife

• 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo ago
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  • erxam 9mo ago
    TRVKE. Scott Adams hates this one weird trick.
  • blell 9mo ago
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• MPSimmons 9mo ago
  I disliked Adams, but this is a good eulogy. >For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work. A+, no notes
  • pityJuke 9mo ago
    I was caught off guard by how brutal this article was at points. I don't really follow Scott Alexander much, so I was pleasantly surprised by it. While I don't have the same relationship with Scott Adams... I can see parts of this in my relationship with Kanye.
    • listenallyall 9mo ago
      Pretty easy to take pot shots at a dead guy who lacks the ability to punch back. Especially when the dead guy hosted a daily show and would have been thrilled to have him come on and debate! Why didnt Mr Codex get around to stating his opinion re: Adams for the past 10 years?
      • muzani 9mo ago
        Seems like he's just quoting Adams himself. Adams was popular for his self-deprecating humor. Adams used to tell people the secret to success was being in the top 25% at multiple things - he could draw and he could make corporate jokes, but he was not exceptional in either of those things. It's not really a pot shot, more of a tribute. He's still saying Adams was just below Leonardo da Vinci.
        • listenallyall 9mo ago
          Less about the degree to which Adams was talented (which, as you note, Adams might agree), more about how much his books sucked and the ideas within them were ridiculous, arguing that Adams' claims regarding hypnosis were entirely bogus, and that gaining popularity as Scott Adams the blogger-slash-podcast host (as opposed to "Dilbert guy") "destroyed him."
      • trueno 9mo ago
        > Pretty easy to take pot shots at a dead guy who lacks the ability to punch back if you read the piece he touches on this
        • listenallyall 9mo ago
          As a reader, can you summarize what Alexander is referencing in the two quoted paragraphs that overcomes his initial doubt and decides "after his death is the best time to disagree"? The only thing I can possibly see is Adams writing "the reader is supposed to be looking for flaws" but it's also clear that Adams is very interested in hearing people's reactions and responses to his work, which he (obviously) can't do any more.
      • _vqpz 9mo ago
        His response wouldn't have been anything beyond angry passive aggressive tweets. Source: have been on the receiving end of a Scott Adams rage
      • tombert 9mo ago
        For what it’s worth, I think a lot of people were pretty happy to shit on Scott Adams for the last decade. I don’t know anything about Scott Alexander, but even well before Adams had cancer, there was a thread on Something Awful making fun of all the stupid weird shit Adams would say.
  • energy123 9mo ago
    Adams says that his comic skills are nothing more than a talent stack of multiple only-slightly-above-average skills.
    • fatherwavelet 9mo ago
      I really enjoyed How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. I think you also have to mention along his talent stack, all his failed business ideas. He really seemed to give his ideas a shot even if they didn't make much sense. I don't think most people would even pursue the Dilbert idea.
  • goodpoint 9mo ago
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    • tpoacher 9mo ago
      Yes, that guy. "Consider the source". I actually watched the podcast in question. As I saw it he made a very reasonable and 100% non-racist comment (in the context of the discussion the soundbytes were later taken out of), which related more to the inflammatory, caustic nature of the media narrative on black-white relationships, and whether as a white person it is even fruitful to be engaging in that narrative, if the end outcome is that your engagement will be used out of context to cause even more strife and division by the people pushing this narrative. I.e. you will make more of a difference as a white person by trying to improve the "systems" around you, in a manner that benefits everyone, rather than by engaging in pointless arguments and debates with people who are blinded by a very deliberately promoted agenda. I very much agree with that point, and have experienced it myself. Ironically, if nothing else, this whole affair and the rush to cancel him and call him racist and disgraced, ultimately proved his very point. Just look at how the links you shared choose to word their posthumous articles. If you really want an accurate source, just go watch the (entire) podcast. No better source than this. Best case scenario you'll disagree with my take, but now your take is informed rather than misinformed. And to set the record straight, Adams was the very opposite of racist in my view. He had very nuanced and pragmatic views, including how the best thing the country could do to help black communities should be investing in education across the board, instead of funding and pandering to apologists who inflame the masses but then drain the money from the education system, perpetuating ghetto-like communities.
      • ProjectArcturis 9mo ago
        I take the opposite view - Adams was an awful troll for years, and he deserved cancellation long before he got it.
        • SamBam 9mo ago
          Long before the racism thing, I remember how grossed out I was by him complaining that he only got to have sex when his girlfriend wanted it, therefore his girlfriend, and women in general, were the "gatekeepers" of sex. Completing failing to recognize that consent is a two person affair.
• k__ 9mo ago
  I found Dilbert in 2013, when I was working in a dead end dev job in a small software company. Felt nice to see others seem to have the same issues. I quit that job and started freelancing. Not only because of those comics, but at least they didn't give me any doubts about that endeavour. What I learned: engineering skills give you power, but it's not the only thing you can be nerdy at. You can be nerdy about anything. It just happens to be that software engineering is something that people with much money are willing to pay for. Just imagine you're history nerd. Not much options to profit quickly from that. Same goes the other direction. If you happen to really like financial markets and math, you might find ways to make even more money with less work than an engineer.
  • da02 9mo ago
    Are you still in freelancing? Did you ever discover any companies or teams that worked well together?
    • jiggawatts 9mo ago
      I’m not the person you’re asking the question from but I’m a consultant that has been to well over a hundred organisations big and small. Employee happiness and team success is essentially random. More accurately: you can go to two “identical” companies directly competing in the same industry at the same scale and they can still be wildly different internally. One can be a depressing march to retirement and death, the other a place where people literally(!) sing with joy in the corridors. Everything is likely to also be totally different: procedures (or lack thereof), policy, tools, training, etc… Despite this, all organisations above a certain size are filled with people that are certain that their way is the only way things are done. They’ll argue until they’re blue in the face that nothing else could possibly work… with someone who was at their totally different competitor last week and saw that in fact a different approach is massively superior. This variability is greatest for small scale workplace practices as typically decided by a “pointy haired boss” (PHB). They also tend to be most convinced of their own methods, and the most resistant to change.
