That's an interesting observation. Apple doesn't really have an AI offering, so they have nothing to stuff into Safari. In general Apples failure to produce an AI offering might turn out to be an advantage long term.
Most of the "AI" features added in Firefox makes no sense. They provide very little value to most people, but they are unreasonably hard to disable. Other than jumping the AI bandwagon, I have yet to understand why Mozilla keeps pushing AI features.
Microsoft and Google I can understand, they have AI products they desperately need to monetize or push to as many users as possible, because management bonuses are tied to CoPilot or Gemini adoption.
I don't see it as hating on AI, just because it's AI. It's not wanting pointless AI features in products that don't need them. I've pretty much disabled anything in the ml namespace in about:config in Firefox, because the features are distracting, but provide absolutely no value to me.
Before that, most people would avoid Jenkins and probably never try Buildbot (because devs typically don't want to spend any time learning tools). Devs would require "devops" to do the CI stuff. Again, mostly because they couldn't be arsed to make it themselves, but also because it required setting up a machine (do you self-host, do you use a VPS?).
Then came tools like Travis or CircleCI, which made it more accessible. "Just write some kind of script and we run it on our machines". Many devs started using that.
And then came GitHub Actions, which were a lot better than Travis and CircleCI: faster, more machines, and free (for open source projects at least). I was happy to move everything there.
But as soon as something becomes more accessible, you get people who had never done it before. They can't say "it enables me to do it, so it's better than me relying on a devops team before" or "well it's better than my experience with Travis". They will just complain because it's not perfect.
And for the OP's defense, I do agree that not being able to SSH into a machine after the build fails is very frustrating.
I think it's possible to both think GitHub Actions is an incredible piece of technology (and an incredible de facto public resource), while also thinking it has significant architectural and experiential flaws. The latter can be fixed; the former is difficult for competitors to replicate.
(In general, I think a lot of criticisms of GitHub Actions don't consider the fully loaded cost of an alternative -- there are lots of great alternative CI/CD services out there, but very few of them will give you the OS/architecture matrix and resource caps that GitHub Actions gives every single OSS project for free.)
I arrived at yes, for the same reason. There are plenty of open source and community projects you could through your time at, but with none of the obligations.
I loved Dilbert, having worked for more than one Dilbert-like company the humor frequently resonated with me.
How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced, e.g. a stroke or something. It was incredibly sad to see him throw away his life's work and go down a path most of us at least hadn't foreseen and die having alienated his fans.
I read one of his books once, written in the 90s or so. It included the idea that affirmations could literally change reality ("law of attraction"), and an _alternative theory of gravity_. At the time, I thought that these were probably attempts at jokes that didn't land very well, but... Once you believe one thing which is totally outside the pale, it is often very easy to start believing others.
After reading that book I found it a lot less easy to be amused by Dilbert. That experience contributed to my actively trying not to learn things about artists I enjoy. It's that "don't meet your heroes" cliche, I guess.
I had this exact experience. Growing up I had nothing but good memories of reading Dilbert over my breakfast cereal, and then laughing as I got into the workforce and realized how accurate the satire was. And then seeing what "he" was actually like just completely threw me for a loop.
I had an opposite experience. I found his comics not-funny when I was a kid, but then as a grown-up who had worked in a corporate environment, I found many of them funny.
I had 100% the same experience. I thought they were stupid when I was young, after working in an office for a year or two I thought they were peak humor.
At some point he had a mailinglist called Dogbert's New Ruling Class (DNRC) which would soon come to rule the world. In it he wrote lots of really weird, unhinged, occasionally funny stuff. At the time I thought it was all one massive joke, layers of irony and trolling. But more recently I've been wondering if he was actually serious.
I had that same epiphany when reading a biography of Ernest Hemingway.
Another type of work I avoid are "the making of ..." documentaries/accounts of classic works of film, music, and TV shows. Pulling back the curtain really destroys the magic.
I had this same feeling. Same with reading a biography of Kurt Vonnegut. Before reading it, I thought of them in idealistic ways. They had multiple affairs and weren't such great people, even though they both wrote really, really well.
Opposite of my experience. I love reading the lyrics and Genius annotations on songs I like. Vampire Weekend has a lot of good lyrics. Reading the annotations for The Black Keys' Turn Blue album was kinda eye-opening, and Kanye has a lot of great memorable lyrics as well. I feel it helps me appreciate the songs more deeply on later listens. Also it kinda bugs me if I can't quite catch some words in a song in the live-listen.
I remember those, i think they were in the appendix of The Dilbert Principal. I thought the gravity one was particularly strange. I bet he had one of those perfect storm personalities that just go completely crazy when hooked into a sufficiently large social media network.
btw, affirmations is a pretty common thing in a lot of religions and other superstitions. Every single Catholic mass is pretty much just the same affirmations/mantra/rituals over and over with a bible story at the end. They even publish the schedule on an annual basis iirc. (my wife briefly converted to Catholicism when we were getting married)
My youth experiences left me with zero desire to ever work anywhere near a tech company. But when I was still in grade school, I once flipped through a Scott Adams book that my father had borrowed from the local library. There's one line that I remember particularly clearly, directed at any woman who felt uncomfortable or ignored in the workplace:
"WE'RE THINKING ABOUT HAVING SEX WITH YOU!"
Google tells me this is from "The Dilbert Future", 1997, pg. 146 under "Prediction 38". It's presented as the explanation for when a woman speaks in a meeting, and male coworkers don't listen to, quote, "the woman who is generating all that noise".
Adams more or less tells female readers to just deal with it, while also telling male readers that they're broken/lying if they're not engaged in a constant sexual fantasy about their female coworkers.
To be honest, this did real damage to how I felt about sexuality and gender. Not a huge amount on its own, but it's just such a distorted take from a respected author, whose books my father kept checking out, that I read at a young age.
Scott Adams clearly lived an atypical life. Most people don't quit their jobs to write comics about corporate culture. If I had to guess why he took such a hard turn later on, I think, maybe it's something that happens when a humorist can't compartmentalize their penchant for absurdity and need for attention from real life, they can tell jokes that resonate with a lot of people, but at the same time their serious views also end up becoming ungrounded...
He has ... very problematic ... perspectives on females. "If you take away my ability to hug, I will kill people. I'm deadly serious and I won't apologize for it. I like hugging more than killing, but I will become a suicide bomber."
and "Learning hypnotism has been my Jedi mind trick to sleep with more women".
You have to remember, it is theorized that Scott Adams is the 'Cartoonist' from the Pick Up Artist book "The Game".
If you aren't familiar with it, well I was once given a copy by a friend who said they used it to 'get their partner'.
I tried reading it, found it despicable (its basically everything we hate about manipulation in the attention economy,) also the person who loaned it to me had bad narcissistic tendencies; the only time I saw them cry was when someone died that they didnt get to bang.
I mean, no doubt people cry. I just can't remember the last time a friend was crying in my presence. It was honestly probably middle school. Maybe a handful of times since then, across all of my friends (men and women). I imagine women cry around women more than women cry around men, and certainly more than men cry around men.
My point was that judging someone for not crying around them much seemed weird to me. Granted, it was a strange thing to cry/get upset about, but the rarity of crying doesn't seem like reason to judge someone as narcissistic.
His theory of gravity (everything in the universe is exponentially growing in size at a continuous rate, shrinking the gaps between things) was a fascinating thought experiment for me as a kid and I enjoyed thinking through how it could work and why it wouldn't work. Finding out later that he at least at one point took it seriously as a potential explanation for how the universe works was very surprising to me.
It's a weird book and not in a great way. He presents a bunch of very strange "theories" in a way where he kind of says "haha just a silly lil thought... unless it's true", which I remember seeing in some of his early Trump stuff too.
Yeah likewise. The book I read had a completely wrong “explanation” of Bell’s inequalities that said that FTL transmission of information was going to be happening in the future as soon as we’d got some of the technical details around entanglement ironed out. It wasn’t a joke it was pseudo—scientific magical thinking. I knew then that he had either always been, or had turned into, a crank.
