[HN Gopher] The Dilbert Afterlife
___________________________________________________________________
The Dilbert Afterlife
Author : rendall
Score : 409 points
Date : 2026-01-16 14:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.astralcodexten.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.astralcodexten.com)
| MPSimmons wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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
| ikamm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| listenallyall wrote:
| That's fine - the man was certainly not above being
| criticized, and he had plenty of flaws. Point is, do it
| while he's alive, don't wait until he's dead (especially
| when his death was not a surprise)
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > do it while he's alive,
|
| Why? Must every obituary be a hagiography?
|
| Adams got plenty of criticism while alive and had plenty
| of chance to defend himself. He doesn't get a heckler's
| veto on the living. We are entitled to tell the truth
| about the dead to ensure the accuracy of their memory.
| listenallyall wrote:
| But this wasn't an obituary. It wasnt a recalling of
| facts about his life. It wasnt written for a news outlet
| which publishes obits about most notable figures. It was
| an opinion piece and a discussion of how Adams affected
| the writer.
|
| Of course Alexander, or anyone, has the right to be
| critical. It's just cowardly to wait till he's dead when
| he isn't able to refute any of the points (or even to
| absorb them and say, yea, he's right about this, I'm
| going to try doing better).
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > But this wasn't an obituary. It wasnt a recalling of
| facts about his life. It wasnt written for a news outlet
| which publishes obits about most notable figures. It was
| an opinion piece and a discussion of how Adams affected
| the writer.
|
| Of course it was an obituary. It did recall facts of his
| life. There is no rule requiring obituaries to be
| positive or published in mainstream, dead-tree
| newspapers. There is a long historical tradition of
| heavily opinionated obituaries. Here's a great example
| about Margaret Thatcher [1].
|
| If we can set aside your nit-picking about the word
| "obituary," I still don't understand your position that
| it's somehow "cowardly" to criticize dead people. As I've
| already pointed out, Adams got lots of criticism while
| alive and the timing of Alexander's article certainly
| isn't motivated by cowardice. To say only kind things of
| the dead is to be dishonest. We owe it to ourselves to
| not sugarcoat the past. Or do you think that a history
| book that accurately recounts Joseph Stalin's rule of the
| Soviet Union is "cowardly"?
|
| [1] https://socialistworker.co.uk/news/margaret-thatcher-
| a-bruta...
| energy123 wrote:
| Adams says that his comic skills are nothing more than a talent
| stack of multiple only-slightly-above-average skills.
| fatherwavelet wrote:
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Are you still in freelancing? Did you ever discover any
| companies or teams that worked well together?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Software and computers is not all there is to technology. There
| are plenty of other STEM fields that didn't enjoy a decades
| long surge in demand. Dilbert still very much applies there.
|
| Aside from that, all the things you list are perks and
| benefits. The same old problems with BS budgets, hallucinated
| requirements, convoluted bureaucracy (seen at the tech giants),
| and mismanagement are evergreen problems even in the software
| industry.
| jbs789 wrote:
| You are describing a top 2pct experience.
| roenxi wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| ^^;
|
| 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.
| uep wrote:
| > 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?
| dpark wrote:
| > Accepting white inferiority?
|
| Because if you reject white supremacy, obviously the
| implication is white inferiority...
|
| White supremacists generally deny that they have societal
| advantages and frame any attempt to give minorities equal
| opportunities as a plot to subjugate whites.
|
| > Full blown resistance marketing market?
|
| MAGA and the rise of neonazis.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| > White supremacists generally deny that they have
| societal advantages and frame any attempt to give
| minorities equal opportunities as a plot to subjugate
| whites.
|
| White people are not a demographic majority in many
| places (including where I personally live), and yes most
| ostensible attempts to give nonwhites equal opportunities
| to whites wind up as blatant anti-white discrimination.
| White people are morally justified in politically
| resisting this even if leftists call white people who do
| so white supremacists or neonazis.
| fareesh wrote:
| Regular listeners know he knew exactly what he was doing i.e.
| the cancellation was priced in.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _he 'd probably swallow his pride and accept that It Is Not
| OK To Be White_
|
| Off-topic: English is not classical formal logic. NOT("It's
| okay to be white") does not have the same meaning as "It's not
| okay to be white": it merely means "I reject what is
| communicated by the phrase 'It's okay to be white'". This
| observation fits quite well into any analysis of slogans: if he
| hadn't committed to the uncharitable misinterpretation, I'd
| expect him to write about this (though I'm not so sure he'd
| have used this particular example).
| alexpotato wrote:
| 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/
| api wrote:
| 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.
| pluralmonad wrote:
| You got it backwards. We (which we?) don't need them, they
| need us. They can't play the games they like without massive
| resource extraction. If someone continually catches the flu,
| it doesn't mean they need the flu.
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| > We are teaching the sand to think and working on 3d
| printing organs and peering at the beginning of time with
| super-telescopes and landing rockets.
|
| There are a lot of smart and skilled people involved in
| making a cutting edge chip fab. It's not one ubermensch in a
| basement inventing a new TSMC process by thinking really
| hard. There's technicians, scientists, researchers in
| multiple disciplines. All of those people have to be
| organized.
|
| I don't know where you think the "smart" people are, but
| maybe meditate on the fact that "smartness" is not a single
| variable that dictates a person's value or success. Someone
| who is an expert at researching extreme UV patterning isn't
| going to necessarily run a great chip manufacturer.
| Bendy wrote:
| We don't just use these people we create them. Since ancient
| Egypt the priest class of every society is employed to apply
| ritual trauma to psychologically prepare princes for their
| vocation of restless leadership.
| botacode wrote:
| The order is wrong here:
|
| Governance creates markets -> markets create innovation.
