In his later life he was clearly trolling and dabbling in stirring up social media for fun, and it was hard to tell where the lines between that and his personal identity were.
Goodbye born entertainer and funny dork.
I forget which video it is and don't want to re-watch it anyways. I Googled the specific quote and it sounds about right with my memory (which admittedly could be faulty):
"I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people."
"Just get the f— away. Wherever you have to go, just get away".
I guess we could discuss whether this is straight up racist, but it sounds pretty bad to me.
Adams was talking about a poll:
> He said it revealed that 26% of Black respondents said it’s “not OK to be White” and 21% said “they weren’t sure.” With a degree of amazement, Adams said: “That’s 47% of Blacks not willing to say it’s OK to be White. That’s like a real poll. This just happened.”
> Adams said that the poll demonstrated that there is “no fixing” current racial tensions in America, which is why White people should live in largely segregated neighborhoods.
> “Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people,” the 65-year-old author exclaimed. “Just get the (expletive) away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.”
...
> “I’ve been identifying as Black for a while because I like to be on the winning team,” Adams continued. “And I like to help. I always thought if you help the Black community, that’s sort of the biggest lever, you could find, the biggest benefit.”
> “But it turns out that nearly half of that team doesn’t think I’m okay to be White,” Adams said.
> Given the poll results, Adams said he’s now “going to re-identify as White,” arguing that he doesn’t “want to be a member of a hate group,” which he claimed he had “accidentally joined” with his supposed Black identification.
https://www.tumblr.com/manlethotline/616428804059086848/hey-...
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.
It started at roughly the time of his divorce, so it's hard to imagine there's not a connection. But, of course, you're right that we'll never know.
Not sure why we are being coy about the triggers. Society of his youth and the biology are well documented.
I don't want to excuse his opinions but that's the sort of event that can change a person.
He did online chats, and did one immediately after. It's a tough watch. https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1046764270128484352
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.
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.)
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.
It took a long time to actually get to diversity that was beyond token "person of group" inclusivity.
I remember reading (I think in newspaper interview) in the late 1990s his own description of how comics became his full-time focus and his deep resentment of how difficult it had been to advance in management in corporate America because he was a White man in the 1980s (!?!) was pretty central to it.
I'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.
The 6/11/1994 comic about sensitivity training comes to mind. "I can't find my keys" and "my blouse falls to the floor."
The key is that it seemed like he was Dilbert when he actually always thought of himself as Dogbert.
For people who haven't read The Dilbert Future: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32627/has-anyone...
It's a weird book and not in a great way. He presents a bunch of very strange "theories" in a way where he kind of says "haha just a silly lil thought... unless it's true", which I remember seeing in some of his early Trump stuff too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But Trump was elected president. Twice. So maybe Adams was right? Or what did you mean with "hill climbing controversy"?
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 to acknowledge as a disaster.
Almost everyone is reasonable, it’s the contexts that our reasons are relevant to, which are different.
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.
Perhaps?
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.
Does that sound reasonable to you?
Adams jumped to Pacific Bell and completed his degree, thinking he was on the fast track to upper management. But in his book, Adams wrote that as was the case at Crocker National, his new employer was also coming under fire for a lack of diversity in its executive ranks.
Instead of getting mad, Adams got to drawing. Believing all this was a sign for him to revive his dream of cartooning, he purchased a primer on how to submit a comic strip and went about creating Dilbert.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/scott-ad...
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.
He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.
His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.
You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.
For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.
Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.
There is a lot of this in the modern era, and probably will only get "worse". People need to sooner than later be able to reconcile this whole idea of "not liking the person yet can't help but like their art". Back in the day it was easy to ignore, and probably most of the bad stuff was easily hidden, not so much these days.
To me, he died many times in the past few years. Dilbert of the 1990s is dear to me and I really enjoyed the animated series. My sons tell me it prepared them for corporate life. I'm sad he left us this way. I wish I could admire him again.
Politics is "How much should we tax people?" and "Where should we set limits on carbon emissions?" or "Which candidate do I support"
Politics is not "Black Americans are a terrorist group" and "Actually, maybe the Holocaust was not as bad as people say it was".