"Theory of positive affirmations" and related ideas have been floating around for a long time. There is some scientific research around this (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-age-of-overindul...) but there are also some culty groups that use it for indoctrination or as sales tools.
Adams had a normal range of beliefs. Postulating that they arose from some extrinsic and extra-personal source is a condemnation of your own limited views. People get older and begin to care less about conformity, including keeping controversial thoughts to themselves, as society loosens its reins as your needs are met (to make money, to find a partner, to have a family, etc.)
The law of attraction / master persuader/ I can hypnotize large audiences stuff isn't that normal, I think?
If you want an explanation for why he would try ivermectin for cancer treatment he had a lot of beliefs in that vein for a long time. I consider that tragic for him.
He was into NLP (the hypnosis theory) from way back.
James Hoffman, the coffee YouTuber, had an interesting comment on how he tried to use that in one of his 90s barista competitions, but seemed skeptical of it now. Scott remained a believer.
It's a communications skill, like, say, making powerpoint slides. If you get good at it, you will swear by it. But if can't gain skill, it's easy to think it's bogus. If you're deeply interested I can go into detail as to what it's about and not about. Or you can buy some books, get a trainer, or take a class.
Tl; dr: it's about adding a second layer to your communication which attends to the subconscious, not unlike art. It was originally for therapy, but unfortunately a lot of businessdorks in the 90s got into it and perverted it.
I've pondered awhile on what hypnosis is. My current model is it's like prompting LLMs, the hypnotic commands are just stuff in the context window but not currently being talked about.
I went to a sceptics talk by a stage hypnotist a while back that I found very interesting.
He said after many years he wasn’t sure what hypnotism was exactly, or even if it was an identifiable thing at all, and that in a lot of ways he was just giving people license and cover to do stuff they probably wanted to do anyway. You can’t hypnotise people to do something they don’t want to, apparently.
So if he says “Come up on stage and cluck around like a chicken, make a real show of yourself in front of the crowd”, then quite a few people will go and do it and come away saying “That wasn’t me, the hypnotist made me do it, but what laugh eh?”.
He was less sure how this might apply to (for example) hypnotic pain control, but it was an interesting take.
The cluck like a chicken thing reminded me that with small kids the teachers would have us run around and then say 'be a tree' or whatever. I guess a combination of kids liking doing that kind of thing and the authority figure telling them to.
He got into a heated debate with his audience about COVID vaccines and ivermectin (he was pro vaccine and said they were idiots). Later he admitted he was wrong, when more evidence came out.
A lot of the people who comment here are techie provincials who literally have no understanding that the things they believe, or at least the things they recite as their beliefs, are ideas that might be analyzed and judged against reality.
Most people in the industrialized world zealously believe what they are told to believe, even if it goes against what's in front of their own eyes. So making things true just by saying or writing them is not that odd.
I think the commentor was talking about Adams's support for Trump. While maybe not normal on Reddit, HN or San Francisco, it's normal enough that more than half the voters agreed with Scott Adams.
You’re probably thinking of politics. You may not have read some of his more philosophical and metaphysical works, which were downright kooky. For example he thought that the universe was the dust of a god that had killed itself.
uh I don't know, try asking almost any person who was born pre-1960? Doubt they all had brain damage. Not that it was necessarily a good thing, but it was certainly 'normal' in many eras throughout time.
Did he go off the rails? My understanding is that the zeitgeist is taking people’s opposing views online and distorting them, removing context, to outrage our own audience and align it to our cause.
Almost everyone is reasonable, it’s the contexts that our reasons are relevant to, which are different.
> the zeitgeist is taking people’s opposing views online and distorting them, removing context, to outrage our own audience and align it to our cause.
This is 100% the case, with very infamous baddies, but people don't want to acknowledge it. It's a sad reality of this always on media we ingest. No idea what can be done, other than slowly ignoring more and more algorithmic stuff, and choose your own adventures based on content providers you have known for a long time, and still have their backbone intact.
Elements of society slowly wise up to how they are being manipulated, as they are increasingly exposed to it. Now with modern AI the online manipulation tactics are getting worse. So as we find ourselves in that pool of ppl who see what is happening, we just stop using those platforms, and increasingly trust more human-human contact or long form video where people have a chance to state their positions.
I think it may be the opposite. The mass propaganda techniques that worked for so long (i.e. control of the narrative via the big 3 news networks) no longer work in the social media age. So you have a system that is trying more and more extreme tactics to regain control, and you have a population that is more and more agitated because they can see through the curtain and the implications are very unsettling.
I haven't followed everything Scott Adams has done recently (largely because most of his stuff ended up paywalled), but in the past I'd note that he'd have an interesting take on something, possibly hard to defend but not intrinsically "bad", but then he'd get lumped in as having a "bad" opinion by people that just wanted to create headlines. One example was his assertion that Donald Trump was a "master persuader", and much more skilled in his speech then people were giving him credit for. I remember, at the time at least, that he always prefaced it by saying it wasn't in support/antagonism of Trump, just an observation of his skill, but it quickly got turned into "Scott Adams is a MAGA guy." (Since then, I don't know if Adams ever became a MAGA guy or not, but it's an example of how at the time his statements got oversimplified and distorted). Anyway, I saw a lot of examples of that -- he'd have a relatively nuanced take probably expressed too boldly, but people wanted to just lump him in to some narrative they already had going.
I think Scott Adams' biggest problem in life (although partially what also made him entertaining), is that he'd kind of pick fights that had little upside for him and a lot of downside.
It would have been easy for you to check whether he was a "MAGA guy or not", which he was in the sense that he spent the last years of his life spreading neonazi adjacent rhetoric.
If your feelings tend to skew in favour of people suggesting that the jewish death toll in the Shoah was pulled out of the ass by someone, perhaps you'd have some to gain from keeping them in check.
"Or is it like every other LRN (large round number) that someone pulled out of his ass and it became true by repetition? Does the figure include resistance fighters and civilians who died in the normal course of war, or just the Jews rounded up and killed systematically? No reasonable person doubts that the Holocaust happened, but wouldn’t you like to know how the exact number was calculated, just for context? Without that context, I don’t know if I should lump the people who think the Holocaust might have been exaggerated for political purposes with the Holocaust deniers. If they are equally nuts, I’d like to know that. I want context."
He could have easily figured this out but didn't, because he preferred to publish this neo-nazi adjacent rhetoric. Nazis use this talking point all the time, you see.
I.e. it's not at all about curiosity. Arguably Scott Adams was one of the least curious famous persons in history. His cartoons were based on office related cliches, and while that provides a bit of laughter and relief to people who have negative experiences from office environments it's not based on curiosity or interest in people.
I am really confused how one can read Holocaust denial into words that literally say "No reasonable person doubts that the Holocaust happened" and "I want to know if people who think [it was] exaggerated ... are equally nuts"
Ok, I'll restate: I am really confused how one can claim as "neo-nazi adjacent rhetoric" words that literally say "No reasonable person doubts that the Holocaust happened" and "I want to know if people who think [it was] exaggerated ... are equally nuts"
> Arguably Scott Adams was one of the least curious famous persons in history.
That's a bold claim, and I would argue against it based on The Dilbert Future and God's Debris
I'll also re-quote OP: "...it's an example of how at the time his statements got oversimplified and distorted...[a]nyway, I saw a lot of examples of that -- he'd have a relatively nuanced take probably expressed too boldly, but people wanted to just lump him in to some narrative they already had going."
Because that is an extremely common neo-nazi talking point. It is tailored to people who aren't yet radicalised enough to accept denialism but puts them on a trajectory towards it, in a similar way that fossil fuel companies have designed their campaigns against climate action initiatives. 'Climate might be changing, but haven't it always? Who's to say what's really going on here, maybe they're trying to fool you again.'