• accidentallfact 9mo ago
  That isn't how I understood Dilbert. Dilbert is a normal guy and PHB is actually mentally retarded. It's essentially gallows humor for a world where, for no apparent reason, blithering idiots often seem to be the only people who wield any decision making power.
  • HWR_14 9mo ago
    Scott Adams had a take on that. The "Dilbert Principle" (his version of the Peter Principle) is that useless engineers that are promoted away from doing real work to keep them from messing it up.
    • accidentallfact 9mo ago
      I have a much darker hypothesis about it - when people are left to compete, they often resort to badmouthing those who they think could outcompete them. Thus, the reputation of the most competent gets destroyed, while the village idiot remains as the only one left unscathed.
• michaelt 9mo ago
  > But t-shirts saying “Working Hard . . . Or Hardly Working?” no longer hit as hard as they once did. Contra the usual story, Millennials are too earnest to tolerate the pleasant contradiction of saying they hate their job and then going in every day with a smile. They either have to genuinely hate their job - become some kind of dirtbag communist labor activist - or at least pretend to love it. At least in the technology sector, work has changed a lot in some regards since the days when Scott Adams was in the workforce. No suits and ties needed, show up in a tee-shirt and denim jeans. Flexible work hours, and work-from-home. Top 2% salary. Free food. Clean, well-maintained, offices. No request for annual leave ever denied. Pick the work you like from the top of the backlog. No bosses sending interns to get them coffee or any nonsense like that. Go ahead, play some foosball or table tennis on the clock. Is two screens enough, you can have a third if it'd boost your productivity? And senior leaders try to project the image of "Stanford CS PhD dropout" rather than "Wall Street Harvard MBA" - they're "just like us", look at that hoodie he's wearing. The world of Dilbert, meanwhile, is trapped in amber. And the wry insights that fax machines are hard to use don't really land like they did in 1995.
  • antonymoose 9mo ago
    I’ve spent most of my career in the cushy Silicon Valley startup style work cultures you’ve described. Obviously I greatly prefer them… but the stodgy business casual+ 9-5 cube farms still exist, and in great numbers. I’ve worked in them out of necessity here and there, and they’re more common than one might believe reading HN. If the desperate recruiters in my metro are anything to judge by, it seems just about everything manufacturing and financial services firm is run by a Pointy Haired Boss or two. There is still plenty of need for Dilbert strips in the workforce.
  • y-curious 9mo ago
    Beautifully stated. A lot of the comics still apply, but certainly not directly to my job. I imagine government workers find it very relatable, however.
  • tiek9394 9mo ago
    [flagged]
• roenxi 9mo ago
  > I had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show. I do wonder if Scott Alexander means this in the sense that he watched a few shows because Adams had died, or if there were the first episodes of Adams' shows he had watched. Dying does reveal some interesting things about a person - in Adams' case he was doing his live podcasts right up to about the end. I tuned in to one out of ghoulish interest and he seemed to be the sickest person I'd ever seen. He was clearly doing that show because he loved it. If he had his time over, he'd probably swallow his pride and accept that It Is Not OK To Be White because of the disastrous impact on the Dilbert empire, but I do think Alexander has fundamentally misread what Adams believed it meant to be successful. He wasn't that motivated by commercial success since at least the 2010s, although he had achieved it. He seemed a lot more interested in getting ideas out there and making a difference to people's lives.
  • HWR_14 9mo ago
    > He wasn't that motivated by commercial success since at least the 2010s, although he had achieved it. Alternatively, he achieved enough commercial success and then was satisfied.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 9mo ago
    ^^; Part of me knew a comment like this would show up. The trend itself is greater than Dilbert and not new, but it has certainly become more pronounced. What is interesting that while 'Dilbert empire' fell in the process for not accepting white inferiority, full blown resistance marketing market is taking ( or maybe has taken already ) shape fueled largely by highly polarized populace. I am not looking forward to it, because it requires keeping abreast of currents I do not care for or even understand.
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    • uep 9mo ago
      > What is interesting that while 'Dilbert empire' fell in the process for not accepting white inferiority, full blown resistance marketing market is taking ( or maybe has taken already ) shape fueled largely by highly polarized populace. I must be daft. There must be some cultural context I'm missing so that I don't even understand what you're saying. Accepting white inferiority? Full blown resistance marketing market? Huh?
• alexpotato 9mo ago
  For those looking for a "successor theory" to the Dilbert Principle, I highly suggest Venkatesh Rao's Gervais Principle [0]. To use Dilbert terms: Adams would say that PHB is dumb and he is promoted into management as that's where he can do the least damage. Rao would say that PHB is actually put there by upper management to be a combination of: - fall guy/lightning rod to take blame for failed projects - dumb subordinates are less likely to try to take your job (dumb doesn't mean unintelligent. Rather, Rao uses the term "clueless" to highlight smart people who are not political) 0 - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
  • api 9mo ago
    Look at the contrast. We are teaching the sand to think and working on 3d printing organs and peering at the beginning of time with super-telescopes and landing rockets. Then look at our leadership class. Look at the leaders of the most powerful countries. Look at the most powerful leaders in finance and business. Look at that contrast. It’s very clear where the actually smart people are. But those actually smart people keep putting leaders like that in power. It’s not a conspiracy. We do it. We need them for some reason. I have two hypotheses. One is familiar: they are sacrificial lightning rods. Sacrifice the king when things don’t go well. The other is what I call the dopamine donor hypothesis. Compared to the speed and complexity of the modern world, most human beings are essentially catatonic. Our dopamine systems are not calibrated for this. So we sit there and do nothing by default, or we play and invent but lack the intrinsic motivation to do the hardest parts. So we find these freaks: narcissists, delusional manic prophets, psychopaths. They’re deeply dysfunctional people but we use them. We use the fact that they have tireless non stop motivation. Dopamine always on. Go go go. We place them in positions of authority and let them drive us, even to the point of abuse, as a hack to get around the fact that our central nervous systems don’t natively do this. Then of course if things go wrong, it’s back to their other purpose: sacrificial scapegoats. So in a sense we are both victims of these people and exploiters of them. It’s a dysfunctional relationship. If we could find ways to tweak our systems like amphetamine but without the side effects, we could perhaps replace this system with a pill. It would be more compassionate for the freaks too. They’re not happy people. If we stopped using them this way they might get help and be happier.