| These things have feedback loops into governance, but the
| tail ultimately does not wag the dog.
|
| Engineers-- especially in the Bay where discussion of such is
| written off as mental illness-- often dismiss politics and
| governance as nonsense subjects that lack rules and are run
| by the mob/emotions. The reality however, is that these
| societal constructs have their own "physics" and operate like
| a (very complex and challenging to study) system just like
| everything else in the natural world.
|
| The attitude itself is of course something has been designed
| and implemented into engineering culture by precisely the
| leaders you contend are scape goats to society. POSIWID.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Governance creates markets"
|
| I am not sure this is necessarily the case, at least
| historically. We have good evidence of long distance trade
| from the Stone Age, and even some Neanderthal sites contain
| stones whose origin can be traced to distant regions (over
| 100 km, IIRC, which is far away in a primordial roadless
| countryside).
|
| I would agree that markets cannot grow beyond a certain
| size without a government, though.
| retrac wrote:
| Presence of trade is not necessarily a market in the
| modern sense.
| jnovek wrote:
| > The attitude itself is of course something has been
| designed and implemented into engineering culture by
| precisely the leaders you contend are scape goats to
| society. POSIWID.
|
| I don't know if this particular statement is true or not,
| but the number of smart people I know who thinks they're
| not affected by propaganda is wild. We're all affected by
| propaganda.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| If for no other reason, that's true because we live in a
| democratic republic. If you're affected by propaganda,
| then I am, too.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Those games operate far more probablistically and high
| dimensionally than programming and I suspect engineers
| would rather dismiss them as "dumb" than accept they are
| simply inferior players in those games.
|
| Primary multi agent multi dimension probabilistic
| resolution problems model human and crowd interaction
| better than "code do this every time".
|
| I've spent a long time in the valley and I've come to the
| personal conclusion that engineers are often the dumbest
| (and most narrowly useful) in the room not the smartest.
| And the rest of them let them think they are very smart
| (tm) so they do what we say.
| dtech wrote:
| It's pretty simple: those people are the absolute experts in
| their field, similar to those top chemists or whatever. That
| field is societal power systems.
|
| Of course someone who dedicated his time to climbing and
| understanding power systems will have more power than someone
| who doesn't.
| api wrote:
| Sure, but then my question is why we need them. What
| service do they provide? That's what I was speculating
| about. I don't buy the conspiracy theory that they're pure
| parasites, since hosts without parasites would then be
| stronger and would ultimately outcompete.
|
| We have all the skills to do all the things without these
| power systems so what are they for?
|
| I don't mean policing and courts. Those are administrative
| and managerial functions. I mean _power_ of the sort that
| makes large numbers of people do stuff. I mean gurus and
| aggrandizers, basically. The people who con and goad us
| into doing hard things.
|
| My hypothesis is that we can't self generate that due to
| neurological limitations rooted in our evolutionary history
| in a much slower world that rarely changed.
|
| Amphetamine could work too but it has ugly side effects.
| Social pressure is less hazardous and scales better.
| dasil003 wrote:
| People are not inspired by institutions and committees,
| you need a personality that can articulate a vision.
| phtrivier wrote:
| Managers are here to accommodate the need for
| cooperation, while compensating for lack of telepathy.
|
| Put two people with a lot of expertise in different
| domain. Require them to come up with a solution to a
| problem you have.
|
| That's three people. You'll get at the very least four
| opinions about each and every step.
|
| Scale the complexity of the problems and the number of
| people.
|
| You end up with full time jobs consisting purely in
| routing information from brain A to brain Z.
|
| Unfortunately, the skills to do this job are never
| properly taught, but learnt in the job. (MBA don't teach
| management - they either teach the mechanism of some
| administration, or ways to get rich consulting.)
|
| Problems occur because we conflate management,
| supervision, decision making, strategy setting, etc...
|
| P.H.B. is an antipattern, a caricature, a stereotype like
| all other : it's funny cause there is truth to it. But we
| are by no mean condemned to fulfill our stereotypes
| (should I remind all engineers here about the stigmas
| attached to nerd in the real world ?)
| erichocean wrote:
| The WIDGET model of "working geniuses" is one possible
| answer, it does explain a lot of team dynamics in my
| experience.
|
| Since no one has all six working geniuses, and you're
| only a genius at two, it takes a collection of people,
| proportional to the work that needs to be done, of each
| type.
| alexpotato wrote:
| The opposite note widget is the "film director".
|
| Eg they are not the best screenwriter, producer or
| cinematographer but they are the best at getting all of
| those people to work together.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > I don't mean policing and courts. Those are
| administrative and managerial functions.
|
| Middle management is also an admininstrative and
| managerial function. Even in a best-case scenario,
| coordinating work among a huge amount of people within
| enterprises that are mostly run via command-and-control
| mechanisms and inside politics (as opposed to any self-
| regulating "market") obviously takes a whole lot of
| effort. That's really the natural job description for
| PHB's.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| How very Dilbertian. If one were to compress the above post
| into a comic, it would star Dilbert wondering why people with
| towering intellects like Dilbert weren't running the world in
| the first panel and then humorously demonstrating in
| subsequent panels Dilbert's disastrous and irreparable lack
| of understanding of messy human interrelationships and
| motivations that have to be navigated to not implode as a
| leader.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Well observed. And seen in tragic relief as the piles of
| dead in Russia and China during their most technocratic
| periods run by engineers.
|
| Which wasn't just about refusal to interact with humanity
| but to acknowledge that complex multi factor problems can't
| be solved as top down heuristics.
