My former manager used to have Dilbert comic strips on his wall. It always puzzled me - was it self deprecating humor? At a certain point though it became clear that in his mind the PHB was one layer ABOVE him in the management chain and not anyone at his level. I suspect it may be a recursive pattern.

To use Dilbert terms: Adams would say that PHB is dumb and he is promoted into management as that's where he can do the least damage.

Rao would say that PHB is actually put there by upper management to be a combination of:

- fall guy/lightning rod to take blame for failed projects

- dumb subordinates are less likely to try to take your job (dumb doesn't mean unintelligent. Rather, Rao uses the term "clueless" to highlight smart people who are not political)

0 - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

>For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work.

A+, no notes

I found the Dilbert principle book in my parents downstairs cloakroom (wedged between magazines and other generic bathroom reading material).

At a superficial level I just read the comic strips in the book and laughed, I thought to myself - haha look at those poor corporate workers, that won't happen to me.

In a way it didn't happen to me vis-a-vis cubicles, suits and water cooler gossip, TPS reports etc.

However, in other ways it did happen to me, the frustrations of working with incompetent people, working in teams who brainwash themselves that they are making something useful or being productive, hilarious executive decisions made without any scientific or rational thought. (startup - https://youtu.be/iwan0xJ_irU)

I still like to add Dilbert comic strips to closing slides in presentations, my go to one is this, when we are discussing new technologies to use.

https://tenor.com/nJfQSXLP8am.gif

We are in the Dilbert universe, it just keeps changing

p.s. if anyone is looking for Saturday TV binge material, all of the Dilbert TV show is on Youtube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH7dgUq5Qe4

Scott Adams was basically a classic Sophist, believing that rhetoric was the only thing worth cultivating. Nobody special; snake oil salesmen are up there with prostitutes and mercenaries in oldness of profession.

I quit that job and started freelancing. Not only because of those comics, but at least they didn't give me any doubts about that endeavour.

What I learned: engineering skills give you power, but it's not the only thing you can be nerdy at.

You can be nerdy about anything.

It just happens to be that software engineering is something that people with much money are willing to pay for.

Just imagine you're history nerd. Not much options to profit quickly from that.

Same goes the other direction. If you happen to really like financial markets and math, you might find ways to make even more money with less work than an engineer.

There’s a fan theory that Garfield hates Mondays because he just spent two days with Jon and now Jon is leaving him alone again.

As clues it is the case: 1) Adams came up with very stupid easily proven wrong physics theories and still was convinced it was correct, which is not what a clever will do, 2) as said in other comment here, some people who identifies themselves as "clever like Adams" were also incapable to get their head around the fact that their own boss was displaying dilbert comics, as if they were not clever enough to understand that the manager see themselves as "dilbert" the same way they do.

Idk man, imagine quitting HP in the 70s to make your own HP or IBM. Inconceivable

I do wonder if Scott Alexander means this in the sense that he watched a few shows because Adams had died, or if there were the first episodes of Adams' shows he had watched. Dying does reveal some interesting things about a person - in Adams' case he was doing his live podcasts right up to about the end. I tuned in to one out of ghoulish interest and he seemed to be the sickest person I'd ever seen. He was clearly doing that show because he loved it.

If he had his time over, he'd probably swallow his pride and accept that It Is Not OK To Be White because of the disastrous impact on the Dilbert empire, but I do think Alexander has fundamentally misread what Adams believed it meant to be successful. He wasn't that motivated by commercial success since at least the 2010s, although he had achieved it. He seemed a lot more interested in getting ideas out there and making a difference to people's lives.

Based on this article, somehow I really doubt that.

At least in the technology sector, work has changed a lot in some regards since the days when Scott Adams was in the workforce.

No suits and ties needed, show up in a tee-shirt and denim jeans. Flexible work hours, and work-from-home. Top 2% salary. Free food. Clean, well-maintained, offices. No request for annual leave ever denied. Pick the work you like from the top of the backlog. No bosses sending interns to get them coffee or any nonsense like that. Go ahead, play some foosball or table tennis on the clock. Is two screens enough, you can have a third if it'd boost your productivity?

And senior leaders try to project the image of "Stanford CS PhD dropout" rather than "Wall Street Harvard MBA" - they're "just like us", look at that hoodie he's wearing.

The world of Dilbert, meanwhile, is trapped in amber. And the wry insights that fax machines are hard to use don't really land like they did in 1995.

Out of curiosity I searched this quote in Google, DDG and Claude and none of them found any source. Anyone know who the other self-hating nerd writer is? Sounds a bit like John Donne.

What I found most interesting about him was around the time Trump was running for president the first time, Adams was one of the first people to point out that Trump was, to use Adams' terms, a "master persuader". No one else at the time seemed to be talking about this and it was fascinating to see a humorist have this take/insight.

What I remember that is notable about Scott Adams is way back he had The Dilbert Blog and it was pioneering in it's early adoption of the internet. Adams wrote his takes and theories back then, too. But he once wrote that he was going to scale those back, because they were not productive: he would lose followers for being controversial. But later something happened with the feedback loop of social media, because he eventually started to court controversy. I do think that the internet sucked him in.

Adams, Musk, Andreesen, Stephen Miller, Chappelle, Maher. They're everywhere.

Sure I enjoyed Dilbert.

