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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

• 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.
      • prewett 9mo ago
        “I’ve got zero beef with my local Humane Society”: this is wonderful! It’s got irony but the irony of the irony is that it’s literally correct.
  • jchw 9mo ago
    I don't really identify with any particular movement, but it's important to note that there are plenty of people who legitimately oppose the core concept of rationalism, the idea that reason should be held above other approaches to knowledge, this being put aside from other criticisms leveled at the group of people that call themselves rationalists. Apparently, rationalism isn't obviously correct. Unfortunately, I don't really have enough of a background in philosophy to really understand how this follows, but looking at how the world actually works, I don't struggle to believe that most people (certainly many decision makers) don't actually regard rationality as highly as other things, like tradition.
    • zzzeek 9mo ago
      there are two facets to "is rationalism good". one is, "is there a rational description of the universe, the world, humanity, etc.". Some people think there isn't, but I would like to think that the universe does conform to some rational system. the other, and important one is, "do humans have the capability to acquire and fully model this rational system in their own minds" and I don't think that's a given. the human brain is just an artifact of an evolutionary system that only implies that its owners can survive and persist on the earth as it happens to exist in the current 50K year period it occurs in. It's not clear that humans have even slight ability to be perfectly rational analytic engines, as opposed to unique animals responding to desires and fears. this is why it's so silly when "rationalists" try to appear as so above all the other lowly humans, as though escaping human nature is even an option.
      • card_zero 9mo ago
        Uh-huh. Rationality is open-ended, we're apparently not very good at it and room for improvement is plentiful. However, I can still try to be rational, and approve of rationality.
        • zzzeek 9mo ago
          see that? you didnt even read what I wrote and responded to something else. then I'm not able to not be snarky about it.
  • didgeoridoo 9mo ago
    Or naming your cult “The Reasonabilists” https://parksandrecreation.fandom.com/wiki/The_Reasonabilists https://parksandrecreation.fandom.com/wiki/The_Reasonabilist...
  • polotics 9mo ago
    Well, I agree but think it is even worse than this. Anyone who hasn't got wind of the opposition between rationalism and empiricism is squarely placing themselves in a very ancient thought-space, more Plato than Kant, no Popper, no modernity. They are basically outing themselves as either having little curiosity, or as having had very limited opportunity to learn... Still if they expound on it, the curiosity deficit is the most likely explanation.
  • Aurornis 9mo ago
    In theory, the name is supposed to imply that they're pursuing rational thinking and philosophies, not that their decisions are the rational choice. That said, I was surrounded by rationalists in my younger years by pure coincidence and spent some time following the blog links they sent and later reading the occasional LessWrong thread or SSC comment section that they were discussing each day in chat. It's pretty easy to see that the movement attracts a lot of people who have made up their minds but use rationalisim as a way to build a scaffold underneath their pre-determined beliefs in a way that sounds correct. The blogs and forums celebrate writing of a certain style that feels correct and truthy. Anyone who learns how to write in that style can get their ideas accepted as fact in rationalist communities by writing that way. You can find examples throughout history where even the heroes of the rationalist movement have written illogical things, but they've done it in the correct way that makes it appear to be "first principals" thinking with a "steelmanning" of the other side along with appropriate prose to sound correct to rationalists.
    • JuniperMesos 9mo ago
      You should explicitly state who those people are, what illogical things they have written, and why they are illogical. I think it's very likely that people who can plausibly be considered "heroes of the rationalist movement" have written illogical things. But I don't know which specific people and which specific things you mean by that, so I don't know if I think you in particular are correct in your judgement or not. Using first principles thinking and steelmanning are just rhetorical techniques for persuasive thinking and writing. Even people who are unfamiliar with those particular pieces of terminology do them.
• inglor_cz 9mo ago
  J. W. Goethe was obsessed with "Farbenlehre" [0], which is so weird that it is "not even wrong". I don't think it detracts from his intelligence. It was just his blind corner, so to say. Intelligent people are sometimes very, very weird. Grothendieck and Gödel come to mind as well. It is not smart to die of hunger because your wife is hospitalized, every lizard knows better than that; but that is precisely how Gödel met his end. [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farbenlehre_(Goethe) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farbenlehre_(Goethe)
  • cauch 9mo ago
    The example I gave what about Adams being convinced to "know better" while it was clearly not true, which is to me a clue that when it comes to his view on society and business, which already looks pretty simplistic to me, the idea that he "knew better" is more probably the result of him thinking that and managing to convince others people who also like to see themselves as smarter than others.
  • kilpikaarna 9mo ago
    >J. W. Goethe was obsessed with "Farbenlehre" [0], which is so weird that it is "not even wrong". I think that's a bit harsh? Goethe's color theory is taught in every art school to this day. Goethe and science is an interesting one. In some sense he may have been a Newton of another, separate (and in some sense orthogonal) approach towards a science of nature [0]. One that takes primarily an intuitive/integrative/phenomenological approach to the world, rather than a mathematical/analytical. Somewhat analogous to continental vs analytical philosophy (or German vs British, if you want to be reductive). The latter showed its strength once the industrial revolution rolled around and it gave the tools to understand and design ever more impressive technology, with the Goethean approach becoming ever more fringe. And after WW1+2 the cultural sphere that nurtured it was basically done. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethean_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethean_science
• zczc 9mo ago
  Yes, he was an idiot, but that doesn't contradict that he was smart. In his own words, from The Dilbert Principle book: "People are idiots. Including me. Everyone is an idiot, not just the people with low SAT scores. The only differences among us is that we're idiots about different things at different times. No matter how smart you are, you spend much of your day being an idiot. That's the central premise of this scholarly work. I proudly include myself in the idiot category. Idiocy in the modern age isn't an all-encompassing, twenty-four-hour situation for most people. It's a condition that everybody slips into many times a day. Life is just too complicated to be smart all the time."
