Adams has become a controversial figure in recent years. Regardless of what you think of him, as someone who has worked in Corporate America for over a decade, there really isn't anything quite like Dilbert to describe the sort of white collar insanity I've had to learn to take in stride. My first workplace as a junior developer was straight out of Dilbert and Office Space. I have a gigantic collection of digitized Dilbert strips that best describe office situations I've run into in real life – many of them including the pointy haired boss.

He's expressed a lot of what I would consider... stupid opinions these days, but I would be sad to learn he's no longer with us.

Dilbert is about the 90s.

He has had some questionable views all throughout his life. In his book "The Dilbert Future", which was from 1997, the last 2 chapters are some wacky stuff about manifesting - i.e if you write something down 100 times a day every day it will come true and other stuff like that.

And while that may seem a far cry from the alt-right stuff he eschews, its really not - inability to process information clearly and think in reality in lieu of ideology is the cornerstone of conservative thinking.

Of course, you are not going to write down that you will win the lottery and then win.

But most people are their own worst enemy and self limiting to some extent. Focusing on what you want in life, and affirming it to yourself over and over, is effectively a way to brain wash yourself to change your own self limiting behavior and it’s not surprising that this is often successful.

But that's mild compared to what he says. He basically says he can influence the stock market with affirmations.

You should read the chapters. https://www.scribd.com/doc/156175634/the-dilbert-future-pdf. Starts on 218.

If you want to read a book that's closer to how the universe actually works, and how your mind should operate, read it: https://archive.org/details/B-001-001-709

E.g when the Spanish Empire ruled the world, the British were not very happy about that. With the British Empire, the French and the Germans fought them with every opportunity.

Plausibly quite true. But given (1) how often the succession turned violent after a monarch died, and (2) how very little power the average person had - I'd say such prayers were entirely reasonable. If they made "life in the lower 99%" just 1% more bearable, that'd be a worthwhile RoI.

Demon-Haunted World is a book worth reading...but Carl often seems to forget that 99% of humans are neither huge science geeks (as he is), nor rationalist robots.

He does not say that.

> Starts on 218.

Actually it’s page 246.

Not even that. He says that affirmations resulted in him having a premonition. He does not generalize or predict that this will happen for other people, or even himself in the future.

A premonition is a fancy name for an unconscious prediction.

Now does are the predictions "good", that is a completely different story. Probably depends on the information going in.

The problem with woo is you can always add more woo (bonus points if it has sciencey glitter). Goes from woowoo to woowoowoo.

Woo has no logical consistency and has nothing predictably predictive.

Ask manifestation believers why they are not successful or rich or whatever? You'll hear some fabulous reasons.

My neighbour paid money (I presume thousands) to do courses on learning how to unblock herself. The stated reason for the failure to manifest was due to blocks. Her explanation of the material was outrageous. I have yet to see the positive effect on her.

I don't manifest, yet I've got things others would like to manifest. Not sure there that fits in with the woo.

But after some time goes by and you get pinched in the mortgage crash, or your wife hits you with a divorce, or you get cancer, if you really believe you manifest everything into your life, then you have to believe you manifested the bad stuff too. So why did you do that to yourself? It's a rough belief system then.

Truly a master of manifesting my own reality, I suppose? heh. But seriously though, in think in the vain of the above, if "manifestation" is what someone needs to do as their trello or jira for themselves, more power to them.

He does not. I can’t prove a negative, but you, being the one making an assertion, could provide a quote (with context) which shows your assertion correct. Please do so.

> If it's possible to control your environment through your thoughts or steer your perceptions (or soul if you prefer) through other universes, I'll bet the secret to doing that is a process called "affirmations."

> I first heard of this technique from a friend who had read a book on the topic. I don't recall the name of the book, so I apologize to the author for not mentioning it. My information came to me secondhand. I only mention it here because it formed my personal experience.

> The process as it was described to me involved visualizing what you want and writing it down fifteen times in a row, once a day, until you obtain the thing you visualized.

> The suggested form would be something like this:

> "I, Scott Adams, will win a Pulitzer Prize."