• 999900000999 9mo ago
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• alexpotato 9mo ago
  I was a long time Scott Adams fan with the Dilbert Principle being one of my favorite books. What I found most interesting about him was around the time Trump was running for president the first time, Adams was one of the first people to point out that Trump was, to use Adams' terms, a "master persuader". No one else at the time seemed to be talking about this and it was fascinating to see a humorist have this take/insight.
  • ZeroGravitas 9mo ago
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    • randallsquared 9mo ago
      I dunno if the "just paraphrasing [...] Fox" works as an explanation for success. It sounds like you believe he just keeps unaccountably stumbling into piles of cash and power?
      • ZeroGravitas 9mo ago
        Have we given up on him being a master persuader already? He was literally born into wealth before he could even stumble.
        • terminalshort 9mo ago
          As were many hundreds of thousands of other men, and yet Trump is in the Oval office and they are not.
          • notahacker 9mo ago
            An ageing Biden and Dubya have also occupied that office and they don't exactly strike me as "master persuader" types either. Nobody is accusing Trump of lacking ambition or charisma, and there's also no doubt the party machine that backed him is pretty sophisticated in the arts of political campaigning. But there's a difference between being a "master persuader" able to convince almost anyone of almost anything and being a shameless braggart in front of an electorate that's unusually impressed by a celebrity's overconfidence and wealth, and also being a lot less shameless about appealing to their chauvinistic attitudes than predecessors.
• tensility 9mo ago
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  • zabzonk 9mo ago
    "Each man's death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee." John Donne
• ironbound 9mo ago
  Great eulogy and art, What saddens me is the lack of a friends around him, seems like he got isolated in the politics of 2015 and then got radicalized.
  • Balgair 9mo ago
    I could only hope for a eulogy like that. I think the lack of friends (heightened by his Titanic wealth) contributed to his isolation. Like how we all kinda got out of practice talking with people during COVID isolation. That then kinda spiraled him into algorithmicly fed nonsense as he didn't have anyone he could trust to tell him he was wrong. Just sycophants and fans and golddiggers. Cicero is still right, a friend is the best thing to have, no question. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/cicero-on-friendship-de-amicitia https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/cicero-on-friendship-de-a... Eulogies are such good reading for those of us left here. They really drive the points home. Life isn't the grind, it's a journey. We're all just here for each other
  • KevinMS 9mo ago
    No idea what you are talking about. He became hugely popular and had lots of adoring fans and friends. His twitter had 1.3M followers and he did a daily show.
• DFHippie 9mo ago
  The weird thing about Adams was that he believed Trump was Dogbert, not the pointy-haired boss. If he'd stayed apolitical people would have kept clipping his strips and putting them up on cubical walls. Dogbert was not an appealing character. His sharper edge kept the sharp edges of Dilbert and the other engineers more out of one's attention. Then Adams revealed that he believed Dogbert was the one to emulate and tried to prove his theories (and he said black people were scary -- there was that) and he polarized himself. Much of his audience recoiled. He gained new, more ICE-esque followers, and then still more of his audience recoiled. To his credit he pioneered the PR death spiral later made famous by Kanye and Rowlings. This was not the career capper he was looking for.
  • pharrington 9mo ago
    Trump's trademark skill is conning and taking advantage of people, just like Dogbert.
    • doogedmmmh 9mo ago
      He even fooled Scott. Impressive!
    • leoc 9mo ago
      In another way Trump is actually rather like Adams himself: his one great talent is as an entertainer and self-publicist, but he feels that he deserves success in business and leadership, so that he can be hailed as a great builder and decision-maker. Trump does have the personal charisma and feel for manipulation which Adams longed for, though. (Though it does help Trump that he started with the charisma boosts of inherited megawealth and the associated upbringing.)
• martinpw 9mo ago
  > This was the world of Dilbert’s rise. You’d put a Dilbert comic on your cubicle wall, and feel like you’d gotten away with something My former manager used to have Dilbert comic strips on his wall. It always puzzled me - was it self deprecating humor? At a certain point though it became clear that in his mind the PHB was one layer ABOVE him in the management chain and not anyone at his level. I suspect it may be a recursive pattern.
  • cainxinth 9mo ago
    From a recent NYTimes article about his passing: > “Dilbert” was a war cry against the management class — the system of deluded jerks you work for who think they know better. Workers posted it on their cubicles like resistance fighters chalking V’s on walls in occupied Paris. But their bosses posted “Dilbert” in their offices too, since they also had a boss who was an idiot. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/opinion/dilbert-scott-adams-maga.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/opinion/dilbert-scott-ada...
    • catoc 9mo ago
      https://archive.is/9JVkU https://archive.is/9JVkU
    • raverbashing 9mo ago
      And while we don't have cubicles and TPS reports anymore, people have different grievances and ways of expressing their cynicism. History does not repeat but it rhymes indeed
      • seanmcdirmid 9mo ago
        We don’t even have cubicles anymore, it’s all everyone shoved onto the same table now.