The latter are core moral views, and we should not be so quick to dismiss them as merely political.
I loved reading the Belgariad as a young teen and was shocked upon learning more about the author as an adult.
I think the Egyptians had it right. Ultimately your heart will be weighted against the feather of Ma'at, and it is up to the goddess to decide. We mere mortals don't know the true intentions and circumstances of other people and their lives to judge, nor to throw the first stone.
They related him to an uncle figure who became a mean drunk.
Even the US - after independence one imperialism was replaced by another - a committee of the wealthy. It was a slow march to the democracy and universal suffrage that exists today.
Whether this is objectively true is another question, but from their perspective, that's what it is.
Opium Wars, Rape of Nanking. Things had been pretty hardcore for the Chinese for quite some time when Mao took power.
People that take power in those kinds of environments rarely trend towards genteel treatment of their political enemies in the peace that follows.
If anything, the US is still far away from as bad as China.
Over time I've learned context about how those doldrums occurred, and more about what Reagan actually did, and the trade seems much less worthwhile. :-/
Shouldn't we reject these people entirely? We have a fascist regime running the USA right now, with a gestapo running around killing and kidnapping people, in no small part due to people like Adams making his point of view acceptable and palatable over time.
As to ICE deporting criminal aliens, that's not what they're doing. They're kidnapping people off the street and out of their homes and cars, with no warrants. They're literally doing "Papers, please" style stops of anybody they even suspect could be an immigrant, including Native Americans. Just a few days ago in Minneapolis they abducted four homeless men who are members of the Oglala Nation. This all sounds pretty Gestapo like to me.
Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not? I think most people could actually "choose family" (or not, if it's better for you as individual). Why stick with people if they're mostly negative and have a negative impact on you? Just because you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human on the planet?
Not to take away from the rest of what you say, it's a highly personal experience, and I thank you for sharing that heartfelt message to give people more perspectives, something usually missing when "divisive" (maybe not the right word) people end up in the news. Thank you for being honest, and thank you for sharing it here.
And back in the day, Adams was a pretty crunchy California guy. Remember the Dilburrito?
In my teens I began to learn that most of the people on my father's side of the family were horrifically broken people with severe issues. There's at least one town in New Mexico where I wouldn't want to use my last name because an uncle of mine has run it deeply through the mud and 20' underground so to speak.
I've actively cut those people out of my life. I've decided that blood isn't the only thing that makes family, and that I can choose who I want to treat as family.
The infighting bastards who happen to share my last name are not my family.
Of course it's different for everyone, some families are so tragic they may not be worth preserving, etc. But that's an outlier-- the modal experience is that the power of family is precisely in the fact that you don't get to choose it.
I have not found this to be true.
If you can get friends who live nearby and come over once a month that's probably closer than the modern us family structure tbh
An adopted child is also a form of chosen family.
I first read those words many years ago. They were a comfort and a revelation then, and they still resonate today, when I have very much chosen my own family.
It's all fun and games until grandma passes with a $10M net worth without a will, and the 5 children and 20 grandchildren start a real life session of battle royale
> Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not?
I'm sorry you had that experience.
There are very good reasons to leave / avoid family. I have an extended family and I've seen it all: One cousin recently had to kick her husband out for being an alcoholic; a different cousin was kicked out for being an alcoholic and met his 2nd wife in AA. Fortunately, my ultra-conservative aunt and uncle tolerate their transgender grandchild, but it creates a lot of friction between them and my cousin (transgender child's parent).
For most of us, our families are a positive experience. As we get older, we also learn that families are an exercise in learning to accept people as they are, and not as we wish they would be. We just can't go through life changing our people whenever they don't live up to what we want them to be.
As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.
Acting like "oh, he was trolling", or "it was just a small amount of hating Black people and women" is exactly how you get Steven Miller in the fucking White House.
We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again, and that means calling out the bigotry even in death.
I would argue it has not in fact been useful, that making it shameful hasn't reduced it, and that calling it out in death is not useful in reducing it. I think we do it because it's easier than doing something useful and it makes us feel good.
I hate bigotry as well. I encourage to do something IRL about it.