It's also an extremely low effort take on the issue. That entire article can basically be summed up in a sentence, 'I know very little and I have no explanation for why no one is spoon feeding me'. It's characterised by a blatant lack of curiosity, and presenting things that wouldn't come across as particularly ambigous if you actually were curious about them as highly ambigous and contentious.
And this tactic is really, really common among far-right activists. 'I'm just a dumb dude asking innocent questions, are things really as they seem or could women be another species that you need a bit of manly coercion to perfect? Is it really the oil or is it natural causes, like this dude in a suit on the telly said it might be? How come there are so many jews among nobelists, isn't that weiuhrd...?'
Again and again he's proven that he does not have either the intellectual integrity and rigour to examine subjects he brings up, and that he somehow thinks he's the most appropriate person to do it. His attempt at Dilbert Reborn is itself a good example of this. I'm not sure whether it's a grift or material he tried to put some authenticity into but I also don't really care, he was told both in words and actions that he should be better and as far as I know never tried to be.
"Just asking questions" about how many people really died in the Holocaust is a common wedge used by deniers to bring people into the fold. If I squint, I can kind of see the point he's trying to make in that article, but why use that example? And what does he mean when he says it's "missing from the news"? Is the news supposed to detail the historical record for him every time the Holocaust is mentioned? The information is there if he wants it (a point he concedes).
When viewed in light of his Twitter persona, embrace of Trump / hard right politics in general, and his declaration that black people are a hate group, I really don't know why anyone would be eager to extend him the benefit of the doubt. He provided plenty of ammo himself, no media distortion needed.
I think that demonstrates more about you than it does about him. Asking "how did you come to this number" is a valid question anytime someone gives you a number that would be hard to calculate. Asking for receipts is not the same as being a neo nazi..
I see extremists (on both sides) do this all the time, you don't argue the actual point you just say its "adjacent to bad thing, thusly bad"
That's still racist, because he's seeking out information that 'proves' his racism (and using a poll of 130 respondents as proof is insane).
I feel like this thread on Scott Adams is exposing how many people on HN are just overtly racist. You can enjoy his content before he went off the rails fine, but seeing some of the takes here feels like a bunch of people are one step away from arguing that segregation should come back.
So now we’ve moved the goalposts to “most people are actually racist so it’s okay to perpetuate segregation and other remnants of racial slavery in America.”
Enlightenment is a fight against our tribal instincts. But some folks think we should return to warring tribes rather than striving for something better.
It’s funny how people with bigoted views can’t handle being canceled. Scott Adams literally predicted he would be “canceled” as he proceeded to say the things on his mind that he knew would cause controversy.
He was okay with saying things that hurt the reputation of others but he was ultimately not okay with hurting his own reputation once he self-inflicted his wound.
I think it's okay to perpetuate segregation from the racists. The non-racists white and blacks can live together. And the extreme left mob who have an axe to grind with white people can live with the neo-nazis.
A wise man once said "Can't we all just get along"
You are responding to wrong person. Parent has moved the goalpost before me.
He was a collateral damage because at the time cancelling white people was the vogue. Fortunately society moved on a little since then (and no I don't support current president (and I fucking hate to get sucked into US politics everyday like this)).
Seems reasonable. He makes a provocative statement for ppl in his audience to draw their attention and make the important point it’s not okay (we should avoid) ppl who dislike us based on skin color. And he makes the further point he agrees there is still systemic racism against black folks and it’s a big problem. And yet, as you see in response to your posting of the video, ppl still dismiss it because they’d rather hold on to the soundbite to maintain their outrage, rather than understand the guy’s position.
His take is stupid even if you give him the benefit of the doubt and believe his claim at face value. You shouldn’t avoid people that dislike you in this manner because it perpetuates the problem to eternity. It is essentially the same concept as segregation: well, we can’t ever get along so we’ll just exist in separate spaces!
We literally tried that already and it didn’t work out so well.
I hate to say this but you control your destiny when it comes to your reputation. If you want people to celebrate your life instead of celebrating your death, spend your life being nice to people lifting them up.
Scott Adams didn’t do that. We are all free to feel however we want to feel about him. Don’t worry, his feelings won’t be hurt, he’s dead.
Most non-racists don’t need to spend 30 minutes on cable news explaining themselves to save face.
Saying something publicly is an action. Depending on what you say, you can’t take it back. If you tell your wife you think her friend is hot and you want a threesome you can’t take that back.
I also think you as the commenter should think a little bit about what motivates you to defend this guy. Why does he as a dead famous comic book author need his reputation defended? Why is it so important that we don’t see him as a racist asshole? What do you get out of that? Why not just let his own mistakes speak for themselves?
> Most non-racists don’t need to spend 30 minutes on cable news explaining themselves to save face.
Most people never get interviewed on cable news at all, so that’s not a meaningful baseline. When someone is publicly accused, explaining yourself publicly is a predictable response, not evidence of guilt.
> Saying something publicly is an action. You can’t take it back.
Of course you can clarify or correct yourself—people misspeak all the time. Whether that matters depends on whether listeners are interested in understanding or just in cancelling someone they don't like.
> Why do you feel the need to defend him?
Because I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of Scott Adams over many years, and I’m confident I understand his views far better than people judging him from short, out-of-context clips.
I don’t get anything out of this except insisting that the truth matters. Even when the person involved is unpopular or dead.
Because you’re invested. You’re a Scott Adams fan.
As someone who likes the Harry Potter series, I hear you. It’s tough to see your idols fall into being dumbasses.
If you sincerely think Scott Adams had zero bias, that he’s not a bigot, that he didn’t support “stop the steal,” that’s on your conscience and your value system. I choose to believe the impulse of what he said, not the 30 minutes of damage control afterward.
I’d say nobody asked the guy his opinions on such subjects and just wanted to read his funny office comics.
But that’s what happens with celebrities like this.
> Because you’re invested. You’re a Scott Adams fan.
Sure — but I wouldn’t be if I thought he was a bigot. Having listened to hundreds of hours of him explaining his views, I’m far better informed than people judging him from short, out-of-context clips.
> It’s tough to see your idols fall into being dumbasses
I don’t treat public figures as idols. I also don’t think disagreeing with prevailing opinion automatically makes someone a “dumbass.” Sometimes it means they’re willing to take reputational hits for what they believe is right.
> If you sincerely think Scott Adams had zero bias
Nobody has zero bias. That’s an impossible standard.
> As someone who likes the Harry Potter series
For what it’s worth, I think J.K. Rowling is an example of someone who did the right thing at substantial personal and professional cost, particularly in defending women and girls. That’s not idol worship — it’s acknowledging moral courage when it’s inconvenient.
> That he didn’t support ‘stop the steal'
This is where the argument seems to shift from racism to political conformity. Disagreeing with someone’s politics isn’t the same thing as establishing that they’re a bigot.
When your politics are bigotry, it isn’t a matter of “disagreeing with them.”
When your politics are anti-democracy and pro-fascism, it isn’t a matter of “disagreeing with them.”
Politics aren’t detached from real life, they aren’t some hypothetical. They have real consequences, and they represent real values.
Now I know where you stand. You follow every conservative talking point 100%.
You are playing the “I am taking a nuanced view, you’re just a sheep following popular opinion” card while you yourself are just doing the exact same thing on the other side with no nuance at all. You and I are at worst no different from each other in our belief systems.
Scott Adams was a Trumper, therefore you support him.
JK Rowling is anti-trans, which is the right wing party line, therefore you support her.
Good talk. You know where you stand, I know where I stand.
You’re treating disagreement as evidence of moral failure, then using that to retroactively justify the label. That’s not reasoning — it’s tribal sorting. You must exist in quite a bubble, a rapidly shrinking one.
You have the causality backwards. Your moral stance is abhorrent, therefore I disagree with you and want nothing to do with you. Not the other way around.
It’s not like Scott Adams did nothing wrong and was pulled in front of an inquisitor. He said weird shit and then had to play a game of PR damage control.
