Scott Adams did me a considerable and unsolicited kindness almost 20 years ago, back in 2007. One day my site traffic logs showed an unexpected uptick in traffic, and recent referrals overwhelmingly pointed to his blog. Of course I recognized him from Dilbert fame, both the comic strip and The Dilbert Principle.
I sent him a thank you email for the link, and he replied graciously. This began a conversation where he referred me to his literary agent, and this ultimately led to a real-world, dead-tree-and-ink book publishing deal[1]. He even provided a nice blurb for the book cover.
I can't say that I agreed a lot with the person Scott Adams later became--I only knew him vaguely, from a distance. But he brought humor into many people's lives for a lot of years, and he was generous to me when he didn't have to be. Today I'll just think about the good times.
I got to interact with Scott just once on Twitter. I shared one of his strips in response to a tweet he made. My intent was tongue-in-cheek and very inline with the themes of his work, but he reacted very aggressively and then blocked me.
It was a bit of a crushing moment because inside my head I was thinking, "I know and love this guy's work. Surely if I just engage him at his level without being a jackass, we can add some levity to the comments section." My instinct was that maybe he really was just a jackass and I should label him as such in my brain and move on.
But then my cat got sick last year and went from being a cuddly little guy to an absolute viscious bastard right up to the day he died. It was crushing. One day I realized it felt similar to my experience with Scott. I wondered if maybe Scott was just suffering really badly, too. I have no idea what the truth of the matter is, and I don't think that people who suffer have a free pass for their behaviour. But I think I want to hold on to this optimism.
Always give the benefit of doubt. Perhaps him acting aggressively and blocking you was a misunderstood attempt at humor. A lot of comments I make online are tongue in cheek but people take everything very seriously. Adding emojis doesn’t solve that problem and can even make it worse. It’s really impossible to know for certain. Online communication is totally different from the real world where feedback is instantaneous. Better to assume good intent, even when there’s a very high likelihood of being wrong. If nothing else it’s better for you to err towards rose colored glasses.
Quite frankly, this is a worry for me. I have noticed that I've become shorter with people and less tolerant as I've got older. I've started to feel some resentment in certain situations where I felt I was being unfairly treated.
I recognise these feelings and things, which I am grateful for. So I work hard to correct this, and I hope I succeed, but I seriously worry about my brain changing and becoming someone quite unpleasant. You look at people from the outside, and it is so easy to judge, but we're all just a big bag of chemicals and physics. Personality change does happen, it could happen to any of us.
It's a sad moment for me. I got into Dilbert at the tender age of eight years old. I don't know why I liked it so much when half the jokes went over my head, but I loved computers and comics, and I plowed through every book at my local library. It was my real introduction to software engineering, and it definitely influenced me in many ways that certainly shaped the man that I am today.
I never agreed with him politically, and I honestly think he said some pretty awful stuff. However, none of that changes the positive impact that his comics had on my life. Rest in peace.
> I got into Dilbert at the tender age of eight years old. I don't know why I liked it so much when half the jokes went over my head, but I loved computers and comics
Same! Or at least I got into them as a young kid I don’t remember the exact age, it was probably a few years older but definitely tweens max.
I’m also not sure why I liked them so much, other than that I loved computers and always knew I’d end up working in the industry, so maybe it was like a window into that world that I liked. I also loved the movie Office Space, so maybe I just had a thing for office satire.
very interesting to find other folks who jibed with this comic at a young age. My mom and aunt had cubicle jobs and the entire idea seemed very fun to me. I recall looking at my 4th grade classroom and thinking we could really benefit from some cubicles.
Sadly I'm doomed to work in an open floorplan.
I wasn't exactly a daily reader at the time, but I was sad to hear when dilbert was pulled, and why. I tried to send him some fan mail when I heard he had fallen ill, but the email of his that I found had been deleted.
Same! My dad worked in corporate HR and loved Dilbert (I guess it spoke to him), so we usually had a few of his books and/or a strip-a-day desk calendar around the house that I would read. I never considered it before, but maybe I'm the cynical software engineer I am today because of Scott Adams. The world is a funny place sometimes.
There was a super weird alignment at a previous job where the appearances, personalities, and seniority/rank of some of my co-workers matched characters in Dilbert to the T. It was really funny and almost eerie, like Scott Adams was hiding in a cube taking notes.