In the last 10 years, the modern black lives matter movement has triggered similar violent backlashes, with every public gathering drawing a militarized police response and hateful counter-protesters. On a policy level, even the most milquetoast corporate initiatives to consider applications and promotions from diverse candidates of equal merit are now being slandered and attacked. In education, acknowledgment of historical racial and gender inequality is under heavy censorship pressure.
It really does seem like the more effective we are at acting IRL, the greater the backlash is going to be.
Is it more effective to put on kid gloves and treat bigots with dignity and respect that they themselves refuse to give out?
Are we supposed to sit back and say nothing? Is that more effective?
Yes, making it shameful to be a bigot has reduced it, if you ask me.
I encourage everyone to do some research on the way Black people were spoken to in public a few decades ago in America. You’d be pretty shocked at what was considered normal and not shameful.
Scott Adams can rest in piss. One less bigot in this world.
There is immense value in acknowledging and learning from the mistakes of others, yes, even after their deaths.
It is shameful to have those views. But perhaps we can bring it up tomorrow rather than right this minute.
I don't really want to study fluctuating levels of religious bigotry in Bach's life when I listen to his works.
FWIW, I use to be a big fan of Crystal Castles (like listening to 4+ hours a day for close to a decade). It was a core part of my culture diet. Once it was known that Ethan Kath was a sexual predator that groomed teenage girls, I simply stopped listening or talking about them ever.
Why is this hard? IDK, it really feels like people put too much of their identity into cultural objects when they lack real communities and people in their lives.
Also throwing it out there, I don't really know much about Scott Adams (or his work for that matter). Dilbert comics weren't widespread memes on the phpBB forums I'd post on throughout the 00s and 10s.
edit: spelling
The thing that is wrong about it is that the purity spiral may get out of control and result in wholesale purging of art, Iconoclast-style (or perhaps Cultural Revolution-style).
I don't trust people with an instinct to purge history. They rarely know when to stop.
Plus, standards change a lot. Picasso had a teenage mistress. It wasn't as scandalous back then. Should we really be so arrogant as to push our current standards on the entire humanity that once was? If yes, we will be obliterated by the next generation that applies the same logic to us, only with a different set of taboos.
Even calling for a boycott or lack of commercialization of something is not purging from history.
You can still stream all of Crystal Castles songs on every platform, you can still buy their music, their albums still have hundreds of seeders on trackers. Just as I'm sure you can buy your Dilbert books.
Telling people to maybe look up to better humans, which it needs to be stated have always existed and aren't a modern invention, should be encouraged.
One of the other threads in here an OP states that we should use this moment to reflect and do better in our own lives, what is wrong with this viewpoint?
We've seen countless examples of people getting sucked into social media holes and I've yet to encounter a single case where this has ever led to healthy outcomes.
We're allowed to avoid consuming the work of artists we think are horrible humans. We're allowed to encourage others to do that too even. None of that is purging or censorship.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oG5EpzGmAtA&pp=0gcJCTIBo7VqN5t...
My TL;DR Choosing not to financially support a creator for ethical seasons makes sense as an ethical stance. But that doesn't mean the media we like needs to always reflect our values.
You can’t burn a woman at the stake today and say ”oh well, 300 years ago it was normal so”.
- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who died hundreds of years ago, whose work is in the public domain, who does not materially benefit from your spectatorship (what with them being dead and all)
- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who is alive today, whose work they have ownership of, who materially benefits from your spectatorship
- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who died mere minutes ago, whose work is owned by their estate, whose heirs materially benefit from your spectatorship
I think the first category is fine, the second category is unambiguously not fine, and the third category is ambiguous, but I would err on the side of "don't consume".
I don't think I ever paid for a Dilbert comics strip, though I never downloaded them from somewhere illegal either.
I'm not -your- conscience, I can only explain my own. To me? No, that's not fine.
People knew slavery was wrong when slavery was happening. People knew child labor was wrong when child labor was happening. People knew segregation was wrong when segregation was happening. Those people were not rewarded by society.
It continues to have prominance in our society due to inertia and the fact that some people want a positive legacy to endure long after they pass regardless of whether or not they did anything in life to deserve that kind of legacy.