If you spoke extemporaneously for an hour a day, every day, for years, and people went hunting for the most awkward or easily misinterpreted clip, I’m confident they’d find weird shit too.
If you truly believe that casual conversation will inevitably lead to any kind soul to speak a quote like that you have some serious warped morals.
It’s actually worse when you’re doing it as your job because you’re supposed to know better and be proficient at that craft. It’s not like someone hot micced him having a private conversation with his buddies, this was a man who had been interfacing with the public for decades.
I don’t see any froth around my mouth. I just think the guy sucked, and I think he was racist. Free country, I’m allowed to do that.
Give him a generous read on his opinions if that’s what you want to do. To me, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
Modern white supremacists don’t just come out and say things directly because of how it’s obviously reprehensible, they surround themselves with plausible deniability and murky language like the kind you are citing.
Let’s not forget: Scott Adams was a cartoonist. He was not some kind of sociologist or researcher on race relations. He went out of his way to go on a podcast and speak these opinions with no first hand experience or knowledge in any way.
He lived in Pleasanton, California where less than 2% of residents are black.
He has no experience or qualifications to know a damn thing about the subject. He didn’t even live near any black people - how would he know that they hate him?
No, he just wanted to say racist shit. That’s my read. If you read it different, that’s up to you.
People are correctly pointing out that the phrase “it’s okay to be white” is used as a dogwhistle.
They are not literally saying that it’s not okay to be white. They’re saying that those who speak that phrase are projecting their racist ideology. People who say “it’s okay to be white” think that white people are under attack and that white people need to re-establish dominance. To them, equality is a threat.
Of course now we are getting into the persecution fetish. The entire premise of white people in America facing any kind of race-based setback is laughable.
People of all races can have legitimate grievances and harms. Im sure some racist black people said "black is beautiful", but that isnt a reason to forbid anyone from saying it.
“It’s okay to be white” isn’t really the same as saying “black is beautiful” because of the context.
“It’s okay to be white” is spoken in the context of a majority group that has complete societal power over other minority groups, and is speaking the phrase in response to legitimate questions on the majority’s privilege over and treatment of those minorities.
It also makes a lot less logical sense for the group with the upper hand to complain. It’s distasteful: it’s like saying “It’s okay to be regional vice president! as if you are blind to the fact that you boss everyone else around.
”The white majority justice system incarcerates black people for marijuana possession at a higher rate despite a similar use rate.”
Sure, the context was a poll that asked Americans "Is it OK to be white?" with about half of the black participants saying they either disagreed or weren't sure. A bit of Scott's elaboration is near the bottom: https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/poll-finds-over-a-qu...
Not only that, Adams deceptively included the answer "I don't know" with "I disagree", and it STILL didn't add up to 50%. And it was an ideologically motivated Push Poll from Rasumssen Reports, a slanted right wing polling organization. A fair poll would never use a White Supremacist trolling slogan as a trick question with no explanation. The question doesn't even make any sense, and was asked with no context or definition of what "ok" means, so "I don't know" is the obvious correct answer.
"It's ok to be white" is a White Supremacist slogan specifically designed to troll and cause division and hatred, and Adams gleefully took that and ran with it, and lied and exaggerated to make his false racist point, just like negzero7 continue to do. What both Scott Adams and negzero7 did was PRECISELY what the White Supremacists who coined that slogan had hoped for.
>"It's okay to be white" (IOTBW) is an alt-right slogan which originated as part of an organized trolling campaign on the website 4chan's discussion board /pol/ in 2017.[1][2][3] A /pol/ user described it as a proof of concept that an otherwise innocuous message could be used maliciously to spark media backlash.[4][5] Posters and stickers stating "It's okay to be white" were placed in streets in the United States as well as on campuses in the United States, Canada, Australia,[6] and the United Kingdom.[7][5]
>The slogan has been supported by white supremacists and neo-Nazis.[2][1][8]
>In a February 2023 poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports, a polling firm often referred to by conservative media, 72% of 1,000 respondents agreed with the statement "It's okay to be White". Among the 130 black respondents, 53% agreed, while 26% disagreed, and 21% were unsure. Slate magazine suggested that some negative respondents may have been familiar with the term's links with white supremacy.[41] The Dilbert comic strip was dropped by many newspapers after author Scott Adams, reacting on his podcast to the outcome of this poll, characterised black people as a "hate group" for not agreeing with the statement and encouraged white people to "get the hell away from" them.[42]
And now negzero7 is purposefully trolling and spreading the same false divisive misinformation himself, so his racist White Supremacist motives are extremely clear and obvious.
> How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed,
They weren't surpressed; he was very open about them from very early on in his career as a comic artist; they were central to his “origin story” and were woven directly into the comics. Its just, for a while, other aspects of his still-recent experience in corporate America gave him other relatable things to say that were mixed in with them, which made it easier to overlook them.
I specifically do remember comics poking fun at diversity initiatives. A quick search of "Dilbert comic about diversity" brings up some examples.
At the time i read those i probably thought they were on point. I've changed my views over the years. You can't keep them or you end up like Adams. That's probably the key to understanding him. He grew up in an era where black students were not allowed to attend white schools. The world changed. He didn't.
Funny enough, to get to actual representative diversity you need to explicitly hire underrepresented candidates and pass up on white dudes. Which Scott famously complained about.
> you need to explicitly hire underrepresented candidates and pass up on white dudes
If the initiatives that promoted diversity explicitly said that, they probably wouldn't have passed. The whole argument was about whether that was true because proponents would never be honest about that part so the public debate never got past that.
Even in early (20 yrs before Trump stuff) interviews, Adams said that one of the reasons he tried various businesses out (like the comic) was that his coprorate manager told him that the manager was being strongly discouraged from promoting white men. That's likely what folks are referencing with regard to his "origin story."
He definitely blamed both the end of his career in banking and at PacBell on alleged discrimination against promoting White men in/into management (and I think he claims responsible people at both told him explicitly that that was the reason he was being passed over).
Somewhat later (but still quite a while before what people describe as him “turning”), he would also claim his Dilbert show on UPN was cancelled because he was White, making it the third job he lost for that reason. (More likely, it was cancelled because its audience was both small and White and UPN was, looking at where it had successes and wanting a coherent demographic story to sell to advertisers and in an era where synergies between the appeals of shows on the same network was important to driving ratings, working to rearrange its offerings to focus on targeting Black audiences.)
If a show that mostly featured black people was cancelled due to "looking at where it had successes and wanting a coherent demographic story to sell to advertisers and in an era where synergies between the appeals of shows on the same network was important to driving ratings, working to rearrange its offerings to focus on targeting White audiences," would you so readily dismiss the creator at being miffed at that?
Later on there was a ton of weird anti-feminist content in the comics.. he also had his blog where he wrote way too much so ended up in holocaust-denial and “evolution is fake” territory. Another person talented in one field and pretty unremarkable otherwise who needed to air his terrible opinions about everything else.
>Later on there was a ton of weird anti-feminist content in the comics
Others provide convincing demonstrations of what Adams himself said about women so this is more of a tangent....
But good god that was well within the era of "I hate my wife" comedy being rampant. I will never understand fellow men who seem to think "Women suck" or "The person I married is garbage" as the pinnacle of humor.
Yeah every once in awhile I’ll catch an old comedy special and it’s almost jarring how much of the content from some comics was “my wife is awful and she’s really dumb for expecting things from me”.
Neighbors of a certain age have that same mindset.. “Want to come over for a drink and get away from the ball and chain?” Or “After your done with the lawn, would your wife let you come over for a drink?”
I mean I wouldn’t mind grabbing a beer but your view of relationships is exceptionally weird.
Were there early signs? I don't know of them, but to be honest, I mostly "knew" him through Dilbert. When he turned out to be a bigot it was a disappointing surprise to me.