| terminalshort wrote:
| The piles of bodies in China came from Mao and his
| cultural revolution, and he can hardly be called an
| engineer. The recent success of China has come when it
| was run by engineers. And when was Russia ever run by
| engineers? So I think you have it backwards here.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| "Russia was never run by engineers?" That's a massive
| oversight of 20th-century history. The Soviet Union was
| the world's first and most committed technocracy. The
| GOSPLAN (State Planning Committee) was a literal attempt
| to run a continent-sized economy as a deterministic
| engineering problem. By the 70s, the Soviet leadership
| was more densely packed with engineers than any
| administration in US history.
|
| They failed because they tried to 'refactor' nature.
| Stalin's 'Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature'
| and Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' (which applied industrial
| throughput logic to biology/close-planting) are the
| ultimate warnings of what happens when you treat complex,
| probabilistic systems (ecology and humanity) like a
| closed-loop machine.
|
| Mao wasn't an engineer by degree, but he was a High
| Modernist by practice. He believed society could be
| 'debugged' and 'optimized' through central planning. The
| result wasn't a more efficient system; it was a total
| system crash that cost tens of millions of lives.
|
| Current China is a perfect example of 'Success by
| Engineering'--high-speed rail and ghost cities built on a
| demographic 'memory leak' (the One Child Policy) that is
| now crashing the entire stack. This is exactly my point:
| Engineers optimize for the metric they can see, while
| ignoring the high-dimensional chaos that actually
| sustains life.
| 8note wrote:
| i dont think this matches what you said earlier, that
| when there was the most engineers is when there was the
| most death.
|
| instead, the most engineers corresponds with some time
| after the mass death. an alternative explanation would be
| that they started with non-engineers wanting to enforce
| high modernism and it didnt work, and then they switched
| to engineers and it did
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Sure. Whatever. But changing the goalpost to whatever
| personal nonsense definition for engineering is literally
| proves my point.
| jrjeksjd8d wrote:
| The Gervais Principle is much more accurate in my experience.
| One of the important reasons middle management has to be
| "clueless" to drink the kool-aid and take on more
| responsibility for minimal extra compensation. The checked out
| employees of the world know their work is meaningless, but the
| clueless ascribe to it some greater meaning which makes them
| trustworthy.
| dpark wrote:
| The PHB is not middle management. Middle management is at
| least one level above the PHB.
| zahlman wrote:
| That depends on the company size, surely?
| dpark wrote:
| No. A first level manager cannot be middle management. A
| small company might not _have_ middle management but the
| first level manager is bottom management.
| eep_social wrote:
| > bottom management
|
| "line management" is the term I am familiar with
| bananaflag wrote:
| Scott Alexander reviewed it:
|
| https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...
| paulpauper wrote:
| _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._
|
| Why not just fire the incompetent employee? Isn't this obvious?
| refulgentis wrote:
| When I ponder this, the "Isn't it obvious?" frame ends up
| cutting both ways: ex. isn't it obvious this isn't _actually_
| an active thought when people make these decisions? (to wit,
| the theory cited is based on The Office TV series, which also
| never depicts this)
| krackers wrote:
| I found https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/
| has a good comparison
|
| >The Peter Principle holds that people are promoted until they
| prove incompetent in their role, and then they remain there;
| competence is rewarded with promotion and incompetence is
| rewarded with the status quo.
|
| >The Dilbert Principle, with more of a knowledge-worker focus,
| rings true to those of us who have seen terrible programmers
| promoted to project managers. It states that bad employees are
| promoted into management to prevent them from doing damage with
| their incompetence.
|
| >The Gervais Principle gives a lot more credit to those at the
| very top (which, in my opinion, makes it far more accurate in
| its reasoning about corporate leadership); it says that the
| sociopaths that run the organization knowingly over-promote
| dedicated but relatively inept people into middle management
| [and this is done so execs can use them as canon fodder, buffer
| in interaction, and and avoid having their own jobs threatened]
| etruong42 wrote:
| It's nice to see someone else (unsurprisingly) reached
| identical conclusions as me! I would like to try adding a 3rd
| reason: dumb subordinates don't upset the apple cart because
| they don't really have the capacity to do so, and people in
| power hate upsetting the apple cart as they love the status quo
| that puts them in power.
|
| Smart, moral people have practically a compulsion to improve
| things, or at least call out idiocy.
|
| I would also add the need for an actual reason to promote the
| PHB, and I would argue that one quantifiable way upper
| management can try to argue for a promotion of the PHB is how
| "hard they work" (regardless if they achieve results or not).
| Putting in many, many hours also help promote PHBs who will
| defer to authority.
|
| It also helps explain the phenomenon where the manager class
| becomes soulless. Institutions that focus on preserving their
| own power rather than creating value will promote people (at
| least to middle management) who are willing to put their nose
| to the grindstone, sacrifice their health and relationship,
| producing nothing of value, all to walk on some concept of a
| career treadmill faster.
| rendx wrote:
| There's also the Commander In-Chief of the German reichswehr
| quote about officers:
|
| "I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking,
| stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are
| combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the
| General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up
| 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties.
| Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest
| leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and
| strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must
| beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must
| not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always
| only cause damage."
|
| https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
| adolph wrote:
| The Gervais Principle is fascinating and a bit too inflexibly
| nihilistic in my mind.
|
| A transcendent theory past both is Komoroske's "Coordination
| Headwinds"
|
| https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/
| alexpotato wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Interestingly, Adams also pointed out the persuasion flaws in
| Hillary's campaign. Evidently, the Hillary team noticed this
| and changed their messaging, which Adams then commented on.
| ironbound wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-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
| DFHippie wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Trump's trademark skill is conning and taking advantage of
| people, just like Dogbert.
| doogedmmmh wrote:
| He even fooled Scott. Impressive!
| leoc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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-ada...