  • AtlasBarfed 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    • Der_Einzige 9mo ago
      Who were the primary class of people drawn to the SS and the SA? At least in the SA's case it was working class to lower middle class people. Also, so many reds (as in communists) became fascists it was a meme in Nazi Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beefsteak_Nazi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beefsteak_Nazi I don't think white collar tech workers are uniquely predisposed to fascism. Blue collar tradesmen are more likely to be disposed to it and capable of getting their hands dirty.
  • cauch 9mo ago
    Not sure this really obvious analysis really helps. I've seen a lot of people thinking they are really smart for saying that everyone including them are idiots. Adams made a lot of declarations or actions that shows that he really thought of himself as "able to see what the idiot sheeple were not able to see", and this quote is not out of character at all: "you idiots don't even realise that everyone is an idiot including me".
    • Supermancho 9mo ago
      > Not sure this really obvious analysis really helps Doesn't help you, sure. I'm not a fan, as a matter of taste and am self-aware enough to recognize it. The near-reliable output of his creativity and the pervasive notions, distilled and distributed to the culture are proof enough for history.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• Sprotch 9mo ago
  I suggest you read the article, it states the exact opposite and agrees with you
  • cauch 9mo ago
    I think the article explains that Adams "turned bad" because it is the sad consequence of him being smarter than the rest of the people. I'm pretty sure that someone who has time to lose can got through the article and pick up all of the quotes about how Adams was clever and the managers were so dum.
    • nearbuy 9mo ago
      No, the article argues that Adams was good at one very specific thing (writing silly comics about the workplace) and bad at everything else. It's very clear on that point. It argues that later in life he lost his self-awareness of his own ineptitude and began to falsely believe he was smarter than everyone.
      • cauch 9mo ago
        There are plenty of quotes like this one > For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything This does not mean "bad at everything else", this is explicitly "not bad at everything else, even slightly better than usual".
        • nearbuy 9mo ago
          Keep reading. The central thesis of the article/eulogy is that Adams wanted to be successful at something more serious than Dilbert but was bad at everything else he tried. It talks about his first new business attempt with the Dilberito, which was terrible. It quotes, it "could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste". Then he tries to run a restaurant, which he is also bad at. Even Adams realizes he is bad at it. "After every workday, Adams and the waiters get together and laugh long into the night together about how bad a boss Adams is!" Then he tries his hand at writing philosophy, which he is also terrible at. The article spends two long sections describing just how bad his books "God's Debris" and "The Religion War" are. Then the article describes how Adams claimed himself to be a master hypnotist/manipulator in the most delusional and cringey way possible. Then the article talks about Adams' many terrible political predictions. E.g. "His most famous howler was that if Biden won in 2020, Republicans “would be hunted” and his Republican readers would “most likely be dead within a year”." Then there's how he responded to liberals beginning to see him as an enemy when he was predicting Trump would win the 2016 election: "As he had done so many other times during his life, he resolved the conflict in the dumbest, cringiest, and most public way possible: a June 2016 blog post announcing that he was endorsing Hillary Clinton, for his own safety, because he suspected he would be targeted for assassination if he didn’t" Then in 2023, Adams stupidly gets himself cancelled. > There are plenty of quotes like this one No, there aren't. While the article/eulogy says a number of positive things about Adams, that very faint praise at the beginning is the only place the article describes him as being even only-slightly-above-average intelligence at anything other than Dilbert. What it does mention several times is that Adams thought himself cleverer than everyone else. For example (describing Adams' thoughts): > Thesis: I am cleverer than everyone else. > Antithesis: I always lose to the Pointy-Haired Boss. > Synthesis: I was trying to be rational. But most people are irrational sheep; they can be directed only by charismatic manipulators who play on their biases, not by rational persuasion. But now I’m back to being cleverer than everyone else, because I noticed this. Also, I should become a charismatic manipulator. But the tone here is mocking Adams and not endorsing his view.
• terminalshort 9mo ago
  You don't look for smart people by looking for people who don't do stupid things, because you won't find any. You look for smart people by finding people who do smart things because stupid people don't do smart people things.
  • cauch 9mo ago
    I'm not saying Adams is not smart because he has done stupid things, I'm saying that Adams has probably thought of himself as very smart while not smart at all in field X because it is pretty clear he has done that in fields Y and Z (which is the first clue). The second clue is about the fact that the "smart thing" he came up with is quite simplistic.
• bambax 9mo ago
  Scott Adams was more clever than most because, as the article says more than once, he was named "Scott A." and so was the author, to whom an elementary school teacher said he was going to "cure cancer", whatever that means. Maybe the teacher was sincere -- or maybe he was trying to be nice and got misunderstood.
• tombert 9mo ago
  Reminds me of my stoner friends in high school who would watch a few videos by Carl Sagan and then become convinced that they know everything about physics and come up with convoluted and ultimately silly “theories” for physics. Makes me wonder if Adams was a frequent drug user.
  • gyomu 9mo ago
    Ironically enough, Carl Sagan on marijuana: "I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can’t go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books." https://www.organism.earth/library/document/mr-x https://www.organism.earth/library/document/mr-x