As the person you're replying to wrote it better than I ever could I'll write what they just shared becauase I think it's worth repeating, "taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest."
We should strive for honesty in these kinds of discussions over sensitivity.
Now, Adams had plenty of opportunities to defend/explain his comments on certain issues, and he did not satisfy many people with those or perhaps dug himself in deeper (I myself really only know him from Dilbert in the 1990s, and am only superficially aware of anything controversial he did/said outside of that).
But I don't see anyone saying anything about him now that was not being said when he was alive.
This comment actually makes a specific point of calling it out compared to some others here.
Are you saying that Scott Adams was right and, say, white people _should_ avoid black people? Or are you saying that we shouldn't remember how awful people were once they die?
You will not change them, and everyone present already made up their mind on their behavior.
Speaking only positively about people distorts the reality.
I'd say calling him out as a racist is not exactly speaking ill of the dead in this case.
If that were true, how could it be anything but ok? Should I feel guilty because I evolved from monkeys and carry around the leftist equivalent of original sin? No thanks. Though, I suppose you could disagree and say that it's not intrinsic, but that's a really difficult argument to make.
also no, racism is not genetic
When someone I know dies, I speak frankly about them, good or bad, because to do otherwise is a lie, and the most disrespectful thing to do is to misrepresent a person who no longer can represent themselves.
Scott Adams did what he did, that's surely not in question. Honor his life by speaking frankly about how he affected oneself and others, good or bad. Let the chips fall where they may.
We have made our society shameless. Pornographers, gamblers, and truly creepy people are told that it's fine to be what they are. I dunno, maybe that really is the case. But having abandoned shame as a method of social cohesion, you don't get to resurrect it for those things you dislike. The two-edged sword cuts both ways.
I did not follow the Scott Adams brouhaha when it happened, and vaguely I somehow get the impression it's like the Orson Scott Card thing. I'm afraid to check for fear that when I do I will find there was nothing he should've been ashamed for. People use the word "bigot" to mean things I can't seem to categories as bigotry.
I have difficulty reconciling this with the other side of the picture. It seems to me like true clarity of thought wouldn't have ended up in the places he did.
At some point I stopped reading because the RSS feed kept getting broken and it was just too hard for me to follow.
I didn’t hear about Adams again until maybe 7-8 years ago when I found out about the socket puppet thing and he had seemingly gone off the deep end.
From the meager amount I know, it only got worse from there.
It makes things very odd. Given who he was/became I don’t miss him. But I did enjoy his work long long ago.
> That also felt like family [emphasis added]
See the problem?
"Chosen family" is chosen. You weren't recruited.
What did the guy say that has everyone stumbling over themselves to vaguely allude to it?
He was a racist person, and the people he was racist towards would prefer that people not forget that, even in death, because the problems that Scott Adams embodied at the end of his life did not die with him.
Terms like this are part of racist vernacular. It's better to use a reasonable alternative like "sanitizing", or something else that matches your meaning.
"...you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous."
Why hide from it? Embrace it, love it. Be it.
The only people he pushed away are the increasingly intolerant leftists who always choose to interpret whatever he said in the worst possible way.
I’m sorry, are you also racist or do you mean a different family?
Scott Adams undoubtedly “won at life” but also somehow remained angry at the world. More of an example of things we shouldn’t do and things we should try to eradicate.
We joked that we could assess the health of a company's culture by whether Dilbert cartoons were tapped up in cubicles. Companies without them tended to have not much in the way of a sense of humor, or irony, or self-awareness.
That place wasn't just kinda like Initech in Office Space, it pretty much WAS Initech in Office Space, only way less funny and interesting.
And yes, the norm was already pretty bad.
His son died of a fentanyl drug overdose which is really tragic. Scott Adams was definitely a crazy person by the end of his time with all sorts of rants on this and that. But I always viewed this stage with pity rather than outrage. Being crazy after losing your child is perhaps just how things are.
It’s just unfortunate that others treated him as sane.
I'm not sure about the hypnotism and manifesting beliefs, but that might have been the start of some deeper mental health issue too.