| catoc wrote:
| https://archive.is/9JVkU
| raverbashing wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| We don't even have cubicles anymore, it's all everyone
| shoved onto the same table now.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Indeed it's telling how bad things haven gotten that many
| would yearn for the cubicle now
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, and pre-cubicles, it was just a bunch of tables in
| a big room surrounded by managers in offices.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The open workroom was a relatively short fad pioneered by
| Frank Lloyd Wright. If you look at office buildings
| before that, they're much more similar to houses and
| apartments. Lots of rooms connected by hallways,
| staircases, and atriums. You can imagine the difficulty
| and expense of lighting a large open space without
| electricity.
| pm3003 wrote:
| In Europe I see a lot of companies with open space
| workrooms with some cubicles, maybe 30-40% of workers at
| those companies seem to work in them.
| coldtea wrote:
| No, it wasn't. Most companies had separate offices,
| individual or with 2-4 desks in them.
| userbinator wrote:
| There are still many companies with cubicles, although
| they do seem to be getting rarer.
| paulpauper wrote:
| even worse lol
|
| it's like "I hear you hate cubicles, so we can solve the
| cubicle problem and save money at the same time"
| ivell wrote:
| With clean desk policies in some organizations, you would
| be lucky to have a seat. Initial 5-10 minutes are spent
| on finding a place to sit.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I used to say seeing Dilbert strips in the office is a
| warning sign. People shouldn't identify with Dilbert.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| When in the 1990s-00s people posted _Dilbert_ strips, it
| wasn 't, IME, because they identified with the character
| Dilbert.
|
| They did it because they saw in their work environment
| echoes of the environment portrayed in the comic, of which
| Dilbert was as much a part as the PHB.
| dgxyz wrote:
| Yeah that. Some ethics and management training programmes
| leveraged it because they thought it was popular. I still
| have a dilbert ethics training certificate somewhere as a
| reminder of how fucked up corp culture is.
|
| American corp in Europe for ref. Defence. Absolute top tier
| stereotype asshats.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Very true, Wally is my spirit animal.
| maxlybbert wrote:
| For what it's worth, the only company where I posted
| Dilbert art (two animation cels that my wife bought for me
| from eBay) was nothing like the Dilbert world. It's just
| that I loved Dilbert and I thought it was a funny
| decoration.
| da02 wrote:
| Did you ever encounter a well managed (or well functioning)
| team(s)? If so, why do you think they performed so well?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Great question. The best team I can name had these things
| going for them:
|
| - Constrained scope (they were the UI team on an internal
| product; by the time they got their marching orders the whole
| thing was a very well understood problem domain)
|
| - Excellent manager (he has infinite calm, deep empathy for
| the fact that real people are messy and complicated, and an
| incredible nose for time estimates). There was basically no
| amount of pressure up-chain could put on him that would shake
| his cool; he seems to be completely confident internally that
| the worst-case scenario is he goes and lands on his feet
| somewhere else.
|
| As a result, his team was basically always happy and high-
| performing and he consistently missed up-chain expectations
| set by project managers above him who had to consistently
| report that UI wasn't going to be delivered on the timeline
| they set because they had taken his estimates and shaved
| three weeks off of them, only to discover that the estimates
| were dead-on and _they_ were the liars. He was insulated from
| this by (a) keeping consistently good notes on his initial
| estimates, everything that bumped them, and the final
| deliverable dates and (b) having skip-level meetings where he
| could present all of this to his boss 's boss clearly.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I had a period where I was on a team like that. We didn't
| have a manager.
|
| Though some of my worst work periods was when I didn't have a
| manager either lol.
| duskwuff wrote:
| I'm reminded of the story of Graphing Calculator:
|
| "His contract in another division at Apple had just ended,
| so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me.
| She didn't ask who I was and let him keep his office and
| badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him.
| Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings
| and could be extremely productive."
|
| - https://www.pacifict.com/story/
| sosborn wrote:
| It's almost as if the roles/titles aren't the determining
| factor.
| cm2012 wrote:
| The manager has decision making power, a well paid senior
| team, and a clear goal. I have seen it work like a dream.
| yojo wrote:
| My former manager organized an offsite where we all watched
| Office Space together.
|
| Did she just not get it? Or did she get it, and it was some
| weird flex making us watch it with her? I still don't know.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Did you not realize we've built a system where everyone is
| both oppressor and oppressed. Did you not think she too had
| an idiot boss?
| helterskelter wrote:
| Shit rolls downhill...and most people just try to keep an
| eye on where the next turd comes from without bothering to
| watch where it goes after it's past them.
| wordpad wrote:
| That's... So wise... Where is that from
| tejtm wrote:
| from how to be a plumber -- Shit flows
| downhill, payday is on Friday.
| buildsjets wrote:
| You forgot the most important rule of plumbing: Don't
| bite your fingernails.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Not enough people realize this, unfortunately. If they did
| our system would be flatter than it currently is. You
| wouldn't have "peaks", so to speak.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Your manager had a boss, too. She had to deal with the
| oddities and frustrations of corporate life and expectations,
| too.
|
| Even your CEO has a board to deal with.
|
| I always think it's strange when people draw a mental
| dividing line between ICs and managers and think people on
| the other side are living in totally different experiences of
| the world.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Middle management rarely has enough power to make any
| changes. They have to dish out whatever bullshit is handed
| down to them from above.
| yojo wrote:
| I get that we're all part of the same system, but I
| consider Office Space a nihilistic rejection of the
| entirety of that system. It's not just "my boss is dumb,"
| it's "this whole system is anti-human and dumb, and we'd
| all be happier working outside with our muscles."
|
| And it's totally appropriate for that message to resonate
| with my boss, but it's _weird_ for my boss to make that
| message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-
| building event.
|
| Edit: just realized I used a "it's not just _this_ , it's
| _that_ " construction. I swear I'm not an LLM, but maybe
| their prose is infecting my brain.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > but it's weird for my boss to make that message the
| focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building
| event.