The story about the frustrated highly intelligent engineer at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. At the bottom of the social hierarchy.

So what does this archetypical mistreated highly intelligent nerd finally do? Reads up on junk psychology on how to manipulate and influence people. Goes to the gym to get buffed. Gets high on alt-right politics on how the white man now is under whipping hand of woke women and ungrateful immigrants.

Just a fascist joke of a person.

The funniest thing I’ve read all week. Was anyone here lucky enough to eat one?

Just like how Jim Davis stumbled upon a reasonably funny, widely relatable gag that can be repeated for decades with minimal consequences, the success in Dilbert was being the first newspaper comic to live in the topic of corporate bureaucracy.

In case we all forget how newspaper comics work in a digital world of curated content, they are all successful based on broad appeal. Each newspaper has approximately two pages of funny content and each strip has to appeal to a large subset of readers if not all of them.

Family Circus is a perfect example. Dog funny. Reader like dog. Dog funny. Kids say funny thing with dog. Reader has kids and dog.

The topic of “my boss is incompetent” is just as widely appealing as “my cat is lazy and selfish.”

With all that context established we have to acknowledge that Scott Adams was a pretty normal guy with no particularly strong skills.

So as the article points out, when he pivoted his life to other endeavors, his limitations are strikingly apparent.

This is where I start not liking the guy. He has a smarter than thou attitude especially later in life when in reality, he is not himself particularly smart. I would stop short of calling him a narcissist but some vibes are there. He got lucky to be the guy who got a syndication deal at the right time making a specific type of comic. If he was born 20 years later he’d be a nobody, as the comic industry has completely changed.

His craft was largely surpassed by web comic authors with more specific audiences and more intelligent writing.

(1) It doesn't give Adams enough credit for his work on WhenHub. I was reading Scott Adams's posts about WhenHub contemporaneously as he worked through the startup's various pivots. He had a really good idea that people would want to see a map with a little live-location icon of where their friends & acquaintances were on the map and he pushed really hard on different ways of getting this idea towards reality. We have this now (in various other social map apps) and he showed good product sense.

(2) It gives Adams too little credit for the sincerity of his views.

> There’s a passage in the intro to one of Adams books where he says that, given how he’s going to blow your mind and totally puncture everything you previously believed, perhaps the work is unsuitable for people above fifty-five, whose brains are comparatively sclerotic and might shatter at the strain. This is how I feel about post-2016 politics. Young people were mostly able to weather the damage. As for older people, I have seen public intellectual after public intellectual who I previously respected have their brains turn to puddles of partisan-flavored mush. Jordan Peterson, Ken White, Curtis Yarvin, Paul Krugman, Elon Musk, the Weinsteins, [various people close enough to me that it would be impolite to name them here]. Once, these people were lions of insightful debate. Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?

This is not fair. Adams knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what he was getting into for all of 2015-2026. He was an extremely smart guy. We should treat him seriously, not infantilize him. He was not a Nobel Prize winning chemist or Fields Medal winning mathematician coming up with wacky perpeutal-motion machines or cranky Riemann Hypothesis solutions that everyone politely agrees to ignore. His hypnosis stuff and all the rest were genuinely what he really believed -- it's not like Sir Michael Atiyah's Todd function.

Adams was in the prime of his life, he was doing what mattered most to him, and we should take him at his word that he genuinely believed what he said and we should judge what he said on its merits.

(3) I don't really have a disagreement but I am fascinated by the implication in the last 1/3 of the eulogy slatestarcodex view that Scott Adams was trying to establish a guru cult community - in convergent evolution with the sort of thing that the squishy half of TPOT tends to sprout in the East Bay. It's an interesting observation which tells me something about what is going on with Bay Area rationalism, though I don't know quite what.

I thought that many of the things that happened to Adams -- especially his family troubles with his stepson, but also his illness -- were really sad. I'm sorry things didn't turn out differently and grateful for the cartoons.

If he'd stayed apolitical people would have kept clipping his strips and putting them up on cubical walls. Dogbert was not an appealing character. His sharper edge kept the sharp edges of Dilbert and the other engineers more out of one's attention. Then Adams revealed that he believed Dogbert was the one to emulate and tried to prove his theories (and he said black people were scary -- there was that) and he polarized himself. Much of his audience recoiled. He gained new, more ICE-esque followers, and then still more of his audience recoiled.

To his credit he pioneered the PR death spiral later made famous by Kanye and Rowlings. This was not the career capper he was looking for.

Yeah, bosses are stupid and incompetent, I get it. But, guess what? Most people are stupid, one way or the other. Adams wasn't better than PHB, viz. the ridiculous polemics he got himself into.

And Dilbert was a crying baby incapable of taking action against his own misery.

Now, if you think it is so horrible to live under an incompetent boss, try being a peasant in a 3rd world country, living under a dictatorship, being a Palestinian in Israel, being an immigrant chased by ICE or being a minority in a democracy still beset by enormous inequalities; I'd suggest being a black and poor woman in Latin America. If you can't, read any book by Carolina Maria de Jesus[1]. It does give you a whole new perspective in "life sucks".

This dumb comics was "first world problems" all the way down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_Maria_de_Jesus

It's essentially gallows humor for a world where, for no apparent reason, blithering idiots often seem to be the only people who wield any decision making power.