> The thing that caught my attention is that the process doesn't require any faith or positive thinking to work. Even more interesting was the suggestion that this technique would influence your environment directly and not just make you more focused on your goal. It was alleged that you would experience what seemed to be amazing coincidences when using the technique. These coincidences would be things seemingly beyond your control and totally independent of your efforts (at least from a visual view of reality).

He then goes on to discuss stock, him taking the GMAT, etc. He later continues:

> I used the affirmations again many times, each time with unlikely success. So much so that by 1988, when I decided I wanted to become a famous syndicated cartoonist, it actually felt like a modest goal.

Then he talks about syndicating Dilbert.

He doesn't say, "I can influence the stock market with affirmations," but if you read what he wrote, he is very clearly arguing that you can change reality with your thoughts.

> Even more interesting was the suggestion that this technique would influence your environment directly and not just make you more focused on your goal.

> I don't know if there is one universe or many. If there are many, I don't know for certain that you can choose your path. And if you can choose your path, I don't know that affirmations are necessarily the way to do it. But I do know this: When I act as though affirmations can steer me, I consistently get good results.

I'm not the person you replied to, but I would say that "He basically argues that our thoughts can influence reality" is a fair description of these quotes and the rest of the chapter around it. Some of it is him referencing what other people told him, and he certainly hedges his statements a lot, but I certainly read it as him believing that his affirmations are directly influencing reality.

To me, the quotes you give seems aimed at people with preexisting beliefs in multiple universes or quantum woo, and he seems to want to convince people that affirmations can be viewed as perfectly reasonable in their existing belief systems. This does not mean that he believes what they believe.

Where I differ from you in my take on this is that I also weigh what isn't there. He doesn't provide any form of alternate explanation. Nowhere does he say anything that comes close to "I don't believe that affirmations work this way" or anything of the like. I also don't agree that his hedges clarify anything, rather they muddy the waters.

He presents a thesis, presents other people's arguments for that thesis, presents no arguments against, and then explains that he lives his life in a way consistent with believing in that thesis. The hedges fill one function: to make it harder to argue against him. If the arguments aren't his, the chapter stands even if the arguments fall.

To me, that is basically arguing for the thesis, but in a roundabout and quite defensive way. What other point would you say that that chapter conveys?

He said he wanted to get rich on the stock market. Wrote an affirmation. Had a dream to by Chrysler stock. Bought stock, stock went up. By his conclusion, he manifested stock going up (because of how thoughts and perception can influence reality and e.t.c)

He does not say that.

And yes, that is basically what he says.

With infinite possible universes, you can guide which universe becomes your reality through affirmations.

Wacky perhaps, but the philosophies of consciousness and quantum mechanics are kinda wacky too...

---

On a relevant point, he talks about curing cancer.

Edit: BTW, you can’t copy the text on that PDF.

A lot of time has past since I read Scott Adams view on manifesting. I got a decent way through before I realised it wasn't satire. It did seem clear to me that he was advocating a form of manifesting that went beyond either of those principles. That benefits came from manifesting in ways that no-other influence from yourself would be possible. That's essentially declaring it to be magic. Psychology I can believe, if you want me to believe in magic you're going to need a bit more.

From the point of view of an ADHD person, it doesn't surprise me at all that someone who had the ability to do a dumb task like manifesting would also have the ability to do meaningful things that that I find nearly impossible.

Some minds only think when asked to.

And while that obviously has limits, and is far from the magical technique some might claim - it's very hard to argue against things that work.

If you are writing "Repetitive Strain Injury".

The actual cornerstone of conservatism is an instinctual preference for stability, order, and the familiar. The danger arises when this instinct is hijacked by a rigid ideology that resists truth and seeks control rather than continuity.

Which is, you know, what the American right is doing.

Being in tune with reality is not about knowing facts, but instead knowing the framework or measurements that you can make to determine the truth. If you do this, you feel really comfortable about changing your mind and being wrong.

You don't have this framework - to you its more important to associate with ideology. And when you associate with ideology, you tend to bias your interpretation of events giving large importance to even minor things that agree with it while dismissing very prominent evidence that disagrees with it.

Which is why you can post stuff like this: "The danger arises when this instinct is hijacked by a rigid ideology that resists truth and seeks control rather than continuity" with full irony not realizing that this applies to Republicans 100% right now.