|
| Having been a manager: I bet your boss didn't want to be
| there any more than you did. They were forced to do
| corporate team-building and they recognized the absurdity
| of it all.
|
| So they tried to come up with something entertaining that
| they could claim was passably work-related. They were
| trying to do their best by you within the constraints of
| what was mandated by their job.
|
| This looks like a nice gesture. You are too occupied
| viewing your manager as "the other" to recognize when
| they were trying to bond and do something nice for the
| team _within the constraints of their job_.
|
| You're lucky. At corporate team-building retreats I never
| got to watch any fun movies. One had us listen to
| lectures by a manager whose primary experience was as a
| little league coach and who thought leading his team was
| the same thing. The other involved the manager giving us
| a psychology test of his own creation and trying to
| lecture us about what he thought our learning styles and
| weaknesses were based on all the different self-help
| books he read.
| yojo wrote:
| Totally valid that my boss probably didn't want to be
| there either, but for context this was circa 2008 Google
| where "offsite" meant "go spend company money to do
| something fun."
|
| Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa or
| an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really wanted
| to watch a movie, the options were _all other movies_.
| Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your shared
| reality?
| groby_b wrote:
| Because your manager might have been dealing with
| something privately, and didn't feel like doing something
| fun, but had to because the Gods Of Corporate decreed it
| so.
|
| And so, an act of rebellion against a shared reality that
| forces you to have fun on schedule when it's time for the
| quarterly offsite.
| TheGRS wrote:
| I dunno watching office space with my team doesn't seem
| like the worst way to spend some time together. Maybe
| just reading too much into it?
| marssaxman wrote:
| > I swear I'm not an LLM, but maybe
|
| ...they learned it by watching us?
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| To add some meta to your edit: I would swear you are not
| an LLM... or maybe an LLM trained on a lot of comments on
| HN.
| nvader wrote:
| Don't worry, your use of its not X, it's Y did not
| trigger the LLM pattern match for me. I think the main
| reason is that your two clauses are of very disparate
| lengths. LLMs use its X not Y as a rhetorical device that
| relies on brevity and punchiness, while your longer quote
| has the authentic ring of clumsy, human phrasing.
| watwut wrote:
| You have seen a human side of that manager. She acted
| like a human.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _And it's totally appropriate for that message to
| resonate with my boss, but it's weird for my boss to make
| that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate
| team-building event._
|
| That just means they valued their actual sentiments more
| than keeping appearances. Doesn't sound weird: it sounds
| humane.
|
| > _Alternatives were literally things like going to Napa
| or an amusement park or go-karting. Or if you really
| wanted to watch a movie, the options were all other
| movies. Why pick the one that digs at the tenets of your
| shared reality?_
|
| To point at the elephant in the room, as opposed to just
| go on with the program and have another forced fun
| session.
|
| I mean, your questions amount to "why couldn't she just
| be a good cog and pretend like the rest of us?"
|
| It's like being surprised a coworker is a human on the
| inside.
| terminalshort wrote:
| It seems to me that line managers straddle the line
| somewhat and above that is where it is a really different
| world. I have started a company and now back to being an IC
| so been on both sides of it. It's not totally different,
| but it is a lot.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I've been back and forth between manager and IC, too.
|
| It is different. I won't deny that.
|
| However, politics and corporate absurdist formalities
| aren't exclusive to management. A lot of the corporate
| politics and face-palm worthy office games I've dealt
| with came from ICs, either as my peers, reports, or as
| some other manager's reports.
|
| We just tend to give a pass to ICs when they do it
| because they're not viewed as having as much power in the
| office.
| ekropotin wrote:
| I actually think managers struggle much more than ICs,
| because they have to deal with quirks of their multiple
| reports + their boss's.
| muyuu wrote:
| I don't have stats to back it up, but many people claim that
| Office Space made a lot of people resign their cubicle jobs
| and this was a sharp effect on its release.
| astura wrote:
| Office Space was released in 1999, at the peak of the dot-
| com bubble. So, of course office jobs (particularly
| software jobs) would decrease when that bubble popped.
|
| But it's not as a result of that movie.
| margalabargala wrote:
| The specific claim made was a spike in voluntary
| resignations, which should be distinguishable from any
| bubble popping effect.
| ivanhoe wrote:
| Perhaps she just had a good sense of humor? It's a great
| movie after all..
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > my former manager organized an offsite where we all watched
| Office Space together.
|
| Working in management is infinitely more soul crushing than
| being Peter Gibbons.
|
| I literally brought up The Peter Principle when I quit a job
| like that.
|
| Office Space is a parable about a software developer who
| doesn't want to be promoted beyond his core competency. Peter
| Gibbons is fighting the Peter Principle.
| crazygringo wrote:
| People can play a role and clearly see the role they play as
| well.
|
| Plenty of managers see the absurdity in a lot of what they have
| to do, but it's mandated by the people above them.
| analog8374 wrote:
| I think everybody, with few exceptions, is in the system
| involuntarily. And also you can't say that that you don't want
| to be in the system. You have to fake it very hard if you want
| to "win". You have to demonstrate "passion" and such.
|
| My boss refused to allow people to call him boss, for example.
| He really hated the system.
| setsewerd wrote:
| "I'm a regular boss, I'm a cool boss. You can just call me
| Stan"
|
| Probably not how you meant it but I chuckled.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| It speaks to a general lack of self awareness people have about
| class/power structures.
| 1over137 wrote:
| PHB?