        • steveBK123 9mo ago
          Indeed it’s telling how bad things haven gotten that many would yearn for the cubicle now
• asacrowflies 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  • jordemort 9mo ago
    (Ohio meme)
  • kayamon 9mo ago
    [flagged]
  • GaryBluto 9mo ago
    > The amount of comments about white superiority/inferiority with no awareness of how absurd it is... I haven't seen any. Could you give me an example? > Is this site now a nazi bar? Damn. Please don't turn Hacker News into a site for endlessly regurgitating lame social media "gotchas" or tropes. There are already many, many websites for that.
    • kayamon 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      • GaryBluto 9mo ago
        If you make a claim based on the supposed existence of something, be prepared to back the existence of said thing up. It's not "sealioning"[1][2] to want evidence for an extraordinary claim. [1] Sealioning is an example of an blanket phrase that can rarely be applied correctly but more often that not is used by anti-intellectuals who have no other method to refute a statement or inquiry to their line of thought. Other examples being "whataboutism" (for the act of pointing out hypocrisy) and "slippery slope fallacy" (which is used to ridicule logical cause and effect statements) [2] I find it humorous that the example given is of somebody prejudiced against an entire species for no logical reason (and who wants said species eradicated), who then refuses to justify it to the creature they are prejudiced against. It almost feels as if the comic was originally written to justify racism and the author then realised how unpopular that would be. (The author attempts to refute this in an addendum but ends up using many words to say nothing, instead refuting a criticism of the character's visual design.)
• tomaytotomato 9mo ago
  Like the author I was fortunate enough to be exposed to Dilbert as a teenager, before I got caught up in the rush of the university-professional-yuppie-industrial-complex. I found the Dilbert principle book in my parents downstairs cloakroom (wedged between magazines and other generic bathroom reading material). At a superficial level I just read the comic strips in the book and laughed, I thought to myself - haha look at those poor corporate workers, that won't happen to me. In a way it didn't happen to me vis-a-vis cubicles, suits and water cooler gossip, TPS reports etc. However, in other ways it did happen to me, the frustrations of working with incompetent people, working in teams who brainwash themselves that they are making something useful or being productive, hilarious executive decisions made without any scientific or rational thought. (startup - https://youtu.be/iwan0xJ_irU https://youtu.be/iwan0xJ_irU) I still like to add Dilbert comic strips to closing slides in presentations, my go to one is this, when we are discussing new technologies to use. https://tenor.com/nJfQSXLP8am.gif https://tenor.com/nJfQSXLP8am.gif We are in the Dilbert universe, it just keeps changing p.s. if anyone is looking for Saturday TV binge material, all of the Dilbert TV show is on Youtube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH7dgUq5Qe4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH7dgUq5Qe4
  • fmbb 9mo ago
    For someone who has only been exposed to open office landscapes those cubicles seem like a dream.
    • neogodless 9mo ago
      I haven't seen full height cubicles since my 2006-2011 job. Still even half-height cubicle desks tended to give you a good sense of "your space" relative to the open concept rows of tables/flat desks. Currently I go to the office once a week, where I sit at a tiny mobile desk pressed against the side of someone else's cubicle. I'm almost "in" a walkway. Can't imagine how that interferes with focus!
    • arealaccount 9mo ago
      Personally I hated them they felt dehumanizing, and loved my first open floor company I also don’t like WFH, I wonder if people who like open plans also like RTO
• stogot 9mo ago
  > His next venture (c. 1999) was the Dilberito, an attempt to revolutionize food via a Dilbert-themed burrito with the full Recommended Daily Allowance of twenty-three vitamins. I swear I am not making this up. A contemporaneous NYT review said it “could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste” The funniest thing I’ve read all week. Was anyone here lucky enough to eat one?
  • mattmaroon 9mo ago
    I had one in college back then. It was not very good.
• martythemaniak 9mo ago
  Story of our times: Gen-X counterculture jerk grows up railing against The Man. Grows up, gets rich, famous, becomes The Man. His mind, however, is stuck in the past, still thinks he's a rebel, still thinks he's railing against The Man. In reality, he has become a sadistic asshole hurting others for his self-righteous pleasure. But no amount of pain inflicted on others will make him feel good, he dies a miserable crank. Adams, Musk, Andreesen, Stephen Miller, Chappelle, Maher. They're everywhere.
  • CPLX 9mo ago
    While a little reductive and caricatured, as a Gen-X counterculture type myself I can confirm that there's quite a bit of accuracy in this comment. And a lot more examples in more boring parts of the world than these famous people you are mentioning. With that said it's not exclusively a Gen-X thing to go from counterculture to establishment while preserving the same root personality driver of narcissism and selfishness. It's obviously recognizable as the trajectory of the Woodstock generation as well.
    • martythemaniak 9mo ago
      Yeah, probably unfair to name GenX exclusively - more of a late boomer/early gen-x phenomenon. Perhaps it's just the new mid-life crisis, "corvette in your 40s" is beyond silly these days, but rich, powerful 50-60 year olds thinking they're badass rebels is super common.
      • uxp100 9mo ago
        Yeah, if the same thing doesn’t happen with millennials it’s only because there is no true counterculture anymore.
    • NedF 9mo ago
      [dead]
  • thomassmith65 9mo ago
    I thought there were people whose lives followed that trajectory in many generations, but it's just the one. What a relief! /s
• narrator 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  • engineer_22 9mo ago
    If there's any truth to Dilbert, this is exactly what will happen.
  • Cornbilly 9mo ago
    Paramount Skydance, the one owned by the right-wing Ellison family, is going to put out woke Dilbert?
    • narrator 9mo ago
      What "Star Trek Academy" that Paramount just put out did to the Star Trek franchise is what I'm expecting them to do to Dilbert.
      • Cornbilly 9mo ago
        And that is what exactly?
