>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.
I found Dilbert in 2013, when I was working in a dead end dev job in a small software company. Felt nice to see others seem to have the same issues.
I quit that job and started freelancing. Not only because of those comics, but at least they didn't give me any doubts about that endeavour.
What I learned: engineering skills give you power, but it's not the only thing you can be nerdy at.
You can be nerdy about anything.
It just happens to be that software engineering is something that people with much money are willing to pay for.
Just imagine you're history nerd. Not much options to profit quickly from that.
Same goes the other direction. If you happen to really like financial markets and math, you might find ways to make even more money with less work than an engineer.
That isn't how I understood Dilbert. Dilbert is a normal guy and PHB is actually mentally retarded.
It's essentially gallows humor for a world where, for no apparent reason, blithering idiots often seem to be the only people who wield any decision making power.
> But t-shirts saying “Working Hard . . . Or Hardly Working?” no longer hit as hard as they once did. Contra the usual story, Millennials are too earnest to tolerate the pleasant contradiction of saying they hate their job and then going in every day with a smile. They either have to genuinely hate their job - become some kind of dirtbag communist labor activist - or at least pretend to love it.
At least in the technology sector, work has changed a lot in some regards since the days when Scott Adams was in the workforce.
No suits and ties needed, show up in a tee-shirt and denim jeans. Flexible work hours, and work-from-home. Top 2% salary. Free food. Clean, well-maintained, offices. No request for annual leave ever denied. Pick the work you like from the top of the backlog. No bosses sending interns to get them coffee or any nonsense like that. Go ahead, play some foosball or table tennis on the clock. Is two screens enough, you can have a third if it'd boost your productivity?
And senior leaders try to project the image of "Stanford CS PhD dropout" rather than "Wall Street Harvard MBA" - they're "just like us", look at that hoodie he's wearing.
The world of Dilbert, meanwhile, is trapped in amber. And the wry insights that fax machines are hard to use don't really land like they did in 1995.
> I had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show.
I do wonder if Scott Alexander means this in the sense that he watched a few shows because Adams had died, or if there were the first episodes of Adams' shows he had watched. Dying does reveal some interesting things about a person - in Adams' case he was doing his live podcasts right up to about the end. I tuned in to one out of ghoulish interest and he seemed to be the sickest person I'd ever seen. He was clearly doing that show because he loved it.
If he had his time over, he'd probably swallow his pride and accept that It Is Not OK To Be White because of the disastrous impact on the Dilbert empire, but I do think Alexander has fundamentally misread what Adams believed it meant to be successful. He wasn't that motivated by commercial success since at least the 2010s, although he had achieved it. He seemed a lot more interested in getting ideas out there and making a difference to people's lives.
For those looking for a "successor theory" to the Dilbert Principle, I highly suggest Venkatesh Rao's Gervais Principle [0].
To use Dilbert terms: Adams would say that PHB is dumb and he is promoted into management as that's where he can do the least damage.
Rao would say that PHB is actually put there by upper management to be a combination of:
- fall guy/lightning rod to take blame for failed projects
- dumb subordinates are less likely to try to take your job (dumb doesn't mean unintelligent. Rather, Rao uses the term "clueless" to highlight smart people who are not political)
>The Peter Principle holds that people are promoted until they prove incompetent in their role, and then they remain there; competence is rewarded with promotion and incompetence is rewarded with the status quo.
>The Dilbert Principle, with more of a knowledge-worker focus, rings true to those of us who have seen terrible programmers promoted to project managers. It states that bad employees are promoted into management to prevent them from doing damage with their incompetence.
>The Gervais Principle gives a lot more credit to those at the very top (which, in my opinion, makes it far more accurate in its reasoning about corporate leadership); it says that the sociopaths that run the organization knowingly over-promote dedicated but relatively inept people into middle management [and this is done so execs can use them as canon fodder, buffer in interaction, and and avoid having their own jobs threatened]
It's nice to see someone else (unsurprisingly) reached identical conclusions as me! I would like to try adding a 3rd reason: dumb subordinates don't upset the apple cart because they don't really have the capacity to do so, and people in power hate upsetting the apple cart as they love the status quo that puts them in power.
Smart, moral people have practically a compulsion to improve things, or at least call out idiocy.
I would also add the need for an actual reason to promote the PHB, and I would argue that one quantifiable way upper management can try to argue for a promotion of the PHB is how "hard they work" (regardless if they achieve results or not). Putting in many, many hours also help promote PHBs who will defer to authority.
It also helps explain the phenomenon where the manager class becomes soulless. Institutions that focus on preserving their own power rather than creating value will promote people (at least to middle management) who are willing to put their nose to the grindstone, sacrifice their health and relationship, producing nothing of value, all to walk on some concept of a career treadmill faster.
There's also the Commander In-Chief of the German reichswehr quote about officers:
"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
Ive seen it in action. When you get lazy, you start to notice that the single most important aspect is posturing.
So to be lazy you start posturing, selling people how great you and your project is. The more projects you have under you, the higher the chance of something very successful too.
It works, suddenly they can work even less and get promoted.
Ofc this is horrible for the company, having the worst people doing the most “internal sales for positioning”. This also creates a giant middle management layer.