Once, for a whole week, every Dilbert cartoon matched something that happened in our office of ~50 people the day before. People started getting freaked out like we were in the Matrix or someone was feeding it to Adams.
I didn't always agree with Scott Adams on everything he did and said, but "The Dilbert Principle" taught me more about living in a corporation and management than any other book on business and his dilbert comics were a source of endless wisdom and amusement, which I use often today.
Really love Scott for creating Dilbert one of the best all-time comic strips, teaching the psychology of persuasion, and for writing How to Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big. It taught me to focus on systems and habits as a preference over goals (goals are still useful, but can be unrealistic and less adaptable). Plus God's Debris was an interesting thought experiment about the origin of the universe. Really great thinker and humorist. RIP Scott.
I always enjoyed Dilbert, one of the few of my friends who did as it was a bit of a specific sense of humor. But Scott Adam’s really, really fell off a cliff into some very odious takes in his recent years. Feels like he should have stuck to Dilbert, but he lived long enough to see himself become the villain instead.
He fell off the cliff when he left his day job to write the comic full time. At least that is my opinion. Falling down the cliff took a while, at first he was still close enough to corporate reality to still be realistic in his exaggerations and thus funny, but the longer he was a way the less his jokes were grounded in reality and so they became not funny because they felt a little too far out.
Of course writing a comic takes a lot of time. I don't begrudge him for wanting to quit, and others have made the transition to full time humorist well - but he wasn't the first to fail to make that switch. He should have retired when he was a head....
Let the above be a warning to you. I don't know how (or if) it will apply, but think on it.
The story I read long ago was that he had a long-standing agreement with his manager that if his cartooning ever became an issue for his day job, he would leave. Then a new manager came in who basically said "OK."
Worth the read: “The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh” https://a.co/d/7b7Jnt6
I couldn’t read Dilbert the same after that. Adams avoids, with surgical precision, things like unionization, while the author simultaneously supports downsizing despite seeming to mock it in his strips.
Anyway, shame he’s dead, but to me he died a long time ago. I only feel sad when thinking about how I used to enjoy Dilbert.
Very true, loved Dilbert. I guess I was unaware of his dubious takes early on because my only interaction was seeing the comics. Later on the interactions became Dilbert + Reddit post on how Scott Adams is an antivaxxer.
Dilbert was pretty influential for me in the 90s and early 2000s. I enjoyed those comics a bunch while I was kid. He seemed to struggle a bit with his fame, and apparently his divorce caused him a pretty big psychic trauma, which was unfortunate.
His later personality was.. not my style.. and I dumped all of his books into little free libraries a few years back. The only things I really found interesting from his later work was focusing on systems rather than process.
Can't deny the early influence, though. The pointy-haired boss will live on forever.
Why does every other comment apologize for adams' political views? It's like a bunch of people were conditioned or brainwashed into reflexibly regurgitation nonsense.
Long ago where one's politics is elevated to the position of identity the culture shifted and continues to shift.
I realized early on through IRC that some people cannot have a professional or cordial relationship with someone opposed to their position. The moment someone found out I believed in the opposite of the group I was attacked.
Always gave a sensible chuckle to his comics. One of my favorite scenes from the show was about "The Knack". My dad originally shared this with me, reminding me that I'm "cursed" for inheriting the knack from him.
Dilbert definitely captured a 90s era corporate zeitgeist. But, after he departed PacBell, although there was the occasional strip that really nailed it, Dilbert never really moved on to modern SV/startup/open floor plan tech and it mostly felt like been there, done that. That said, Dilbert in its prime was easily in the top comics I enjoyed.
That’s exactly it. I got into the industry right at that transition, at a startup that sold software into telcos. At the startups we found out what happens when Wally becomes the CEO…
Someone I knew taped a cloud-related strip to my half-cube wall. It was perfect. (I had been hired in early cloud-related days for that purpose.) But there were increasingly fewer things in that vein latterly.
I loved Dilbert back in the day, and even the books were witty and poignant.
I would like to point out that the quality of his satire really feel of as time went on. He came from an office life in the late 90s and had a lot of insight into it's dysfunctions. But after decades of being out of that world, he had clearly lost touch. The comics often do little to speak to the current corporate world, outside of squeezed in references.