        • narrator 8mo ago
          Performative ignorance. Look it up.
• tpoacher 9mo ago
  > In case it’s not obvious, I loved Scott Adams. Based on this article, somehow I really doubt that.
  • jackblemming 9mo ago
    You can absolutely criticize your hero’s and know they’re flawed humans like everyone else. I thought the author was pretty generous to be honest.
  • trueno 9mo ago
    it is an admittedly long read but i could sense it. i have a few fallen heroes myself and id be able to write diatribes of why i loved them and simultaneously hold their nuts to the fire in modern times.
  • kalkin 9mo ago
    I don't think you write a eulogy this long about someone unless you have something more than a simple dislike or even hatred for them.
  • Aurornis 9mo ago
    In the world of rationalist blogs, writing anything too negative about someone is dismissed as a "hit piece" which is license to ignore it. The only way to write negatively about a person is to write a both-sides style evaluation where you sandwich the criticism in between praise for the person. It's a way of signaling that you're a nice person who isn't just being mean, before you get to the meat of the issue. This blog fits that format: It starts with praise for the person, some signaling about being their biggest fan, and then gets into the topic he actually wanted to write about. When articles started coming out about the author of this blog and some of his problematic past with reactionaries and race science, the common tactic to dismiss any criticisms was to claim they were "hit pieces" and therefore could be ignored. In this community, you have to write in both-sides style and use "steelmanning" to pretend to support something before you're allowed to criticize it.
    • csense 9mo ago
• NoboruWataya 9mo ago
  > As another self-hating nerd writer put it, “through all these years I make experiment if my sins or Your mercy greater be.” Out of curiosity I searched this quote in Google, DDG and Claude and none of them found any source. Anyone know who the other self-hating nerd writer is? Sounds a bit like John Donne.
  • ajb 9mo ago
    Don't know it, but this website attributes it to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: https://theomarkhayyamclubofamerica.wordpress.com/extended-rubaiyat/ https://theomarkhayyamclubofamerica.wordpress.com/extended-r... (Edited on reading more closely) Or possibly some fan work, since this "Extended Rubaiyat" isn't entirely from Omar Khayyam. So this doesn't pin down the provenance of the phrase.
  • libraryofbabel 9mo ago
    I was also curious about this quote, and it sounded to me too like Donne (or Pascal or Robert Boyle, a bit). But Gemini 3.0 knew what it was, and it is from Omar Khayyám like the sibling commenter said, but from the little-known E. H. Whinfield translation (1883) rather than the more famous Fitzgerald one: —- 221. (395.) Such as I am, Thy power created me, Thy care hath kept me for a century! Through all these years I make experiment, If my sins or Thy mercy greater be. ——- Link to the actual page in Google books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NN_TAAAAMAAJ&q=Experiment#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NN_TAAAAMAAJ&q=Experimen...
• commandlinefan 9mo ago
  > why should Garfield hate Mondays? He’s a cat! He doesn’t have to work! There’s a fan theory that Garfield hates Mondays because he just spent two days with Jon and now Jon is leaving him alone again.
  • badc0ffee 9mo ago
    He seems to hate Jon, though. He seems to hate everything except food.
    • tombert 9mo ago
      I got the impression he actually really likes Jon, he’s just kind of a jerk who can’t express himself.
    • cindyllm 9mo ago
      [dead]
  • tombert 9mo ago
    I thought the joke for Garfield is that some crazy annoying shit happens to him on Mondays, and as such he uses the same “I hate mondays” that a person might, just for different reasons.
    • Sniffnoy 9mo ago
      I think that may have only been in the animated TV show?
      • tombert 9mo ago
        https://kagi.com/proxy/latest?c=LsHiRSPxhD29sXqLhdI0j1EsQ98nx-H1fY71FBuiA4lHSpaGOGB76OSYLVQxaN365BW8XYQ93xNRc5XFoowp3klpucRTz87nbRebk5jbasvOpVGAjGPRzNLEVRUCrn-5IETw7j88DPhOylSqzgz_6KKs9Jp7SpqeAcEjQgAE5gg%3D https://kagi.com/proxy/latest?c=LsHiRSPxhD29sXqLhdI0j1EsQ98n... It was the comic too.
• cauch 9mo ago
  This article keeps saying that Adams was more clever than the others. What are the proof of that. It looks like he was like those usual rationalists who come up with obvious theories that a lot of people have come up with and think they are super clever, when they are not. As clues it is the case: 1) Adams came up with very stupid easily proven wrong physics theories and still was convinced it was correct, which is not what a clever will do, 2) as said in other comment here, some people who identifies themselves as "clever like Adams" were also incapable to get their head around the fact that their own boss was displaying dilbert comics, as if they were not clever enough to understand that the manager see themselves as "dilbert" the same way they do.
  • Blackthorn 9mo ago
    > What are the proof of that. It looks like he was like those usual rationalists who come up with obvious theories that a lot of people have come up with and think they are super clever, when they are not. Anyone who identifies as a rationalist is immediately suspect. The name itself is a bad joke. "Ah yes, let me name my philosophy 'obviously correctism'."
    • brightball 9mo ago
      Right up there with calling your group "The Good Guys"
      • raverbashing 9mo ago
        Or "Clean Code™"
        • HlessClaudesman 9mo ago
          Drivers who use their indicators, getting a little tired of all their incessant signaling.
      • mikkupikku 9mo ago
        It's stupid, but it works. There are innumerable examples of it, The People's Democratic Republic of Korea, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, National Socialism, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Good guys, or at least people who are good in the context of your or my value systems, also do it. I've got zero beef with my local Humane Society, they're great, but clearly the name of the organization has been chosen for its strong emotional potency.