I wouldn’t say they are dumb, they just noticed that great work has no correlation with performance. What does have a correlation is how you act and speak. The All-In Chamaths of the world (not saying he is dumb, he isnt, but damn if boosting isn’t everything for him).
This is why Manifesting, was so popular for the management layer, suddenly it wasnt “being untruthful” it was “manifesting into existence”.
I was a long time Scott Adams fan with the Dilbert Principle being one of my favorite books.
What I found most interesting about him was around the time Trump was running for president the first time, Adams was one of the first people to point out that Trump was, to use Adams' terms, a "master persuader". No one else at the time seemed to be talking about this and it was fascinating to see a humorist have this take/insight.
Interestingly, Adams also pointed out the persuasion flaws in Hillary's campaign. Evidently, the Hillary team noticed this and changed their messaging, which Adams then commented on.
Great eulogy and art, What saddens me is the lack of a friends around him, seems like he got isolated in the politics of 2015 and then got radicalized.
No idea what you are talking about. He became hugely popular and had lots of adoring fans and friends. His twitter had 1.3M followers and he did a daily show.
The weird thing about Adams was that he believed Trump was Dogbert, not the pointy-haired boss.
If he'd stayed apolitical people would have kept clipping his strips and putting them up on cubical walls. Dogbert was not an appealing character. His sharper edge kept the sharp edges of Dilbert and the other engineers more out of one's attention. Then Adams revealed that he believed Dogbert was the one to emulate and tried to prove his theories (and he said black people were scary -- there was that) and he polarized himself. Much of his audience recoiled. He gained new, more ICE-esque followers, and then still more of his audience recoiled.
To his credit he pioneered the PR death spiral later made famous by Kanye and Rowlings. This was not the career capper he was looking for.
> This was the world of Dilbert’s rise. You’d put a Dilbert comic on your cubicle wall, and feel like you’d gotten away with something
My former manager used to have Dilbert comic strips on his wall. It always puzzled me - was it self deprecating humor? At a certain point though it became clear that in his mind the PHB was one layer ABOVE him in the management chain and not anyone at his level. I suspect it may be a recursive pattern.
Any truly popular art relies on finding an emotional hook that’s specific enough to identify with strongly but broad enough that most people can see themselves in it. Everyone’s felt their boss is an asshole and their underlings are idiots, so they identify with that emotion rather than the specifics of Dilbert being an engineer. Most of Dilbert’s complaints map pretty well to the conflict between any other kind of individual contributor role dealing with management.
> The amount of comments about white superiority/inferiority with no awareness of how absurd it is...
I haven't seen any. Could you give me an example?
> Is this site now a nazi bar? Damn.
Please don't turn Hacker News into a site for endlessly regurgitating lame social media "gotchas" or tropes. There are already many, many websites for that.
Like the author I was fortunate enough to be exposed to Dilbert as a teenager, before I got caught up in the rush of the university-professional-yuppie-industrial-complex.
I found the Dilbert principle book in my parents downstairs cloakroom (wedged between magazines and other generic bathroom reading material).
At a superficial level I just read the comic strips in the book and laughed, I thought to myself - haha look at those poor corporate workers, that won't happen to me.
In a way it didn't happen to me vis-a-vis cubicles, suits and water cooler gossip, TPS reports etc.
However, in other ways it did happen to me, the frustrations of working with incompetent people, working in teams who brainwash themselves that they are making something useful or being productive, hilarious executive decisions made without any scientific or rational thought. (startup - https://youtu.be/iwan0xJ_irU)
I still like to add Dilbert comic strips to closing slides in presentations, my go to one is this, when we are discussing new technologies to use.
> His next venture (c. 1999) was the Dilberito, an attempt to revolutionize food via a Dilbert-themed burrito with the full Recommended Daily Allowance of twenty-three vitamins. I swear I am not making this up. A contemporaneous NYT review said it “could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste”
The funniest thing I’ve read all week. Was anyone here lucky enough to eat one?
Story of our times: Gen-X counterculture jerk grows up railing against The Man. Grows up, gets rich, famous, becomes The Man. His mind, however, is stuck in the past, still thinks he's a rebel, still thinks he's railing against The Man. In reality, he has become a sadistic asshole hurting others for his self-righteous pleasure. But no amount of pain inflicted on others will make him feel good, he dies a miserable crank.
Adams, Musk, Andreesen, Stephen Miller, Chappelle, Maher. They're everywhere.
I can relate to the author. Really loved the strip when I was younger and before I actually worked anywhere. The TV show on UPN was pretty decent too, it's a shame it didn't catch on more. Adams seemed to have a smart everyman quality to him and was doling out nuggets of wisdom like candy. His later years really troubled me because it difficult to relate the earlier idea I had of Adams to the later. It's a lesson in mortality and how much a person can change (not that I knew Adams or anything, maybe he was always like that). There are many other examples out there.
One thing I think people make the mistake of is taking a look at a person as they are now and then retroactively applying that to their past persona. I think there is something more to learn from the idea that we all can change substantially over time, even without major life incidents. The mind is very complex and sometimes it can go down some dark paths.