I was a Kaiser Northern California member and yes their scheduling system was dysfunctional — they were the better of the options my employer offered. However, if you’re in need of treatment that is already approved, one phone call was always all you had to do book. Surgery was harder to book than anything, particularly for rare conditions.
> In his May stream announcing his cancer, he said he’d used anti-parasitic medications ivermectin and fenbendazole to treat himself, but they didn’t work. There’s no evidence that ivermectin works as a cancer treatment.
I don't really think bureaucracy was his downfall.
Even at 12 I could tell this guy was an annoying idiot. Loved the comic though.
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdb/1996Mar/0000.ht...
The simplest objection I can see is orbital mechanics.
> Humor often comes from the weird thoughts and emotions involved in a situation, as opposed to the simple facts. The best fodder for humor can be communicated by a simple description of the situation and then saying "So then I was thinking..."
I don't think this originates with him, it sounds like an amusing joke a physicist would say because the math happens to be equivalent, and there is not an experiment to differentiate between the two.
Which is why it's so important for people understand the Principle of Parsimony (aka. Occams Razor), and Russels Teapot.
Also, refuting it is rather easy, and doesn't even require modern technology, Henry Cavendish performed the experiment in 1797 [1]. Nothing in the experimental setup would change if all involved objects expanded.
This was someone who called all Black people a "hate group"; said that parents of troubled boys could only watch them kill other people, or kill their sons themselves; and opposed women presidential candidates because they would negatively affect men.
Scott Adams said some really stupid, poorly thought out things about minorities and women, and he faced real world consequences for his actions. But he also died slowly and painfully of cancer, and he died crying out for help very publicly. That’s objectively very sad, and if you should ever share the same fate I truly and genuinely hope your loved ones are there and with you, and choose to forgive you of any of your perceived sins.
I promise you that maybe nobody speaks up to you, but I’ve heard people like you on the street. I overhear you in a cafe, at a restaurant, I work with you, I’ve gone to school with you. People will not remember you based on how you think they should. They will remember you based on how you actually were. Surely I will forget this interaction in a few hours as the tandem of a typical day creeps back in, but know that I have personally assessed you to be a horrible person, and if you’re anything like this behind the screen other people in your life have too!
Hope this helps.
It’s not hard for a lot of us to criticize who he became. He certainly had no shortage of criticism for others. I looked up to Scott a lot as a kid, and as an adult found him to be a man like any other, with limits and flaws… not merely in spite of his accomplishments, but often because of them. There’s a lesson there that I wish to carry too.
That concept of merging skills stuck with me.
Don't max one stat. Be a unique, weird combination of several.
interesting...
I'm not going to gloat, nor am I going to consider him even remotely a good person based on things he's said and done. I will never know him outside of his works and the things he's said and done, so I can only judge on those merits.
I guess all I can really do is shake my head and wonder what could have been had he not completely lost his way; his death by cancer was likely (not guaranteed, but there's always some hope if treated early and properly) preventable, but he made a choice.
I guess I'll just remember the early, funny, too-true-to-life material and try not to think too much about what happened after that.
After a couple of years his jokes became repetitive, formulaic, obvious,...
For some people that might be a good thing. Chuckling at an old joke is like trying again the food or music they used to love when they were young. Being funny or revealing isn't the point, being familiar and reassuring is what matters.
He had a moment at his time. A few more years and no one will remember him.
1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things."
I'm certain at least some small part of my own success can be attributed to my exposure to this idea, and for that I give my respects to Adams. As far as Adam's character (or lack thereof) is concerned, that's already being discussed elsewhere in this thread by others more eloquent than myself, so I'll leave that to them.
Is this idea that top 25% is "very good" at something innumeracy, or a subtle insight I'm missing? There's got to be a million skills that you could assess rank at -- writing embedded C code, playing basketball, identifying flora, PacMan, archery, bouldering… I can't imagine ever being able to not continue this list -- and you should expect to be in the top 25% of roughly a quarter of those skills, obviously heavily biased towards the ones you've tried, and even more biased towards the ones you care about. It's hard to imagine anyone who's not in the top 25% of skill assessment in a dozen things, let alone two or more…
I wonder if he managed to do it in time.