• empathy_m 9mo ago
  I thought this piece was nice but: (1) It doesn't give Adams enough credit for his work on WhenHub. I was reading Scott Adams's posts about WhenHub contemporaneously as he worked through the startup's various pivots. He had a really good idea that people would want to see a map with a little live-location icon of where their friends & acquaintances were on the map and he pushed really hard on different ways of getting this idea towards reality. We have this now (in various other social map apps) and he showed good product sense. (2) It gives Adams too little credit for the sincerity of his views. > There’s a passage in the intro to one of Adams books where he says that, given how he’s going to blow your mind and totally puncture everything you previously believed, perhaps the work is unsuitable for people above fifty-five, whose brains are comparatively sclerotic and might shatter at the strain. This is how I feel about post-2016 politics. Young people were mostly able to weather the damage. As for older people, I have seen public intellectual after public intellectual who I previously respected have their brains turn to puddles of partisan-flavored mush. Jordan Peterson, Ken White, Curtis Yarvin, Paul Krugman, Elon Musk, the Weinsteins, [various people close enough to me that it would be impolite to name them here]. Once, these people were lions of insightful debate. Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? This is not fair. Adams knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what he was getting into for all of 2015-2026. He was an extremely smart guy. We should treat him seriously, not infantilize him. He was not a Nobel Prize winning chemist or Fields Medal winning mathematician coming up with wacky perpeutal-motion machines or cranky Riemann Hypothesis solutions that everyone politely agrees to ignore. His hypnosis stuff and all the rest were genuinely what he really believed -- it's not like Sir Michael Atiyah's Todd function. Adams was in the prime of his life, he was doing what mattered most to him, and we should take him at his word that he genuinely believed what he said and we should judge what he said on its merits. (3) I don't really have a disagreement but I am fascinated by the implication in the last 1/3 of the eulogy slatestarcodex view that Scott Adams was trying to establish a guru cult community - in convergent evolution with the sort of thing that the squishy half of TPOT tends to sprout in the East Bay. It's an interesting observation which tells me something about what is going on with Bay Area rationalism, though I don't know quite what. I thought that many of the things that happened to Adams -- especially his family troubles with his stepson, but also his illness -- were really sad. I'm sorry things didn't turn out differently and grateful for the cartoons.
• diego_moita 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  • lanfeust6 9mo ago
    What do you expect from 3-panel funnies exactly? Biting deep social commentary? All of these were formulaic, they were pumped out every week.
• shadowgovt 9mo ago
  For those who haven't read it, Scott Alexander's "Unsong" (https://unsongbook.com/ https://unsongbook.com/) is a very fun piece of historical fiction / religious fantasy. Basic premise is that the world is incredibly shocked when the Apollo 10 mission crashes into the Dome of the Sky and (a) proves that the Biblical cosmology was the true cosmology this whole time and (b) damages reality. It includes the idea that there is a whole cottage industry of people trying to apply technology to deciphering the True Name of God by essentially Mechanical Turking it ("If we divide up all possible syllable combinations into tranches and pay folks minimum wage to sit around reciting every syllable combination possible, we're bound to hit it sometime!").
  • TimorousBestie 9mo ago
    The book is okay (I think I gave it three stars on Goodreads?) but in my opinion it suffers from Neal Stephenson syndrome: the book kinda just ends without a whole lot of anticlimax or resolution. The pacing is all over the place and the supporting cast are more like character sketches than characters. I think Foucault’s Pendulum is a significantly better novel that uses the basic themes in more compelling ways.
    • CommieBobDole 9mo ago
      I read the whole thing and enjoyed both the premise and the writing, but yeah, it would have benefited considerably from the attention of a professional editor and a couple of rounds of rewrites.
    • andrewflnr 9mo ago
      It was an online serial. Any new plotline or character is a live experiment that might publicly fail to work out. That kind of thing does indeed need a lot of work to become a conventionally structured novel. That said I actually thought the ending was pretty alright. Well, most of it.
      • TimorousBestie 9mo ago
        I read it in real time. I read a lot of serialized fiction. It is possible to write a serial with decent pacing.
• snitzr 9mo ago
  I think this article really nails it. Adams' ego and self-satisfaction contributed to his susceptibility to the forces of the internet. It could happen to anyone. What I remember that is notable about Scott Adams is way back he had The Dilbert Blog and it was pioneering in it's early adoption of the internet. Adams wrote his takes and theories back then, too. But he once wrote that he was going to scale those back, because they were not productive: he would lose followers for being controversial. But later something happened with the feedback loop of social media, because he eventually started to court controversy. I do think that the internet sucked him in.
  • notahacker 9mo ago
    Think he was always unusually susceptible to the feedback loop of social media. Long before he was trying to be a political figure, criticism of his book resulted in this glorious piece of peak internet forum nonsense in which he responded to criticism by registering an anonymous account to say things like "I hate Adams for his success too" and "he's a certified genius which is hard to hide" until the mods decided to call him out... https://www.metafilter.com/102472/How-to-Get-a-Real-Education-by-Scott-Adams#3639512 https://www.metafilter.com/102472/How-to-Get-a-Real-Educatio...
• LogicFailsMe 9mo ago
  Mostly seems like yet another case of snorting one's own tailpipe to the very end. It's a shame, the comics were great. But so many who experience success like that begin to consider themselves chosen ones and it only goes downhill from there unless you're a clown genius (tm).
• Redoubts 9mo ago
  > Scott Adams based Dilbert on his career at Pacific Bell in the 80s. Can you imagine quitting Pacific Bell in the 80s to, uh, found your own Pacific Bell? Idk man, imagine quitting HP in the 70s to make your own HP or IBM. Inconceivable
  • mananaysiempre 9mo ago
    Quitting Fairchild to make your own semiconductor manufacturer (twice), quitting Intel to make your own CPU manufacturer, etc. The point isn’t that people didn’t do it if brave/desperate enough, the point is that it wasn’t a Thing You Can Do in the collective consciousness. Also, relatedly, that the societal infrastructure to support(/profit from) this category of people wasn’t yet in place, so you needed to be wealthy or connected (even more so than now).