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| Pointy Haired Boss :)
| coldtea wrote:
| Well, PHB is not about simply being a manager, but about being
| a certain type of manager, so he might very well be justified
| in his wall decoration.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's PHBs all the way up.
| asacrowflies wrote:
| The amount of comments about white superiority/inferiority with
| no awareness of how absurd it is... Is this site now a nazi bar?
| Damn.
| jordemort wrote:
| (Ohio meme)
| kayamon wrote:
| I'm afraid it might be, yeah. I stopped recommending this site
| to people years ago.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > I haven't seen any. Could you give me an example?
|
| Sure, here's a few: https://wondermark.com/c/1062/
| tomaytotomato wrote:
| Like the author I was fortunate enough to be exposed to Dilbert
| as a teenager, before I got caught up in the rush of the
| university-professional-yuppie-industrial-complex.
|
| I found the Dilbert principle book in my parents downstairs
| cloakroom (wedged between magazines and other generic bathroom
| reading material).
|
| At a superficial level I just read the comic strips in the book
| and laughed, I thought to myself - haha look at those poor
| corporate workers, that won't happen to me.
|
| In a way it didn't happen to me vis-a-vis cubicles, suits and
| water cooler gossip, TPS reports etc.
|
| However, in other ways it did happen to me, the frustrations of
| working with incompetent people, working in teams who brainwash
| themselves that they are making something useful or being
| productive, hilarious executive decisions made without any
| scientific or rational thought. (startup -
| https://youtu.be/iwan0xJ_irU)
|
| I still like to add Dilbert comic strips to closing slides in
| presentations, my go to one is this, when we are discussing new
| technologies to use.
|
| 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
| fmbb wrote:
| For someone who has only been exposed to open office landscapes
| those cubicles seem like a dream.
| neogodless wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| tmtvl wrote:
| I like being able to work at the office because then I
| don't have to pay for electricity and internet, although
| commuting is bad for my ecological footprint.
|
| I will never support forcing RTO on people who prefer WFH,
| nor the opposite (unless dire circumstances mandate it,
| like a pandemic or other natural disaster).
|
| I can tolerate open offices, but prefer plans with private
| spaces which make it easier to go into and maintain full
| focus mode.
|
| I've never done pair programming, but I imagine I would
| like it, if me and my colleague use my computer (set up how
| I like it, Dvorak layout and everything) for my part of the
| programming and we switch to my colleague's computer when
| it's their turn.
| arcfour wrote:
| You love noise, interruptions, and a lack of privacy?
| caminante wrote:
| (you replied to wrong comment, parent instead of
| grandparent)
|
| It suits people that coffee badge and serves as a way to
| scan who actually came in on a "required" office day.
|
| Both are signs of dysfunction.
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| TIL I learned about _coffee-badging_ [1].
|
| Sounds like, oddly enough, eighteenth century London when
| coffee houses provided venues for business transactions.
| People (ok men of the right class) toddled around
| visiting various offices and patronising coffee houses.
| Everyone knew the players. [2][3]
|
| I think this might be a good development. Meet to drink
| beverage and achieve 'common understanding' in the sense
| of the Royal Navy. Then disperse to various private
| locations to actually carry out the tasks. Would suit a
| '15 minute' city layout very well.
|
| [1]
| https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/article/1864443/buzz-
| phra...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in
| _the_17...
|
| [3] https://www.layersoflondon.org/map/records/virginia-
| and-balt...
| nomagicbullet wrote:
| I don't find open spaces noisier than cubicles but I am
| able to easily block out distracting sounds.
|
| I am interrupted, and when I am is generally somebody
| giving me a useful quick update or an informal greeting
| from an office buddy when they notice I make welcoming
| eye contact.
|
| I don't think I ever felt a lack of privacy in the office
| or expected it in any way? I wonder what kind of privacy
| I would need that the restroom doesn't cover, I'm sure
| there are some instances since it's been called out.
| dpark wrote:
| I actually think cubicles' faux privacy might encourage
| _more_ noise. When I was in cubicles years ago, there
| were people who would take calls on speakerphone. I've
| never experienced that in an open office space, but it's
| hard to know if that's just because I've had more
| conscientious colleagues in open spaces.
| caminante wrote:
| Never...how?
|
| You're not working with enough people or they're handling
| sensitive matters elsewhere per policy.
| tombert wrote:
| Power to you but I absolutely hate open offices. They're
| often loud and it's easy to get distracted by random
| conversations.
|
| I know people fantasize about these "random conversations"
| leading to innovations from overhearing, but that hasn't
| been my experience at all; instead because it's so
| distracting a lot of people would just wear headphones all
| day.
|
| I would so prefer an office. Ideally something that allows
| me to play music at a reasonable volume without headphones,
| use my mechanical keyboard, and have my own desk that I am
| not neighboring up against someone.
|
| As it stands I work from home so I actually have that,
| which is why I am dreading the eventual RTO. If I could get
| my own dedicated office at a company, I think I would have
| way less desire to WFH.
| TheGRS wrote:
| I certainly have been around for conversations leading to
| this or that change in direction. It happens.
|
| But the bigger reason it's useful is to get facetime with
| the decision makers and the folks adjacent to the
| decision makers who might think of you when opportunities
| arise.
| dpark wrote:
| Cubicles are terrible. Especially the full height ones. They
| have all the same noisy neighbor problems as open spaces but
| you're stuck in a tiny box all day. You get a tiny modicum of
| privacy but not enough to make up for feeling like you're
| stuck in a gray box all day.
| stogot wrote:
| > 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?
| martythemaniak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah, if the same thing doesn't happen with millennials
| it's only because there is no true counterculture anymore.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| I thought there were people whose lives followed that
| trajectory in many generations, but it's just the one. What a
| relief! /s
| Taikonerd wrote:
| "Once you wanted revolution
|
| Now you're the institution
|
| How's it feel to be the man?
|
| It's no fun to be the man."