And this effect permeates every single aspect of your life just like with other conservatives.

Yeah, that actually is an inability to process reality. Stuff changes, and things have never been stable or orderly.

And "order" doesn't fully capture it either, because the concept it gestures at can be more accurately described as "hierarchy" - as Kirk puts it, "a conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions".

In other words, everyone has a proper place in society, with some above and others below, and any attempts to remove that hierarchy are moral wrongs which require the transgressors to be put back in their place.

You can see how that core belief is intrinsically dangerous, and how nearly every controversial conservative belief about social classes falls out of it.

(It's also worth noting that this explains why conservatism's earliest champions were supporters of the aristocracy, and also why conservatism is more beloved by the old-money wealthy than move-fast-and-break-things new-money tech.)

See here is the thing- you don't know this is true. You never actually went and looked at the science or verified how much of it is fake. And yet, at the same time, you benefited from this science when its convenient to you because you probably don't realize that a medication or something you are using came from left leaning university.

This is what I mean by being out of touch with reality.

... which inevitably breaks down when fundamental assumptions become disproven. And that's the point. Many "moderate" Conservatives still believe in the "trickle down" economy theory or that government debt is inherently bad and a government's budget needs to be balanced.

Both have been proven time and time again to be not just wrong, but outright disastrous in their consequences, and yet Germany voted that ideology into chancellorship, not to mention what is currently going on in the US.

The US seems to be combining the worst of both ideologies. I can't imagine what happens next.

Adams's version of manifesting is "if you write stuff down, it's more likely that outcomes outside of your control will help you achieve your goal."

Those are not the same thing.

The concept of the book, as I understand it, is focusing your consciousness on something you want ”will cause the universe to bring it to you”.

The concept is silly to me (it’s the steps that you take to actually achieve the goal that make the difference), but in a way, it is a prerequisite to achieving the goal.

My biggest complaint is this type of thinking usually accompanies lots of “woo” thinking.

>Now imagine you tell someone with poor mental health who struggling at a low paying job that all you have to do is write something 100 times a day to make it happen.

Sorry, did you think I was suggesting that it was good advice? Or that Doctor's should prescribe it?

> It aligns very closely with conservative thinking - a lot of conservative people think they worked hard for what they have, not realizing that they have been given a massive runway (such as not having college loans to pay back, being in a good school district, having parents who aren't crazy busy with work to dedicate time to support them, and so on)

The train has left the station. I do not think you were on it.

Can we not do this kind of thing please?

It is absolutely not a unique failure to conservatives. But it does explain why there is so much interchange between crunchy granola hippies and qanon militias.

The podcast If Books Could Kill manages to stumble on a fair amount of overlap between "power of positive thinking" / "The Secret" crap, and right wing politics in the books they review.

The sheer volume of "woo" and positive affirmation manifestation among my friends is vastly higher on the left side of the spectrum than the right.

Perhaps it's more to do with extreme personalities and wishful thinking.

How conservative was DOGE's effort to save money. The story was conservative but the actions were radical.

I wouldn't equate conservatism with the flat earth crowd. I would equate the current majority closer to flat earthers than Columbus.

[EDIT] Which is unsurprising since the whole flat earth deal requires some sort of vast lizard-person conspiracy or whatever, and that's the kind of thing Qanon is, too.

Adams, himself? Not so much. I think he tends to have a rather nasty outlook on humanity, and I had a hard time reconciling it.

I do know that he was/is pretty much about as far away from Diamond Joe* as you can get. Interesting that they seem to be fighting the same battle.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_(The_Onion)

Probably also because, like e.g. "Yes (Prime) Minister", part of the depicted did come from anecdotes, instead of fantasy.

He spoke at MIT (early 90s?) and I remember him talking about making fun of PacBell colleagues in his comic: They would recognize themselves, ask him to autograph the comic for them, and then go away happy (thus making fun of them a second time.)

At this point, he basically started leaning into controversy for pageviews. He'd start linking to the controversial section of each post right at the top of the post. After a few months or so I had to unsubscribe, after years of reading his blog and Dilbert cartoons/books.

He's become such a gremlin that I won't be 100% sure he's serious about this until he actually dies.