• varjag 9mo ago
  I imagine them coming together at some Bay Area house party on copious amounts of LSD or MDMA. One, the world’s greatest comic writer, who more than anything else wanted to succeed in business. The other, the world’s greatest businessman, who more than anything else wanted people to think that he’s funny.
• YackerLose 9mo ago
  > Scott Adams felt the contradictions of nerd-dom more acutely than most. As compensation, he was gifted with two great defense mechanisms. The first was humor (which Freud grouped among the mature, adaptive defenses), aided by its handmaiden self-awareness. The second (from Freud’s “neurotic” category) was his own particular variety of reaction formation, “I’m better than those other nerds because, while they foolishly worship rationality and the intellect, I’ve gotten past it to the real deal, marketing / manipulation / persuasion / hypnosis.” Scott Adams was basically a classic Sophist, believing that rhetoric was the only thing worth cultivating. Nobody special; snake oil salesmen are up there with prostitutes and mercenaries in oldness of profession.
• chvid 9mo ago
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  • boca_honey 9mo ago
    What's wrong with going to the gym? Also, I don't think you know what the word fascist means.
    • SV_BubbleTime 9mo ago
      There is a no-joke they’re serious effort to link gym and fitness with conservative values. People on the left point to statistics and a study or two showing decent correlation. People on the right readily agree regardless of their fitness saying it’s because of discipline and personal responsibility. I think it’s funny to see people on the left lean into it.
  • SV_BubbleTime 9mo ago
    >Can we talk about how he in the end buried himself in vile racist politics? Can you point to anything other than the single post that he made saying “white should get/stay away from black people”? I’ve seen how he lost his way, or fell, or whatever. But all I’ve seen anyone post is one tweet one time. And every single time it leaves out the context that he was replying to a poll of black people saying the same about white people. There was also one comic strip that was actually a correct and decently good take on the failure/intersection of postmodernism and DEI. I don’t count that as it wasn’t a bad faith take it was on point. If there is more to I’d like to know.
    • SV_BubbleTime 9mo ago
      Shocking that no answer ever came.
• gradus_ad 9mo ago
  While this was a well written essay I enjoyed reading, likely the only thing I'll remember from it in a year is "If God is so smart, why do you fart?"
  • bambax 9mo ago
    Ok but what is this question trying to say? I never quite understood the argument that God should be "perfect"; it's entirely possible the universe we're in is a toy made for the amusement of an evil god-child, like we have ant farms, and they enjoy having meteorites and black holes and whatnot. It's not especially likely -- but it's not less likely than any of the other mainstream religious myths.
    • gradus_ad 9mo ago
      I'm remembering it not because it makes a good point, trying to reason about God is futile and pointless, but because it's funny both alone and because of its central role in the novel as saving humanity from a global holy war. Like that's just hilarious.
    • lukan 9mo ago
      "I never quite understood the argument that God should be "perfect"" My understanding from reading the bible while I was still christian is pretty much, that in the older parts, god was indeed not almighty. He was just the god of a desert tribe. And of course a stronger god than the other gods of the inferior tribes ... slowly evolving to obviously the strongest god up to the point that there was only one god. And there can be only one god if he is almighty. Or, so powerful that the difference does not matter anymore. Anyway, the logical fallacy of the "almighty" thing was the main thing for me to give up on the concept. I cannot accept a concept, that puts me in hell (or heaven), eternal damnation (or salvation) for being who I was made to be, influenced by an environment also totally controlled by the creator.
      • 1718627440 9mo ago
        The christian understanding of the concept of God, is that it is transcendental, i.e. beyond the universe. This means that from the view from inside the universe he must be almighty. A non-almighty "God" is just not a God, according to the Christian definition, it is just yet another thing in the universe. > a concept, that puts me in hell (or heaven) ... for being who I was made to be ... by the creator. Why do you think it needs to be an explicit action from the creator as opposed to being just the result of your own actions? When someone loves you, but you really don't love him/her back, that's quite the hell for you. Compared to the state of this being heaven to you, i.e. you do love back, there is no difference in intention or action from the other persons side.
• dangus 9mo ago
  Once the article made the claim that the was the greatest comic author of all time, it became clear that the article is overanalyzing the man. one aspect proving the overanalysis is the wild length of the article beyond that point. Just like how Jim Davis stumbled upon a reasonably funny, widely relatable gag that can be repeated for decades with minimal consequences, the success in Dilbert was being the first newspaper comic to live in the topic of corporate bureaucracy. In case we all forget how newspaper comics work in a digital world of curated content, they are all successful based on broad appeal. Each newspaper has approximately two pages of funny content and each strip has to appeal to a large subset of readers if not all of them. Family Circus is a perfect example. Dog funny. Reader like dog. Dog funny. Kids say funny thing with dog. Reader has kids and dog. The topic of “my boss is incompetent” is just as widely appealing as “my cat is lazy and selfish.” With all that context established we have to acknowledge that Scott Adams was a pretty normal guy with no particularly strong skills. So as the article points out, when he pivoted his life to other endeavors, his limitations are strikingly apparent. This is where I start not liking the guy. He had a smarter than thou attitude especially later in life when in reality, he was not himself particularly smart. I would stop short of calling him a narcissist but some vibes are there. He got lucky to be the guy who got a syndication deal at the right time making a specific type of comic. If he was born 20 years later he’d be a nobody, as the comic industry has completely changed. His craft was largely surpassed by web comic authors with more specific audiences and more intelligent writing.
  • yicmoggIrl 9mo ago
    > one aspect proving the overanalysis is the wild length of the article beyond that point I agree. I found the style tedious and the length exhausting. I'd occasionally read pieces from the author, and now I expected better. :/
• pfdietz 9mo ago
  I stopped paying any attention to him a while ago. He didn't seem to be something that was worth the time.