I remember reading (I think in newspaper interview) in the late 1990s his own description of how comics became his full-time focus and his deep resentment of how difficult it had been to advance in management in corporate America because he was a White man in the 1980s (!?!) was pretty central to it.
To add, he also said elsewhere that he didn't like his job and was phoning it in and focusing increasingly on his art. He thought he was passed over because of his gender for a promotion... When he was openly phoning it in and writing comics about how his work culture sucked. Why would you promote someone with their foot out the door and who was badly misaligned with the organization? One or the other maybe (someone who doesn't like the work culture might be a good pick to improve it) but both? Why would you even be upset about it when your art is blowing up and going full time on it is clearly the right move?
Similarly he felt his TV show was cancelled after two seasons because it wasn't PC, but his show wasn't getting good viewership and had a terrible time slot. That's a pretty typical trajectory for a TV show, it's like complaining your startup failed.
He wrote a lot about explicitly magical thinking. Sort of along the lines of The Secret; that he could achieve things where the odds were against him through sheer force of will and wishing. That's not necessarily a problem but it does set you up for denial when things don't always go your way. And the denial is dangerous.
The later chapters of his life were marked by tragedy. His stepson died of overdose. His marriage collapsed. He lost the ability to speak and had to fight like hell to get a proper diagnosis and treatment (he later recovered). He went through COVID like the rest of us. Unfortunately these events would seem to have hardened and radicalized him.
I think we can understand and empathize with that without condoning it. I hope he found his peace in the end.
> He was directly told that he won't be promoted because he was a white man.
Even if that was true (I don't believe his allegation), that's just _one company_. He obviously considered himself a very intelligent and capable person, so it seems the obvious next step would be to go work basically anywhere else? The Dilbert comics never seemed to push the ideal of company loyalty, so I don't think he felt trapped by obligation there.
One only needs to look at the upper management and board of any fortune 500 to disprove the idea that only non-white women are getting promoted.
To put it simply, I do not believe his recounting of events. I think that he convinced himself that was the case, but the conversation did not actually happen as he remembers it.
I understand this might be unpopular, but I’ve been told exactly this… directly, to my face, on multiple occasions. The last time it happened, I asked for it in writing. Unsurprisingly, that request went nowhere.
Whether it happened to Adams specifically, I can’t say. But I can state with absolute certainty that this happens, because it’s happened to me repeatedly. Either it’s more widespread than people want to acknowledge, or I’m unusually unlucky.
And yes, it’s a radicalising experience. It’s taken considerable effort and time to regain my equilibrium when discussing these topics.
Could you share more about the context? When? For what position? In what sort of organization?
Personally the only time this has happened to me was when I applied to be a bartender and was told there was a quota for men and women and they had recently hired a man. And I just let that one go, partly because it was a lark and not a career move, partly because I could see the logic in it and chalked it up to the inherent seediness of the enterprise, and partly because my identity had opened a lot of doors for me in the past ("you look like Mark Zuckerberg" was a comment I got when I was hired at my first startup, in a sequence of compliments about my qualifications) so I wasn't bothered by it closing one.
I'm open to hearing other experiences though. I'm reserving judgment until I understand the context.
and, cards on the table, I will not redact company names because I don't really see the point, these are my experiences not rumours.
Here's two, there's one more but it's a bit too awkward to type out on my phone;
Elastic: there were two Lead SRE positions open, I was recommended to apply, so I applied (friend still works there). I passed the interviews and was offered the job, the other job was filled by someone internal; they rescinded the job offer after having a candidate who was just as qualified but was female. I was offered a position under her. I would have been happy to take the lower position if I hadn't been offered the other one (and accepted) and if it hadn't been on the stated basis that it was because they wanted a woman and that's why, nothing about personality, culture fit, approach or even skill fit.
Ubisoft Massive: I applied for an Architect position (a promotion), I was told that I need not bother applying as the position was only going to be filled when we found someone with a non-white ethnic background, and preferably a girl. This was not long after being told by HR that "my next hire had better be a woman" after hiring a 45+ year old white Swedish guy, so I should have known.
--
For balance; I'll say that my ethnicity has helped me too once, I got a job at Nokia partially because I was natively English speaking, so it's all swings and roundabouts.
I don't know what to think of that but I believe you and find that behavior unacceptable. I think the way to improve inclusivity in the workplace is by casting a wider net so that you get applications from people you otherwise wouldn't (not to the exclusion of other applicants), not to change the hiring decision. Like how Roosevelt said he wanted a "square deal" meaning the deck is not stacked while leaving it to the individual to play their hand.
What makes his story unbelievable is that it happened in corporate America in the 1980s (that you have a different experience in 2020s Sweden is not really a counterexample to what makes his story hard to believe) combined with the fact that he is a famously unreliable narrator. He has previously offered conflicting narratives about similar scenarios, changing the story to be about race only in his later years.
Sure, that's why I can't say for sure if it actually happened or not.
People are not readily able to believe my experiences either (though, the political narrative is opening up to the potential for sympathy? I'm not sure).
These policies come in waves. The 90s in the UK was very "PC" as we'd say. I don't necessarily believe that all diversity initiatives happened in the 2010's and onwards.
That said, you're totally right nobody can truly know except him and who he spoke to. A sibling commenter mentioned that it could be a mealy mouthed middle manager trying to ascribe blame to $women for his own decisions; which I totally buy, even for my own scenarios to be honest with you.
> That said, you're totally right nobody can truly know except him and who he spoke to.
Let me be clear about this, I would definitely assume it did not happen without really strong evidence of the contrary. Based on my assessment of his character and the details of his story.
Assuming anything else is giving him way too much credit, and the effect of giving benefit of the doubt here is likely allowing a known racist to spread a false narrative that is based on lies and engineered to sow discontent.
I don’t see what’s wrong about either of these examples.
If diversity is your goal, and you have two equally skilled applicants of different sexes, you should choose the under represented applicant. Elastic made the right choice.
Likewise at Ubisoft, if you don’t explicitly make room for diversity at the top level of the company then you’re never going to get to an equitable state.
I disagree with the premise that these were acceptable decisions.
The Elastic situation wasn't "two equally skilled applicants". I'd already been offered and had accepted the position. Rescinding an accepted offer because another candidate better fits demographic targets is materially different from choosing between two candidates at the offer stage.
On the broader point: I understand the goal of achieving equitable outcomes. The question is whether the ends justify the means. Explicitly excluding individuals from opportunities based on immutable characteristics, whether in the 1960s or today, remains discrimination, regardless of which direction it flows.
If we're serious about equity, we need solutions that don't require accepting discrimination as a necessary tool. Lowering barriers to entry, addressing bias in evaluation, expanding candidate pools, mentorship programmes: these grow the pie rather than just redistributing the slices.
The moment you tell someone "you're qualified, but you're the wrong demographic," you've created exactly the kind of experience that radicalises people. I've experienced it. It's corrosive, regardless of how noble the underlying intent.
Sure, elastic handled that poorly, rescinding an offer like that is very unprofessional, but that’s an indictment of their HR department and has nothing to do with the gender of the other candidate.
I understand where you’re coming from, what you’re asking for is a gradual transition to equity. But until that transition is done, you’re also asking the groups that were systematically discriminated against to endure the effects of that discrimination for longer. And those soft approaches you listed take a looooong time to work, and only while the pie is getting larger.
At one of my previous companies they took those soft approaches. The result was that entry level positions were very equitable, but the higher the seniority the higher the percentage of white men. At the rate that the company was hiring and promoting, it would take 150 years to achieve equity at all levels.
To be clear, that means asking women to wait 150 years before they have a fair shot at leadership positions.
But that was all before 2020. After layoffs hit and the growth stopped the equity transition also stopped because the white dudes at the top weren’t willing to step down so women could take their place.
You say being discriminated against is corrosive, but what about the corrosion that already happened because of all the discrimination that happened up until now? Are you going to do something about it? Or are you just gonna tell the people corroded to deal with it?
I appreciate the acknowledgement about Elastic’s handling.