Chapelle's SNL monolog about Trump is pretty spot on too.

However, the fundamental ideas of System 1 and 2 have made me rethink so many things.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230301101359/https://dilbert.c...

Catbert on work life balance: "Give us some balance, you selfish hag" https://steemitimages.com/p/7258xSVeJbKnFEnBwjKLhL15SoynbgJK...

The other, I can never seem to find. They're all in a meeting, and the Pointy Haired Boss says, "This next task is critical yet thankless and urgent, and will go to whoever next makes eye contact with me". Everyone stares at the desk, and then Alice pulls out a hand mirror and angles it between the PHB and Wally.

Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1998-05-05>

> The other, I can never seem to find.

Here you are: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1993-08-30>

Was sad to me to see someone so good at lampooning absurdity get sucked into such a toxic mindset, but I'll also be sad to hear he's gone and I'm sad to hear he's up against it.

He was the first to publish an open way to communicate with him in order to out the corporate crazies, and readers did in droves, explaining the inanity of their workplace and getting secret retribution for stuff they clearly couldn't complain about publicly.

A good percentage of youtubers and substackers today actively cultivate their readership as a source of new material. They're more of a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom.

Doing this seems to require identifying with your readers and their concerns. That could be disturbing to the author if the tide turns, or to the readers if they find out their role model was gaming them or otherwise unreal, but I imagine it is pretty heady stuff.

I hope he (and anyone facing cancer) has people with whom he can share honestly, and has access to the best health care available.

Grand Budapest Hotel starts with the author stating that when you're an author, people simply tell you stories and you don't need to come up with them anymore!

Dilbert comes down to the caves where trolls (accountants) reside and gets a tour. The guide points to a troll sitting behind a desk, and mumbling in a stupor: "nine, nine, nine...".

Guide: And this is our random numbers generator.

Dilbert: Are you sure those are random?

Guide: That's the problem with randomness - you can never be sure.

Edit: Found it here: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-quest-for-rand....

And thank you, Scott - many laughs thanks to you.

---

Godspeed Scott. Thank you for all the laughs.

So on the card I provided with my gift, I signed off the name of someone else in class, and partially erased it. Made sure it was still somewhat legible and then wrote "From your secret santa" beneath it.

They didn't believe the gift was from me even after the teacher provided them with the original draw, and their supposed gift giver identified someone else as their recipient.

It's been a fun exercise in software architecture. Because I actually care about this.

But we keep pushing this annual survey another year since we never seem to be ready to actually implement it (due to other priorities)

The thing is, as soon as you allow free-text entry, the exercise becomes moot assuming you got a solid training corpus of emails to train an AI on - basically the same approach that Wikipedia activists used to do two decades ago to determine "sockpuppet" accounts.

I've seen the pattern repeat with other data collection as well -- "anonymous" data collection or "anonymized" data almost never is.

That in and of itself puts him above what I've come to expect from this low-bar dip in American culture. Good for him.

> “I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has. I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones, but I’ve had it longer than he’s had it – well, longer than he’s admitted having it,” Adams said.

The use of the word "admitted" implies that Biden is either lying about how far it has progressed, or that he has known about it longer than he has admitted.

The implied timelines don’t match.

No way he and his doctor didn't know about this.

Which is probably true. And it's fine, he has no obligation to disclose this until he wants to. In contrast his dementia though ....... that's something he should have disclosed earlier.

Edit: "Several doctors told Reuters that cancers like this are typically diagnosed before they reach such an advanced stage." from https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bidens-cancer-diagnosis-pro...

I don't have a strong opinion about the tests either way, but I wasn't the one getting the biopsies.

https://thennt.com/nnt/psa-test-to-screen-for-prostate-cance...

I wish they did, of course. I personally lost a close friend to prostate cancer last year. He was 41 and was, before the cancer, one of the healthiest and most athletic people I knew.

The first inkling he had that anything was wrong was a backache that wouldn't go away; a stage 4 diagnosis ensued. He held on for 21 months from the onset of symptoms before the cancer took him.

A lot of men die with prostate cancer, because only very few die from it. And if you belong to the former group, knowing about it or doing any kind of intervention means a massive loss in quality of life. So the best course of action overall is to close our eyes and stop looking. And hope you don't belong to the latter group.