I recall having a "huh?" moment when I once saw the titular character say that there's no evidence for climate change.
The strangest thing is that I hail from a particularly conservative region of the world and I've met many such Scotts Adamses in college (some of whom went on to work in FAANG companies). I don't share these views and I could never wrap my head around the idea that a clearly intelligent and often otherwise kind person could be like this.
Then, I had my own startup, and as a manager of people, had to come to terms with a bunch of personality defects I brought in that I was blind to. Those blind spots really made me a bad manager. I'm grateful I got to learn about myself in that way.
But, then I started to view Dilbert differently. It felt like only some of the characters deserved empathy. I bet Scott Adams would hate that I used that word to critique his comics.
Is it just me? I always felt like half of the people were stupid no matter what the situation. Did I miss a more complex part of Dilbert?
I haven't been able to separate who Scott Adams was, or more specifically, the racist things he said, from his cultural commentary, no matter what insights there are. And, I can't admire "4d chess" because it feels like it is bragging that you can predict the winner if you throw an alligator and Stephen J Hawking into a pen together.
Fair winds and following seas, Scott.
For shame.
Since I get a paywall and it looks like no one has posted such a link yet.
FWIW, I think the Inc article is better: https://www.inc.com/jennifer-conrad/scott-adams-dilbert-dies...
But the link posted to HackerNews isn't the one getting the discussion traffic.
I remember how he predicted Trump's victory all the way back in 2015, early in the primaries. He argues that Trump (and Kanye, for that matter) were super-convincers who used mass hypnosis techniques. Sounds utterly bizarre, and yet mass hypnosis struck me as the only possible explanation of Trump's popularity. Because there were certainly no rational arguments for it.
And yet, this seemingly critical (if unhinged) thinker who claimed to see through those alleged hypnosis techniques, somehow fell for it.
I don't think I'll ever understand Scott Adams.
It is hard to remember how thoroughly Trump's presidential run was seen as a joke in 2015. I bet most people can't remember and somehow think they always knew Trump stood a real chance. That is likely a lie.
Scott made specific, reasoned, unique arguments about why Trump would win, with high conviction. This was at a time when it was about as non-consensus and unpopular as possible to do so (it wasn't just that people didn't want Trump to win, there was a complete dismissal of the possibility from both sides of the aisle).
The fact that Scott was right, and continued to be right when forecasting much about politics, taught me a lot about the nature of the world we live in. Scott clearly understood something important that I did not at the time.
I think it is pretty good.
You can, of course, debate it - and HN being HN people probably will.
Next, many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I'm not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So, here I go:
I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. I won't need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified for entry.
IMO, it doesn't diminish the quality of the Good things.
A Final Message From Scott Adams
If you are reading this, things did not go well for me.
I have a few things to say before I go.
My body failed before my brain. I am of sound mind as I write this, January 1st, 2026. If you wonder about any of my choices for my estate, or anything else, please know I am free of any coercion or inappropriate influence of any sort. I promise.
Next, many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I'm not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So, here I go:
I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. I won't need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified for entry.
With your permission, I'd like to explain something about my life.
For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent, as a way to find meaning. That worked. But marriages don't always last forever, and mine eventually ended, in a highly amicable way. I'm grateful for those years and for the people I came to call my family.
Once the marriage unwound, I needed a new focus. A new meaning. And so I donated myself to "the world," literally speaking the words out loud in my otherwise silent home. From that point on, I looked for ways I could add the most to people's lives, one way or another.
That marked the start of my evolution from Dilbertcartoonist to an author of - what I hoped would be useful books. By then, I believed I had amassed enough life lessons that I could start passing them on. I continued making Dilbert comics, of course.
As luck would have it, I'm a good writer. My first book in the "useful" genre was How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. That book turned out to be a huge success, often imitated, and influencing a wide variety of people. I still hear every day how much that book changed lives. My plan to be useful was working.
I followed up with my book Win Bigly, that trained an army of citizens how to be more persuasive, which they correctly saw as a minor super power. I know that book changed lives because I hear it often.