On the timeline argument: I’m sceptical of extrapolating current rates to 150-year predictions. Organisations change through leadership turnover, market pressure, and cultural shifts that don’t follow linear projections. But I take your point that gradualism has costs for those waiting.
Here’s where we differ: I don’t accept that we must choose between “discrimination now” and “discrimination for 150 years.” That’s a false binary. The solutions I mentioned aren’t just soft approaches; they’re structural changes that can accelerate equity without requiring us to accept discrimination as policy.
Your point about white men at the top not stepping down cuts both ways. If the existing leadership won’t make space voluntarily, and you implement demographic quotas, you’ve just created a system where different qualified people are blocked. People like me, who didn’t benefit from the original discrimination but are now paying for it.
I grew up in generational poverty. As far back as records go, my family has never held money or power. The people you’re describing as beneficiaries of historical privilege might share my demographic category, but we share nothing else. Class gets erased in these conversations, and that erasure makes the solutions less effective, not more.
What about the corrosion that’s already happened? I think about it constantly. But I don’t believe the answer is to corrode more people in the opposite direction and call it justice. That’s how you get radicalisation and backlash, not equity.
I don’t even disagree with you about class, but to deal with that we need to deal with capitalism itself, which I’ve given up on at this point.
So if this is the system we’re stuck with, and it’s an unfair system, then let’s at least make sure it’s equitably unfair.
The goal is not to make sure the most qualified person gets the job. I actually think evaluating others fairly is impossible so that’s an impossible goal.
Sorry if you feel that you got the short end of the stick. I got it too. Someone has to.
You’re arguing we should take turns being discriminated against because fixing the system is too hard. I’d rather actually try to reduce the total amount of discrimination instead of just spinning the wheel to see whose turn it is to lose.
“Someone has to get the short end” isn’t wisdom: it’s defeatism, and toxic at that.
The issue is not “discrimination is happening”. The issue is that systematic discrimination has biased outcomes and under represented certain demographics, and that needs to be addressed.
Discrimination against individuals is not a problem.
“Discrimination against individuals is not a problem” is quite possibly the most dystopian sentence I’ve read on HN.
I’m one of those individuals. So are the women and minorities you claim to be helping. We’re not statistical abstractions to be shuffled around in service of demographic targets.
If your solution to systematic discrimination requires you to declare that discriminating against individuals doesn’t matter, you’ve lost the plot entirely.
I can say the same thing at you. If your solution to large demographics experiencing systematic discrimination over decades leading to worse outcomes is to tell them that from now on it’ll be different but that all the disadvantages they experienced will not be dealt with then you’re either insane, or trying to disguise your bias.
No you haven’t. You’ve offered platitudes. “I think about it all the time” ok, what are you actually going to do about it?
The grow the pie approaches you mentioned only works while the pie is growing, and we’ve had layoffs for the past 2 years. What is your solution now that the pie isn’t getting bigger?
It sure sounds like your solution is telling people to wait 150 years and hope the problem solves itself.
If racism against white men is common place why are white men still over-represented in most corporations and especially at the c-suite level? Do you think there should be even more white men in those positions? That seems to me like you're arguing in favor of more racism, not less.
I think people should be selected for roles based on merit, not skin color. If that results in more or less people of any given demographic in any given role I'm fine with it - provided that they got there through merit.
Management, especially upper management, of large American companies is predominantly white men. Always has been. It was even more so back when Adams was supposedly suffering from this discrimination than it is today.
Any claim that racism against white men is common has to reconcile this fact. If the system is so biased against them, how do they end up so incredibly overrepresented? Are they so much better than everyone else that they get most of the spots despite this unjust discrimination? Or maybe the bias actually goes the other way.
I 100% believe that he was told this by at least one higher-level White male manager in corporate America in the 1980s who would rather his anger at being passed over were directed at women, minorities, and an amorphous conspiracy than the individual decision-maker making the decision to pass him over, and who knew him well enough to know that he would both uncritically accept the description of a bright-line violation of his legal rights that fit his existing biases while also not taking any action to vindicate those same rights.
You write beautifully. I decided to click on your other comments and found the same. Rare combination of high-density, high-impact vocabulary, and yet high-clarity.
> He was directly told that he won't be promoted because he was a white man.
I think Adams was lying. I don't think they ever told him that.
For instance in contemporary interviews about his show being cancelled he gave reasonable explanations. Only later did he claim his show was cancelled unjustly. He also wrote a book with the subtitle, Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter. I think as his views hardened he didn't feel obligated to tell the truth, and/or that his lies were in service of a deeper truth.
So I think he sincerely believed he had been passed over because of he was a man, but that that conversation never took place and he knew it.
> If I remember correctly, it had more to do with his sex and not his race.
You're right. I've updated the comment. Thanks for the correction.
Hell, he could have been told that he wasn't promoted because of his sex/race/whatever by his direct superior who supported Adams' promotion but was overruled by his higher ups/the committee.
"Older white guy boss tells younger white guy Adams that he doesn't have a future because the company is only promoting <slurs> and <slurs>." is something I would totally believe happened. Source: if you're a white guy, other white guys tell you all sorts of things you'd think they'd keep to themselves.
>I am sure it wasn't only the words that convinced Scott Adams, but the observed reality of who is being promoted and who is not.
Humans regularly misinterpret reality. It's why as a species we couldn't figure out jack shit until we started removing ourselves as arbiter of truth.
We are terrible at evaluating information and making conclusions.
My dad is pissed at a company for passing him over because "They only hire gay people in management" and not because.... he doesn't have an MBA and the people they hired do. Or that he doesn't know how to do anything more than low level management in general. Or that he is bad at big picture planning.
Nope, definitely the gays and this woke DEI.
My brother spent most of his life livid at "affirmative action" and seemingly blaming it for his limitations. Rather than blaming the fact that he did drugs instead of leveraging his intelligence to do well in school, dropped out of community college for no reason, and has never even applied to a real institution of higher learning or attempted to educate himself.
Some people just suck at recognizing their faults and make up boogeymen to blame.
There was nothing of the modern taboo on discussing this during the 80s and 90s. White man were more or less free to complain, not that anyone would listen, but complaining was still acceptable.
Oh, oof. But also ... huh. Not that I'm steeped in dilbert lore, but wasn't the the main villain was a stupid balding white manager guy? Dunno if he's an unreliable narrator or was just smart enough to keep the white supremacy out the comics at first.
> Not that I'm steeped in dilbert lore, but wasn't the the main villain was a stupid balding white manager guy?
I'd bet dollars to donuts that (if there is truth at all to him being told what he claims) the superiors making the promotion decisions so that told him he was being passed over because he was a White men were also White men. If he had to justify it, he might say that PHB also became a manager before the wave of political correctness.
I had one of his books from ages ago and it had a long bit on the end about affirmations and his weird views on quantum physics and the ability of human mind to manipulate them.
I read his blog every now and then. He was cheering and celebrating the technical aspects of Trump's manipulative language... with no regard for its impact.
It’s one thing to, say, acknowledge and respect the cleverness of a villain succeeding by pulling a trick and then deconstruct the trick.
It’s a totally different thing when you go beyond mere respect/acknowledgement and start incessantly praising the villain’s cleverness, professing your love for the villain, worshipping the villain, publicly fantasizing about having hot sex with the villain, etc.
Adams at first was vaguely alluding to do the first thing, but testing the waters showed him which side of the sandwich was buttered, and he went fully with the second.
He was always a contrarian. Sometime around 2007-2008, he had a humorous blog post that (IMO rightfully) questioned the US's narrative on Iran and nuclear weapons. He had to backpedal very quickly after it blew up.
The lines were spoken by a man who imagined that he was a woman.
Therefore, I think the comic strip was intended rather about how men can have a skewed perception of women.
The "people acknowledge my existence, people hold the door for me" is not about them being idiots. It's Scott arguing that women have it easy compared to men (which may or may not be true, feminists will disagree).