• deadbabe 9mo ago
  I was hoping this was a series of Dilbert comics to be released after Scott Adams death about Dilbert in the afterlife and was a bit disappointed.
• alsetmusic 9mo ago
  I also read Dilbert books years before joining the workforce. Though the framing of the strip is the workplace, it averages out to all the people in one's life who are wrong but have authority. As a rebellious little shit, I could identify with how Dilbert's boss (PHB) was wrong in ways that I recognized in adults around me plus my inability to do anything about it. This is why every level of worker can see themselves as Dilbert and their superiors as the management who "don't get it." I bet there are even C-suite execs who identify with Dilbert and see their CEO or board of directors as PHBs incarnate. This was part of the appeal of the strip before it went off the deep end; almost everyone taking orders believes they know better than at least one of the people telling them what to do. I'm surprised I don't see this acknowledged more.
  • WalterBright 9mo ago
    Pretty much everyone believes they can do the boss' job better than the boss. Until they get promoted and become like every other boss. When you start your own business, though, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
• bloomingeek 9mo ago
  <And the most successful parasites are always those which can alter their host environment to be more amenable to themselves, and if you’re a parasite taking the form of a bad idea, that means hijacking your host’s rationality.> After reading this, I thought, damn he just described the current administration. Then I kept reading and saw: <It all led, inexorably, to Trump.> Yeah(!), I think I'm gonna bookmark that site and reread it a few more times.
• hamburglar 9mo ago
  This article is great but it is insanely long and suffers from having no scroll bar on mobile. I read for over an hour, falling asleep at least three times, and wondering the entire time how far I was from finishing. Eventually I flicked the page upward to find out and could not believe how far I scrolled. I gave up at that point.
  • drodgers 9mo ago
    Don’t read long form content on mobile then? IDK what else to say.
    • hamburglar 9mo ago
      There’s a reason war and peace wasn’t written on a single page.
• brumar 9mo ago
  Best read I had in months. That,or maybe cognitive dissonance because I spent 1h of my life on it (there is a Dilbert joke just on that, mind you). Thank you Scott A.
• glemion43 9mo ago
  At the end of the day Dilbert was entertainment... And SA was weird as f who made money bye filling a niche. His political views and other snippets made that quite clear. And let's be honest just creating cartoons about our corporate capitalistic shit hole was easy enough hit a nerve but more than a chuckle was Dilbert never. It became cultural because it was printed everywhere and it was fun enough for it's format
• mise_en_place 9mo ago
  [flagged]
• Folcon 9mo ago
  I don't know if anyone else felt this[0], but my god did reading this part hit like an absolute truck Every child is hypomanic, convinced of their own specialness. Even most teenagers still suspect that, if everything went right, they could change the world. It’s not just nerds. Everyone has to crash into reality. The guitar player who starts a garage band in order to become a rockstar. The varsity athlete who wants to make the big leagues. They all eventually realize, no, I’m mediocre. Even the ones who aren’t mediocre, the ones with some special talent, only have one special talent (let’s say cartooning) and no more. I don’t know how the musicians and athletes cope. I hear stories about washed-up alcoholic former high school quarterbacks forever telling their girlfriends about how if Coach had only put them in for the last quarter during the big game, things would have gone differently. But since most writers are nerds, it’s the nerds who dominate the discussion, so much so that the whole affair gets dubbed “Former Gifted Kid Syndrome”. Every nerd who was the smartest kid in their high school goes to an appropriately-ranked college and realizes they’re nothing special. But also, once they go into some specific field they find that intellect, as versatile as it is, can only take them so far. And for someone who was told their whole childhood that they were going to cure cancer (alas, a real quote from my elementary school teacher), it’s a tough pill to swallow. I'd not at all considered that "Former Gifted Kid Syndrome" generalises to pretty much everyone, from being told that you're special to realising that you're not all the way to being incredibly skilled or talented in an area, but that talent only going so far and then having to get over their not being special and that it applies to physical and mental capabilities This sort of false expectation setting and feeling of exceptionalism eventually hits the cold hard reality of the limits of your capability somewhere and that can really break you Reminds me especially of some people I saw in university who were absolutely brilliant, but so deeply affected by that one mistake they made or limit they had found where they had not expected one Heck I felt the same, coming to terms with ones limits is a deeply challenging experience even if it is a very humanising one, I wasn't expecting to have that fall into my lap today There's a few things I enjoy about reading Scott Alexander, he's got some really good takes now and again that in my eyes make reading his essays worth it -[0]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/184503512/its-not-funny-if-i-have-to-explain-it https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/184503512/its-not-funny-if-...
  • mcmoor 9mo ago
• cannabis_sam 9mo ago
  It’s not hard, the dilbert guy was a psycho, sucks if you liked him, he was emphatically a psychopath. Maybe it’s time to reconsider some of your atrocious views, and learn some empathy
  • cannabis_sam 9mo ago
    In other news, fuck dilbert jfc
• gtoast 9mo ago
  I don't understand this white washing (no pun intended) of "Its okay to be white" a well known white supremacist troll slogan (see wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_okay_to_be_white https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_okay_to_be_white). How does one write an article this obnoxiously long and negelect key context of that whole ordeal?
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• bildabearg 9mo ago
  [flagged]
• pointbob 9mo ago
  [dead]
• novemp 9mo ago
  An internet eulogizes a cartoonist. Some Hackernews discuss middle management; others decry the woke mob. No technology is discussed.
• chrisyeh 9mo ago
  I believe in the general principle that it is dangerous to deny reality. Note that this is different than saying that you have to accept reality as it is. But not only does denying reality damage your psyche, it also prevents you from choosing the best ways to actually change reality for the better.