|
| - Ben Folds, "The Ascent of Stan"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caCuRqedslY
| bambax wrote:
| So true! And Maher is probably the worst of the lot.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| That's a pretty wild take. Maher's views have been basically
| consistent, the others have not. Musk has also veered hard-
| right
| narrator wrote:
| Prediction: Dilbert will be bought by Paramount, all the old
| books will stop being published, and not-funny Woke Dilbert will
| get a Barbie movie treatment, a new not funny comic strip
| syndicated in daily newspapers only boomers read, a set of long
| books about social justice that have no comics in them, bad
| jokes, boring rehashed social justice narratives and just a
| picture of Dilbert on the cover to sell it. It will be called
| something like : "Dilbert's Official Apology, Expanded Edition"
| engineer_22 wrote:
| If there's any truth to Dilbert, this is exactly what will
| happen.
| Cornbilly wrote:
| Paramount Skydance, the one owned by the right-wing Ellison
| family, is going to put out woke Dilbert?
| tpoacher wrote:
| > In case it's not obvious, I loved Scott Adams.
|
| Based on this article, somehow I really doubt that.
| jackblemming wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| An author who "actually wanted to write about" how Adams was
| a terrible person, but feels obligated to include some praise
| to pacify the Politeness Police, probably would not write
| these words:
|
| "I loved Scott Adams. Partly this is because we're too
| similar for me to hate him without hating myself."
|
| You seem to think the only thing that matters is Adams'
| engagement with right-wing politics and race; all else is
| fluff that OP only writes under duress, to not get canceled
| by the rationalist community's weird norms.
|
| That is a complex hypothesis; here's a simpler one: OP is
| writing his honest thoughts. He sees Adams as a complicated,
| flawed person who should not be wholly defined by their worst
| comments or bad decisions. Adams isn't an evil villain worthy
| of dismissal and contempt. He's more of a tragic anti-hero
| who made bad choices -- but very understandable ones if you
| know his character sheet, backstory, the times he lived in,
| and the immediate pressures. Or at least that's the way OP
| views him.
|
| It's a careful, nuanced article. It's fine with me if you
| don't agree with the author's viewpoint! But I do object to
| your accusations of disingenuousness for what appears to me
| to be a sincere, heartfelt eulogy.
|
| Were you perhaps hoping for an article along the lines of,
| "He said _that_ about black people, he is the enemy, when we
| think about him should have nothing but fury and contempt in
| our hearts, and the righteous should rejoice in his death "?
| Are you thinking " _Of course_ every community has cancel-
| cudgel-wielding norm enforcers that everybody carefully
| censors their words to avoid, this community must just have
| different censorship rules than the ones I 'm used to,
| because the possibility of a community that doesn't
| immediately ostracize people for wrongthink is absurd"?
|
| If so, I...was going to make a snarky comment about how this
| blog and the rationalist community are not places for you,
| but actually, I just feel bad for you; the politics of the
| 2010s and 2020s has traumatized [1] you and a lot of other
| people. You need to spend _more_ time in places like this,
| not less -- communities where people try to keep their
| discourse on higher rungs [2] [3].
|
| [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-
| traum...
|
| [2] https://waitbutwhy.com/whatsourproblem
|
| [3] https://fourminutebooks.com/whats-our-problem-summary/
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| It's been a consistent part of Scott Alexander's character for
| over a decade now. I doubt Adams' cancellation or death changed
| it.
| TheGRS wrote:
| I can relate to the author. Really loved the strip when I was
| younger and before I actually worked anywhere. The TV show on
| UPN was pretty decent too, it's a shame it didn't catch on
| more. Adams seemed to have a smart everyman quality to him and
| was doling out nuggets of wisdom like candy. His later years
| really troubled me because it difficult to relate the earlier
| idea I had of Adams to the later. It's a lesson in mortality
| and how much a person can change (not that I knew Adams or
| anything, maybe he was always like that). There are many other
| examples out there.
|
| One thing I think people make the mistake of is taking a look
| at a person as they are now and then retroactively applying
| that to their past persona. I think there is something more to
| learn from the idea that we all can change substantially over
| time, even without major life incidents. The mind is very
| complex and sometimes it can go down some dark paths.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Don't know it, but this website attributes it to the Rubaiyat
| of Omar Khayyam:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 Khayyam
| 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=Experimen...
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| He seems to hate Jon, though. He seems to hate everything
| except food.
| tombert wrote:
| I got the impression he actually really likes Jon, he's just
| kind of a jerk who can't express himself.
| tombert wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think that may have only been in the animated TV show?
| cauch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Right up there with calling your group "The Good Guys"
| raverbashing wrote:
| Or "Clean Code(tm)"
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| Drivers who use their indicators, getting a little tired
| of all their incessant signaling.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| card_zero wrote:
| My apologies. But are you really saying that we're not
| even able to try to be rational, or to improve? "Perfect
| rationality" sounds like "perfect knowledge", it's a
| mind-boggling concept belonging to a such a far distant
| future that we'll probably revise the concept away before
| we get anywhere near it. So why present it as a goal?
| Being _slightly more rational_ is a practical goal,
| unless you 're saying human nature won't allow even that
| much.
| zzzeek wrote:
| > My apologies. But are you really saying that we're not
| even able to try to be rational, or to improve?
|
| not at all
|
| > "Perfect rationality" sounds like "perfect knowledge",
| it's a mind-boggling concept belonging to a such a far
| distant future that we'll probably revise the concept
| away before we get anywhere near it.
|
| my statement refers to a general vibe from people who
| call themselves "rationalists" are going on the
| assumption that _they_ are rational, while everyone else
| is not. Which is ridiculous. everyone "tries" to be
| rational. of course everyone should "try" to be rational.