You'll probably never know the impact the book had on the world, but I know, and it pleases me while giving me a sense of meaning that is impossible to describe.
My next book, Loserthink, tried to teach people how to think better, especially if they were displaying their thinking on social media. That one didn't put much of a dent in the universe, but I tried.
Finally, my book Reframe Your Brain taught readers how to program their own thoughts to make their personal and professional lives better. I was surprised and delighted at how much positive impact that book is having.
I also started podcasting a live show called Coffee With Scott Adams, dedicated to helping people think about the world, and their lives, in a more productive way. I didn't plan it this way, but it ended up helping lots of lonely people find a community that made them feel less lonely. Again, that had great meaning for me.
I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my work, I'm asking you to pay it forward as best you can. That is the legacy I want.
Be useful.
And please know I loved you all to the end.
Scott Adams
Let’s not pretend it’s wrong to shit on this man’s grave just because he wasn’t an asshole for the first part of his life.
But then the way he dealt with his cancer make me reconsider. Adams publicly acknowledged trying ivermectin and fenbendazole as alternative cancer treatments, which he later declared ineffective, before pursuing conventional medical care in his final months. Unfortunately by then it's too late.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo
Something is wrong with us engineers. We need to have less magical thinking. More scientific and mathematical education.
I understand he sought to convert to Christianity in his last days. I hope he succeeded in finding God — that he understood that there's more to faith in Christ than chanting “I do believe in Jesus! I do! I do!”, that it requires identifying and purging the hatred in one's heart and replacing it with the unconditional love Christ exemplified. That journey is hard enough when you've spent most/all of a lifetime trying to tackle it; deathbed conversions are even harder, with no time to put that newfound unconditional love into practice. No time for apologies to those harmed, no time for righting one's wrongs — only bare, raw remorse and shame.
May Scott Adams rest in peace. May he be remembered honestly — both for what he got right and what he got wrong.
The best cartoonist is invisible like Banksy and the guy who did the Cow cartoons and Calvin & Hobbes.
Things changed drastically in 2020 (or probably even 2014). People started picking specific events to showcase black hatred. Some kind of specific moment where a cop killed a black person. That stuff happens and it does suck. But again, all of the people being accused of black hate literally loved "in living color" just a couple decades before.
A family friend's husband was shot to death because he didn't open a door to the police as he was going through an "episode" in his bedroom. His wife had called the police because he was yelling threatening things at her. The couple was white. Why didn't that make the news - it didn't fit all the narratives.
I would say most people on the left are in a cult created by the mainstream media and told exactly what to think in all these situations. The leftist cult needs to enrage people to support its causes. It's causes are linked to pulling at your empathy, not at pulling at good policies. Even if there is a grain of truth to "climate change", the selling of it was designed to get votes. The other side of it all has been reactionary. At this point people on the right are just like - ok, what's the new rage going to be this month, and why do I even care anymore. And for the most part its because every rage cycle is entirely predicated on the right combination of ingredients they can mix together to whip people into emotional thinking.
You don't have to EXCUSE Scott Adams for knowing this truth and then start speaking it.
Did AOC get leftist backlash as large as Good when she said to stop chanting for Hamas the other day? That's what the right has been saying for 3 fucking years.
Did Iran protests where reports of 12k people dead get encampments on the lawn of Columbia?
What about when Hamas murdered a bunch of Palestinians on a video a few months ago?
What FAKE rage cycle do you all want to keep participating in?
I was a child and had just read and enjoyed one of his older books, maybe the Dilbert Principle. I came from a religious household and I was surprised by something in the book that revealed him to be an atheist.
I looked up his email, or maybe it was in the back of the book, and wrote him a quick message about how and why he should convert. He replied to me (unconvinced) and I replied back, at which point he realized I was a child and the conversation ended.
When I heard he was dying of cancer I wrote him another email, again offering my own unsolicited thoughts, this time on cancer and experimental treatments. He did not reply, but I thought there was a kind of symmetry to it -- I wrote him towards the start of my life and again towards the end of his.
Interesting guy, I've enjoyed several of his books and the comics for many years. He had a big impact. Tough way to die.
IAmBroom•1h ago