Perhaps this plan just needs better marketing. Instead of dividing tumors into benign and malignant we could have a third category for malignant but slow-growing.

edit: Ah ok. Risk of over-treatment by broad scanning? "Active surveillance aims to avoid unnecessary treatment of harmless cancers while still providing timely treatment for those who need it." according to NHS.

(Yes, yes whole body scans exist but these are largely pseudo-medical scams that don't deliver what they promise. I'm saying deliver on it, within reason.)

For a good short overview: https://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate/psa-fact-sheet

And read “is the PSA test recommended…”

Although I thought his comics growing up were quirky, I was probably too young to appreciate them (xkcd was more my thing anyway).

Knowing more about him and what he says / thinks turns me off Dilbert entirely.

I doubt he'll go as he says. Sounds like a plead for sympathy / attention.

Every time I see someone kitted out in VR gear, I think about his prediction that the Star Trek holodeck will be humanity's last invention and I'm very glad they don't have a button that can beam the next person waiting for their turn into a concrete wall.

But thing is—boy who cried wolf—not sure if he actually has the prognosis of cancer he says he has? It sounds mean, I reckon he does have it, but his past descriptions of health problems were confusing enough that I wouldn't be surprised if he recovers next year and spins it into a story about how he found a cure.

Even if he is being 100% truthful, this is kind of crappy behavior - the kind we expect from him.

Thankfully with all the voice actors and other talent that went into the show, it's easier to disconnect it from the hateful person Adams ended up revealing himself to be.

I remember his remark about Hillary's campaign logo looking like directions to the hospital.

I'll miss him.

Dilbert was a good comic though.

I love that show enough to where I actually bought an animation cel from it a few years ago, and it hangs in my basement office.

Well, I enjoyed Dilbert for years, in any case. It shares the throne with "Office Space" for representing the pre-remote-work era of corporate IT.

As others have said, very Muskian, and I'd add J.K. Rowling to that list. I guess when you have literally no problems in your life you're driven to make some up, like trans people existing somewhere or black people getting jobs you don't want or whatever.

If I got a billion dollars, you'd never see my ass again. I'd buy a reasonably sized/somewhat large home in the middle of fucking nowhere with a huge garage, and I'd spend my days tinkering on my cars, playing videogames, and working on passion projects.

Many people are incapable of leaving others alone. They think they are right and people who disagree are wrong and must be corrected. Both rich and poor people can be like this. Even if someone else has absolutely no impact on their lives whatsoever, if they are "wrong" they must be demonized.

Rich people have the resources to shout over poorer people and buy influence.

The richest man I know sold his business in an all-cash transaction for $114 million in 2011 when he was in his late 50s. He divided the after-tax sum in half and used one half to write checks based on weeks of service to all of his employees and kept the other half. (I was one of those employees.)

He stuck around for six months making sure the transition was smooth then he fucked off to a beach house in Key West and has spent the last decade fishing and working on vintage Corvettes.

He would look at a trans person, go "well ain't that something" and move on with his life.

He would not wage an international media campaign to demonize them.

I can hear him in my head muttering "what in the hell do they gotta do with me?" just thinking about him being asked about a cultural issue.

Some people (both rich and poor, but you only hear about the poor ones) seethe with hatred and it's sad.

That sounds like a lot of unnecessary double tax being paid.

The problem, is that mountains of these kind of people say they are fine with trans people, but voted for this administration, and when you ask, they say "Kamala was going to gender change our kids" or some such bullshit.

So the culture war was fine to them, they just hadn't heard a hateful argument that touched their button yet.

My dad talked for like an entire year about how he's been newly dealing with non-binary and trans folk at the grocery store he was (at the time) managing, and how he thinks they are great and such nice people and their gender or whatever is not a work problem and he thinks "that people just need to have more patience with each other" but he voted for Trump

Because the liberals "have gone too far" with the "DEI stuff" and commented that he was worried that helicopter pilot from that accident was "rushed into someone else's spot"

Because she's a woman. And obviously we don't have like a hundred year history of talented and capable women pilots or anything. And it's not like women have been pilots in American commercial Aviation for decades with a clear trend of increasing safety. And obviously he has always had this consistent worry about woman pilots and feeling like he can't trust their ability and this totally isn't something that Fox News manufactured out of thin air these past couple years.