I suspect this tendency is not correlated to political leaning in any way, and the suggestion that it is says more about how you want to perceive people of a particular leaning than anything about them.
I don't recall any of his rightwing stuff, but I remember one of his 90s books had some stuff at the end about how quantum physics meant you could control reality by envisioning what you want and then you'd enter the universe with it. I was a teen and remember being utterly baffled.
That's basically the premise of the book "The Secret", which ironically destroyed the lives of a few friends of mine for a few years before they snapped out of it.
Concluding he would need an M.B.A if he wanted to climb the corporate ladder, Adams got into UC Berkeley, with the bank footing the bill. As he closed in on his master’s degree, he learned that an assistant vice president position was opening up but figured he wouldn’t get it because the bank was leaning toward hiring a minority, he said.
Adams jumped to Pacific Bell and completed his degree, thinking he was on the fast track to upper management. But in his book, Adams wrote that as was the case at Crocker National, his new employer was also coming under fire for a lack of diversity in its executive ranks.
Instead of getting mad, Adams got to drawing. Believing all this was a sign for him to revive his dream of cartooning, he purchased a primer on how to submit a comic strip and went about creating Dilbert.
He and been way off the rails for decades before that.
In fact, growing up in the very affluent part of my city, I saw a bunch of kids die using opiates to mentally escape the weird family fiefdoms where they [p/m]atriarch inexplicably wouldn't ever need for money, so went completely off the rails mentally. I was prescribed a bunch of opiates (including fent) after a bad ski accident, and can tell you that they basically work by turning down the volume on life around you. I can understand why someone would turn to them to mentally escape a bad family life.
About the only good thing I can say about recreational Xanax is that those kids are generally still alive in contrast to the ones who preferred opiates.
He wasn't though. He was simply analyzing the communication styöe of Trump, using his hypnosis knowledge, and explained why and how it was better (more efficient) than the competitors. This turned out to be true, giving him the win, just like Scott Adams predicted.
The description of reality is not at all the same as supporting it. "Is" vs. "Ought to be".
Can definitely see how that'd warm someone up to a politician who is crippling drug enforcement capabilities, addiction treatment programs, and addiction research... errr wait.
I suspect growing up in an era where community, the newspaper, radio and TV spewed religious, racist, and sexist content gradually increased sensory memory related neural activity that fostered biochemical and epigenetic effects that over time become effectively immutable.
Not sure why we are being coy about the triggers. Society of his youth and the biology are well documented.
I did. Different genetic expressions. The intelligence to realize language is just memes, not truth.
Scott Adams put himself on a pedestal above anyone else in his comics; he was Dilbert. The only smart person in the room. He was always a celebrity obsessed with his own existence. Little difference between him and Tim the Toolman or a Kardashian.
Low effort contributor whose work people laughed at due to social desirability bias. No big loss.
That's a really wild, miserable reading of the strip. For one, Adams himself was a manager, not an engineer, so he had more in common with the PHB, or even dogbert/catbert than Dilbert. For another, he explicitly said Dilbert was based on a specific, undisclosed person he knew. For yet another, many strips were based on anecdotes/stories sent to Adams by his readers.
it doesn't take even a serious reading of Adams to realize he was dogbert, not Dilbert. He mocked Dilbert, he thought he was a loser that did understand how to manipulate the system.
> How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced, e.g. a stroke or something. It was incredibly sad to see him throw away his life's work and go down a path most of us at least hadn't foreseen and die having alienated his fans.
He has plenty of fans right up to the end, it's amazing how people think someone went "off the rails" just because he has a different political opinion.
I'm an engineer and I don't exactly know a lot of engineers who think you can manifest alternative realities into existence with the power of quantum physics, on account of most of us having passed a physics class or two
He always seemed like the archetypal "Californian creative who fried his brain with psychedelics and new age woo-woo in the 70s" type
I think it was that there was a cancel culture censorship type of intensity that occurred while he was able to express before, it particularly latched onto targeting people like him (we all know about and have heard of the intensifying censorship in the last half decade COVID-era) and one of the things I've recently learned is censorship, a form of criticism, has that affect of creating and triggering insecurities which digs us deep into extreme positions.
Think of it this way: if you were cancelled and repressed and censored in your own home and unable to express yourself, your efforts to communicate to remain authentic would intensify not die down. Or you die and let yourself morph to the average new censor-ship approved world.
Scott wouldn't do that and neither would I. All this to say I think its normal to intensify your opinions and even take on and be pushed to more extremes when you live in a controversial time of "you're either on my side or the other side and theres no acceptable middle gray area.
Sometimes people just get to retirement age, realize they don't have much longer to go and choose to stop hiding who they are. Morrissey of The Smiths is another guy who's alienated his audience. Moe Tucker, drummer in the legendary NYC '60s counterculture band The Velvet Underground was picketing at a Tea Party rally in 2009 and saying "Obama is destroying America from the inside".
>How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced.
No surprises for me. By my standards he was never radicalized just an objective thinker with a flair for humor.
Isn't his accounting of things the reason you judge him as crazy in the first place? I would assume you aren't just taking your personal opinions, uncritically, from others'.
I started paying attention to him when he got sick. He seemed very reasonable about most things, and extremely insightful about many things. I certainly don’t think he deserved the posthumous label “crazy person.”
I read his one of his books in the 90s, in which he talked about how he believed in magic (specifically a rather hardline interpretation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_attraction_(New_Thought... via 'quantum' magic). He's been fairly out there for a while.
I started paying attention to him in the 90s and he was already crazy then. The only difference is that he was the fun kind of crazy, talking nonsense about quantum mechanics and such, rather than the disturbing racist crazy he became later on.
Most of us have experienced a family member who got caught up in a corporate (or worse) news addiction.
It’s so common that we barely remark on it any longer. So I don’t think it’s really a mystery, it can happen to anyone who’s not getting outside enough.
My first clue something was wrong was when he didn’t understand the criticism around the Iraq war of the early 2000s. Which even most conservatives have come around now to acknowledge as a disaster.
I'll just say that I didn't know until now that he was under cancer treatment and I wouldn't wish Cancer on 99.9999999% of the population. I have my opinions on home but he does not not meet that prestigious landmark.
Aging is lonelier and more stressful than ever. The aging brain is already less flexible and there is a net loss of synapses and brain mass.
The internet has become a more unkind and manipulative place that ever. It is making people into the worst version of themselves, to serve the ends of groups that benefit from division.
I mourn many things with this news today. RIP Scott Adams.
It's somewhat ironic to claim someone (who spoke every day for an hour about his thoughts) went "off the rails" on the same exact day an attorney representing the country's most prestigious civil-rights organization argued gender discrimination to the Supreme Court and yet was unable to provide a way to distinguish men from women.
You say the end of his life was sad, meanwhile he wrote of an "amazing life" in his final note and expressed immense joy in positively impacting thousands of people.
It's so strange how people like you classify other people's experiences that you actually know nothing about.
Asking someone to give a sharp dividing line in a multi-dimensional bimodal but not discontinuous distribution is just nonsense.
In particular, being unable to give that strict difference (that does not exist) is not proof of not believing that the general bimodal groups exist, nor acknowledging that existence, nor saying that there is not general differences between the groups. It is not the gotcha that elementary school biology suggests it would be.
And you're essentially demonstrating my point. Your long, complicated, meaningless comment here - which boils down to sex being impossible to define - is now widely accepted (and is the basis of a Supreme Court case), while someone like Scott Adams who would claim that chromosomes or sex organs (at birth) are indeed sufficient in defining one's sex, is perceived to be "off the rails". It's absurd.
I always thought it was the same as a solid part of his specific cohort and generation; excessive entertainment-style news consumption through the normal rabble rousers. For a group of people who were obsessed with telling me that wrestling was fake, they sure were a group of marks when a guy with a gravelly voice told them what to think.