> As another self-hating nerd writer put it, “through all these years I make experiment if my sins or Your mercy greater be.”
Out of curiosity I searched this quote in Google, DDG and Claude and none of them found any source. Anyone know who the other self-hating nerd writer is? Sounds a bit like John Donne.
I was also curious about this quote, and it sounded to me too like Donne (or Pascal or Robert Boyle, a bit).
But Gemini 3.0 knew what it was, and it is from Omar Khayyám like the sibling commenter said, but from the little-known E. H. Whinfield translation (1883) rather than the more famous Fitzgerald one:
This article keeps saying that Adams was more clever than the others.
What are the proof of that. It looks like he was like those usual rationalists who come up with obvious theories that a lot of people have come up with and think they are super clever, when they are not.
As clues it is the case: 1) Adams came up with very stupid easily proven wrong physics theories and still was convinced it was correct, which is not what a clever will do, 2) as said in other comment here, some people who identifies themselves as "clever like Adams" were also incapable to get their head around the fact that their own boss was displaying dilbert comics, as if they were not clever enough to understand that the manager see themselves as "dilbert" the same way they do.
(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.
For those who haven't read it, Scott Alexander's "Unsong" (https://unsongbook.com/) is a very fun piece of historical fiction / religious fantasy. Basic premise is that the world is incredibly shocked when the Apollo 10 mission crashes into the Dome of the Sky and (a) proves that the Biblical cosmology was the true cosmology this whole time and (b) damages reality. It includes the idea that there is a whole cottage industry of people trying to apply technology to deciphering the True Name of God by essentially Mechanical Turking it ("If we divide up all possible syllable combinations into tranches and pay folks minimum wage to sit around reciting every syllable combination possible, we're bound to hit it sometime!").
77 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 74.8 ms ] thread>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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
Why not just fire the incompetent employee? Isn't this obvious?
>The Peter Principle holds that people are promoted until they prove incompetent in their role, and then they remain there; competence is rewarded with promotion and incompetence is rewarded with the status quo.
>The Dilbert Principle, with more of a knowledge-worker focus, rings true to those of us who have seen terrible programmers promoted to project managers. It states that bad employees are promoted into management to prevent them from doing damage with their incompetence.
>The Gervais Principle gives a lot more credit to those at the very top (which, in my opinion, makes it far more accurate in its reasoning about corporate leadership); it says that the sociopaths that run the organization knowingly over-promote dedicated but relatively inept people into middle management [and this is done so execs can use them as canon fodder, buffer in interaction, and and avoid having their own jobs threatened]
Smart, moral people have practically a compulsion to improve things, or at least call out idiocy.
I would also add the need for an actual reason to promote the PHB, and I would argue that one quantifiable way upper management can try to argue for a promotion of the PHB is how "hard they work" (regardless if they achieve results or not). Putting in many, many hours also help promote PHBs who will defer to authority.
It also helps explain the phenomenon where the manager class becomes soulless. Institutions that focus on preserving their own power rather than creating value will promote people (at least to middle management) who are willing to put their nose to the grindstone, sacrifice their health and relationship, producing nothing of value, all to walk on some concept of a career treadmill faster.
"I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord
A transcendent theory past both is Komoroske's "Coordination Headwinds"
https://komoroske.com/slime-mold/
So to be lazy you start posturing, selling people how great you and your project is. The more projects you have under you, the higher the chance of something very successful too.
It works, suddenly they can work even less and get promoted.
Ofc this is horrible for the company, having the worst people doing the most “internal sales for positioning”. This also creates a giant middle management layer.
I wouldn’t say they are dumb, they just noticed that great work has no correlation with performance. What does have a correlation is how you act and speak. The All-In Chamaths of the world (not saying he is dumb, he isnt, but damn if boosting isn’t everything for him).
This is why Manifesting, was so popular for the management layer, suddenly it wasnt “being untruthful” it was “manifesting into existence”.
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.
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.
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.
I haven't seen any. Could you give me an example?
> Is this site now a nazi bar? Damn.
Please don't turn Hacker News into a site for endlessly regurgitating lame social media "gotchas" or tropes. There are already many, many websites for that.
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
The funniest thing I’ve read all week. Was anyone here lucky enough to eat one?
Adams, Musk, Andreesen, Stephen Miller, Chappelle, Maher. They're everywhere.
And Eminem tone policing what people say because it might be hurtful.
Based on this article, somehow I really doubt that.
One thing I think people make the mistake of is taking a look at a person as they are now and then retroactively applying that to their past persona. I think there is something more to learn from the idea that we all can change substantially over time, even without major life incidents. The mind is very complex and sometimes it can go down some dark paths.
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.
But Gemini 3.0 knew what it was, and it is from Omar Khayyám like the sibling commenter said, but from the little-known E. H. Whinfield translation (1883) rather than the more famous Fitzgerald one:
—-
221. (395.)
Such as I am, Thy power created me,
Thy care hath kept me for a century!
Through all these years I make experiment,
If my sins or Thy mercy greater be.
——-
Link to the actual page in Google books:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NN_TAAAAMAAJ&q=Experimen...
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.
(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.