Which is funny because there is an actual, genuine, air traffic control scandal where a Black institution had perverted some pre-screening to give members of that Black institution an unfair advantage in screening. But even that horrible situation never put an unqualified or undertrained person on the job. It just made more of the members of the incoming training class black.

But that's the actual problem they don't like. DEI doesn't involve passing someone who should have failed, even in the blatant scandal I mentioned above

If you get rich through putting in consistent "work", you absolutely HAVE to do this through a fundamental belief in what you are doing, where it doesn't feel like work.

Your brain is programed to do a certain thing, and you have no choice but to do this thing - no amount of money can reprogram your brain. This is why so many well off people end up going off the deep end.

There is also a factor in the things that you buy as a rich person actually influencing you in ways that you don't even understand.

> I'd buy a reasonably sized/somewhat large home in the middle of fucking nowhere with a huge garage, and I'd spend my days tinkering on my cars, playing videogames, and working on passion projects.

And being isolated like that is just as likely to make you fall into ideological traps. You think that you can keep yourself happy by doing things you like, but the key thing to consider is why you like them. What purpose do you have for doing the things you do. A lot of times, this purpose is misguided (with cars, its not really about the car as much about the attention you get from others), and when you have the monetary capability to do the thing, you quickly find out that its not what you though it was.

Of course, they can be wrong. But I always find it odd when people say “I don’t understand” when it seems so obvious to me. They see things as right vs wrong and want to make things right even if it hurts them.

What I don't understand is spending your days shitposting on Twitter about it. I'm not sure if that applies to Adams, but it definitely applies to Musk and Rowling.

It is entirely possible your heart is in the right place, but this specific comment gives it away that you haven't actually looked at this issue too closely. There are "scientifically established" reasons why this issue is a lot more complicated than the anti-trans folks always make it out to be, even if we completely ignore the existence of trans people. Look up Swyer Syndrome[1] for example.

[1] - https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/swyer-syndrom...

Swyer syndrome isn't a condition compatible with an athletic career because of the bone weakening caused by hormone deficiency.

You are presenting a strawman argument, and then declaring you can't believe that others believe this. The truth is, they don't believe that.

What women like J.K Rowling argue is that women's and girl's rights are harmed by insisting that trans people be treated for all purposes as their declared gender without regard to their birth sex. They argue that women and girls by virtue of their sex need single-sex facilities where males aren't admitted, no matter how that male self-identifies. They argue that treating adolescents expressing gender confusion with puberty blockers and surgery is extremely harmful and morally wrong.

And it's clear from recent surveys and polls that clear majorities in most western countries agree. An example of this is a recent poll in the UK regarding its recent Supreme Court judgement on the interpretation of its Equality Act. [1][2]

Regardless of the position you take on this, nothing is to be gained by not engaging with what others are actually saying and arguing.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/supreme-cour...

[2] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/half-of-labour-...

It's such a bizarre hill to die on.

Some of this is her advocacy on social media but most of it is material contributions like starting a centre to help female survivors of sexual violence, donating hundreds of millions of pounds to charities that help vulnerable women and children, and funding court cases that have helped protect women's sex-based rights in law.

Maybe to you this is just "culture war nonsense" but consider how much positive and meaningful impact she's made for so many with her philanthropy.

My dad's still ok. He had some localized radiation to beat back the biggest tumors on his spine, then did a round of chemo. This past summer he did a fun immunotherapy treatment, not CAR-T... but something more like that than checkpoint inhibitors. Otherwise his tumors have been kept to almost nothing due to hormone therapy.

Unfortunately, what eventually happens is you accumulate enough hormone therapty resistant cancer cells that the tumors start growing again in a meaningful way, and then there's not much that can be done. I assume this is the stage that Scott Adams has had and that he's been battling it for many years by now. With President Biden, it seems likely that his prostate cancer will respond to treatment, and if this is the case then he will likely die of something else, as is usual now for old men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer.

I still ask for the PSA test. I've never been offered ultrasound.