| That's what everyone is doing most of time regardless of
| how poorly we judge their success.
|
| > Being slightly more rational is a practical goal,
| unless you're saying human nature won't allow even that
| much.
|
| Everyone should be "slightly more rational". The
| rationalists state that they *are* more rational, and
| then they go on to have fixations on such "rational"
| things like proving that "race" is real and determines
| intelligence. Totally missing what their brains are
| actually doing since they are so "rational".
| mistersquid wrote:
| > Apparently, rationalism isn't obviously correct.
| Unfortunately, I don't really have enough of a background
| in philosophy to really understand how this follows, but
| looking at how the world actually works, I don't struggle
| to believe that most people (certainly many decision
| makers) don't actually regard rationality as highly as
| other things, like tradition.
|
| Other areas of human experience reveal the limits of
| rationality. In romantic love, for example, reason and
| rationality are rarely pathways to what is "obviously
| correct".
|
| Rationality is one mode of human experience among many and
| has value in some areas more than others.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Seeing the outcomes of romantic love makes me think it
| should never be used as an example of correctness in any
| way.
| b450 wrote:
| Rationalism in philosophy is generally contrasted with
| empiricism. I would say you're a little off in
| characterizing anti-rationalism as holding rationality per
| se in low regard. To put it very briefly: the Ancient
| Greeks set the agenda for Western philosophy, for the most
| part: what is truth? What is real? What is good and
| virtuous? Plato and his teacher/character Socrates are the
| archetype rationalists, who believed that these questions
| were best answered through careful reasoning. Think of
| Plato's allegory of the cave: the world of appearances and
| of common sense is illusory, degenerate, ephemeral. Pure
| reason, as done by philosophers, was a means of
| transcendent insight into these questions.
|
| "Empiricism" is a term for philosophical movements
| (epitomized in early modern British Empiricists like Hume)
| that emphasized that truths are learned not by reasoning,
| but by learning from experience. So the matter is not "is
| rationality good?" but more: what is rationality or reason
| operating upon? Sense experiences? Or purely _a priori_,
| conceptual, or formal structures? The uncharitable gloss on
| rationalism is that rationalists hold that every
| substantive philosophical question can be answered while
| sitting in your armchair and thinking really hard.
| card_zero wrote:
| Well empiricists think knowledge exists in the
| environment and is absorbed directly through the eyes and
| ears without interpretation, if we're being uncharitable.
| b450 wrote:
| Sure. The idea of raw, uninterpreted "sense data" that
| the empiricists worked with (well into the 20th century)
| is pretty clearly bunk. Much of philosophy took a turn
| towards anti-foundationalism, and rationalism and
| empiricism are, at least classically, notions of the
| "foundations" of knowledge. I mean, this is philosophy,
| it's all pretty ridiculous.
| nearbuy wrote:
| You're (understandably) confusing rationalism the
| philosophy from the Enlightenment with the unrelated
| modern rationalist community.
|
| For what it's worth, the modern rationalists are pro-
| empiricism with Yudkowsky including it as one of the 12
| core virtues of rationality.
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| Or naming your cult "The Reasonabilists"
|
| https://parksandrecreation.fandom.com/wiki/The_Reasonabilist.
| ..
| polotics wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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 Godel 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 Godel met his end.
|
| [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farbenlehre_(Goethe)
| cauch wrote:
| 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.
| zczc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| White collar men are all fascists in waiting, after all.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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".
| Sprotch wrote:
| I suggest you read the article, it states the exact opposite
| and agrees with you
| cauch wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| terminalshort wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| empathy_m wrote:
| 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.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| I'm probably missing something obvious but I can't parse what
| you mean by the squishy half of TPOT, or even TPOT on its own.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| TPOT is "this part of Twitter", a loose community of
| (roughly) post-rat affiliated people; the "squishy half" is
| presumably referring to the fact that a substantial number of
| such people end up quite big into woo of various sorts.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| For those who haven't read it, Scott Alexander's "Unsong"
| (https://unsongbook.com/) is a very fun piece of historical
| fiction / religious fantasy. Basic premise is that the world is
| incredibly shocked when the Apollo 10 mission crashes into the
| Dome of the Sky and (a) proves that the Biblical cosmology was
| the true cosmology this whole time and (b) damages reality. It
| includes the idea that there is a whole cottage industry of
| people trying to apply technology to deciphering the True Name of
| God by essentially Mechanical Turking it ("If we divide up all
| possible syllable combinations into tranches and pay folks
| minimum wage to sit around reciting every syllable combination
| possible, we're bound to hit it _sometime!_ ").
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| snitzr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-Educatio...
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| > 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.
| gradus_ad wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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.
| lukan wrote:
| "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? "
|
| There is no such thing as "my own actions" if I was
| created by an allmighty god. And the environment
| likewise. Then every action would be determined by the
| allmighty.
|
| It all would be just gods playground to test and reward
| and punish his creations for being how he (or she or it)
| created them.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Christianity also assumes free will and non-determinism,
| yeah otherwise it would be quite pointless. It also
| includes the possibility of willfully turning away from
| God, which is not intended by him. If you think of a
| place where (most) things behave exactly as God created
| them, that's the story before that apple[0], but guess
| what, it ended.
|
| [0] ... I know that that is an translation error.
| dangus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I stopped paying any attention to him a while ago. He didn't seem
| to be something that was worth the time.
| deadbabe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| <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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Don't read long form content on mobile then? IDK what else to
| say.
| brumar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Regardless of how you feel about him, a good litmus test to go by
| is how Jews perceived him. This is the second article by a Jew
| throwing shade at the man.
|
| We've had almost 100 years of the Talmudic dialectic, culturally
| speaking. Tiresome is not even the word for it anymore, it's time
| to give it a rest. We get it.
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