I didn't know about his comments about Black people until today. It's more than a bit pathetic that he devolved into colour-based absurdities so late in life. For someone who could pattern match the reality of life at a large company so effectively, it's unfortunate he couldn't realize he was being played by 4chan trolls and fellow travelers in the media.
My working hypothesis is that some jobs are inherently isolating and that gradually leads to mental deviance. CEOs and cartoonists are similar in this way.
He didn't have peers to challenge him on anything, and after a couple decades of that, he was just high on his own supply. Elon Musk and Kanye West have the same issue.
How sheltered are you people? Scott Adams was a pretty standard non-woke boomer. Do you think that just because you don’t hear certain opinions in the workplace or the faculty or the Atlantic podcast, that they aren’t widely held by members of the public? Do you think everyone’s into DEI, BLM, trans-rights, multi-culturalism etc?
Looking the timeline of controversies, I reckon he was radicalized by Conservative ragebait twitter, repeating just what was hype then. I'm only aware of these things because I know some people who brought out similar 'hot takes' and 'you need to care about these issues' irl at similar times
I followed his blog back when he started this descent, and I have a theory that it was hill climbing.
He used to blog about pretty innocent stuff; his wife making fun of him for wearing pajama pants in public, behind the scenes on drawing comics, funny business interactions he'd had. But then he started getting taken out of context by various online-only publications, and he'd get a burst of traffic and a bunch of hate mail and then it'd go away. And then he'd get quoted out of context again. I'm not sure if it bothered him, but he started adding preambles to his post, like "hey suchandsuch publication, if you want to take this post out of context, jump to this part right here and skip the rest."
I stopped reading around this point. But later when he came out with his "trump is a persuasion god, just like me, and he is playing 4d chess and will be elected president" schtick, it seemed like the natural conclusion of hill climbing controversy. He couldn't be held accountable for the prediction. After all, he's just a comedian with a background in finance, not a politics guy. But it was a hot take on a hot topic that was trying to press buttons.
I'm sure he figured out before most people that being a newspaper cartoonist was a downward-trending gig, and that he'd never fully transition to online. But I'm sad that this was how he decided to make the jump to his next act.
Ahh, so that's what I've internally called "The Sharpiro Effect" really is. Though it's still a bigger shame that a philosophy professor would need to resort to this compared to a newpaper cartoonist.
I should have clarified for people who had the good fortune to not be exposed to these posts, but that was usually his lead-in to his ultra toxic writing. i.e. it was an engaging hook that led to more engaging trolling
While he definitely went off the rails, I first caught a hint, back in the 90s, when his fanclub/e-list was named "Dogbert's New Ruling Class"... and he seemed to take it a bit too seriously.
In some sense I agree, there is a level of defeatism in at least part of the wisdom of the stoics and very little questioning of authority. You do have the "If it's not right don't do it, if it's not true don't say it", and you are suppose to act on things if they are within your control. There's just no encouragement that you're more capable than you think or that you should do anything beyond "The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury." That doesn't really topple oppressive regimes.
It's a bit of a interesting take, you should act with virtue, but there is no encouragement to act against oppression and question authority. It seems very much like something to ignore and hope there's not a clash.
For many, if not most, of the sites I regularly visit, text based browsers work surprisingly fine. My main complaint is actually the structure of the html. In many cases sites could improve massively, if they moved navigation to below the actual content. Having a large vertical menu taking up the entire screen as the first thing you see is slightly annoying.
Best thing about sites that works in TUI browser is that it can also work in Tor Browser "Safest" mode. In fact to those who are saying that these text based website are anti feature. I would argue that it is a safety feature to be able to browse and work in Tor Browser "Safest" mode. In fact ALL web page should strive to work in "Safest" mode, and only throw in bells and whistles when needed. As one can see just by turn on JS the site is NO longer really safe.
Let me ask you, is TOR even still safe or worth it?
I'm seriously asking cause I don't know. I heard that the US govt runs a lot of the exit nodes now. So maybe it's safe, as long as you don't live in the US?
> The main navigation menu is just above the site footer in the HTML document.
Just letting you know, that stuff is a bit confusing to screen reader users.
Though I really wish we standardized on putting content first, like mobile apps do. At least we woulnd't haave to explain to new screen reader users why getting to the f???ing article is so damn hard if you don't know the right incantations to do it quickly.
For the (small, noncommercial) sites I help with, we've always had at least a ‘jump to content’ link at the very top, hidden by CSS, dating back to when lynx was my main browser. In practice today, it's more for people using screen readers.
It's not just the TV, it's the weird take that tuners are bad, apparently. I helped my mother-in-laws friend, a lady in her 60s, getting her TV working after a move. The local cable providers don't care to offer their coax solution anymore, you need their box. To be fair, the box is nice enough, but it's way more complicated than simply hooking up the tuner.
Modern Samsung TV are also awful, there's no longer a source button on the remote, so you have to use their terrible UI to navigate to the bottom of the screen, guess which input you want, which takes 10 - 15 seconds. If you can find it in their horribly busy UI.
From what I've read on some modern Samsung TVs if they have a settings button on the remote long pressing that is a shortcut directly to the input selection.
Another option is if the remote has a mic button you can use that. This works pretty well on my several year old Samsung (most of the time [1]). I just press the button and say e.g., "HDMI 2". If I want to watch an OTA channel, say channel 4, I say "channel 4".
I don't know how well this works on the newest models because I believe they know have they own Alexa-like thing called Bixby handling this instead of something built specifically for TV voice control.
If you don't watch OTA TV another possibility is to enable HDMI-CEC for your devices. Then when you turn on or wake a device it can switch the TV input to that device (and turn the TV on if it is not on).
[1] Around a year ago they had a glitch that affected the voice commands on older TVs around the world. Most reports were for 2017 TV models. These TVs started only recognizing voice commands in Russian (and the feedback showing what you said was in Russian too).
For switching between HDMI 1 and HDMI 2 I was able to learn how to say those well enough in Russian for it to work by listening to Google Translate speak them in Russian. But no matter how many times I tried I was not able to learn how to say "channel 4" well enough in Russian. It worked if I let the TV listen to Google Translate speaking it, so the problem was my pronunciation rather than Google Translate not translating correctly.
This is because every channel on the cable is encrypted now, lest someone try to pirate service, and given that the cable companies all but killed "CableCard" that box is required because it is the "decryptor" of the streams.
It's not just Apple though. Something is wrong in the software industry. Desktop/PC operating systems aren't going away, but the industry have decided that it's no longer a relevant product category.
Windows is going down a strange path, where it's productivity is suffering because Microsoft is measuring success in terms of CoPilot adoption. Apple is stuck trying to invent the next iPhone, but in the meantime they are trying to make the iPhone sexy by slapping on a new skin. Then they forgot about macOS and quickly moves over some stuff from iPhone. Neither of the products apparent have UX designers anymore and QA is meeeh.
I don't understand either company. Both use to have talented UI/UX teams and actually listened to them. Is it really just short term stock price thinking that make them both forget that their operating systems should be about productivity and user ergonomics?
>Something is wrong in the software industry. Desktop/PC operating systems aren't going away, but the industry have decided that it's no longer a relevant product category.
Half of humanity is not very smart. Once you've sold computers and software to everyone who is smart, you have to sell to the not smart half. And that not smart half isn't going to like or even be able to use complex software. Since there are far more people out there simply consuming things and few people creating things, the bias is going to be for the simpletons.
Software and technology went from being a productivity tool to an ad delivery vehicle (or delivery vehicle for whatever bullshit is en-vogue like media subscriptions, AI, etc - that ultimately sooner or later comes back to ads).
Turns out you don't actually need much UX or design when the product's productivity capabilities no longer affect your bottom line.
My question is what those people think will happen when the transition completes and everything fully became an ad delivery machine with no productivity features? Ads only work as long as people have disposable income to spend on the advertised products/media, and they won't be having any money if you break the productivity tools they used to make said money. Ads can't work if the entire economy becomes ads.
reply