As I see it, decline in quality and the political radicalization go hand in hand. You cannot be a good satirist and be so long removed from the world you are satirizing.
The political radicalization and the divorces. The strips he created after being fired by his syndicate are a bleak insight into his mindset in his final years. https://x.com/WyattDuncan/status/2011102679934910726
Taking his anodyne setup-punchline-sarcastic quip formula and applying it to aggressively unfunny shock material is actually low key brilliant, albeit unintentionally so.
It’s like if Norm MacDonald didn’t posses a moral compass.
I think that a lot of us on here can give credit to Scott Adams for helping develop their cynicism, for better or worse.
He was a role model to me for helping me to make sense of the corporate world and its denizens. This might not sound like a compliment, but it is. He was my Mr. Miyagi for mental resilience by providing good arguments for most people not being evil, despite how it might seem.
This guy was always interesting...because he understood satire so well, he understood nuance and made comedy from it...then he became chronically online and went down insane alt-right rabbit holes.
Even those of a logical mind may not have the fortitude to protect themselves from propaganda that exploit their victimhood.
I disagreed with him politically, especially during the last few years, but I'm very appreciative of Dilbert and in particular the Dilbert cartoon. The Knack is one of those clips that I keep coming back to and sharing with friends whenever someone shows signs.
> After a 2022 mass shooting, Adams opined that society leaves parents of troubled teenage boys with only two options: to either watch people die or murder their own son.
Which is at it should be. Wikipedia isn't a news source, and especially for something like this should be careful about allowing edits to stand until they can cite sources.
> Later (incorrect) predictions repeatedly featured in Politico magazine's annual lists of "Worst Predictions", including that one of Trump, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden would die from COVID-19 by the end of 2020,[98] that "Republicans will be hunted" if Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election
> In a 2006 blog post, Adams asked if official figures of the number of deaths in the Holocaust were based on methodologically sound research.
It's not about assumptions, it's rationalization. The tribal playbook requires one to demonize the enemy in order to justify what they want to do to them.
The entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale.
To go from a brilliant satirist to becoming terminally online and just completely falling off the far right cliffs of insanity is incredibly sad. And unfortunately, this is plight is not uncommon. It is incredibly dangerous to make politics part of your identity and then just absolutely bathe yourself in a political media echo chamber.
I read the Dilbert Principle when I was young, but still old enough to appreciate a lot of its humor. Later, when I discovered Scott was online and had a blog, I couldn't believe it was the same person. To me, the Scott Adams of comic strip fame had already died many years ago.
> just absolutely bathe yourself in a political media echo chamber.
It seems to me that social media belongs in the same "vice" category as drinking, drugs, and gambling: lots of people can "enjoy responsibly", some make a mess but pull back when they see it, and some completely ruin their lives by doubling down.
The danger is those three are usually done in social situations where others can "pull you back" - which is why online gambling and drinking/drugs alone can get so bad so fast.
Social media has nobody to pull you back, you just get sucked in to the whirlpool.
Social drinking and smoking can also pull you forward. What pulls you back is having something else to do (in other words a greater life to go back to), and that is why behavior problems fit in to a larger picture of a not-having-anything-to-do crisis, which is referred to in the media as a mental health crisis, a loneliness crisis, alienation of labor, or anything that involves the natural cycles regulating normal human behavior (socializing, working to make stuff, having balanced views) being interrupted.
Absolutely. Social media is designed to elicit a constant stream of dopamine hits, prey on our need for social validation, keep the amygdala engaged, stoke conflict, and bolster whatever beliefs we carry (no matter how deranged). It’s the ultimate distortion machine and is wildly dangerous, particularly for individuals who struggle to keep it at arm’s distance and fail to equip mental PPE prior to usage.
Just watching it now (and what a house it is). There's a TV in almost every room, and Fox News is on each of them. He says: "Yes, it is the same station on every television, because that's how the system is designed. It's designed so it'll play the same station all over the house. It happens to be Fox News, but I do flip around. It's not nailed on Fox News, in case you're wondering."
What makes it cautionary? From what I can tell, he hardly suffered from what you described. I'm not saying that I agree with everything that came out of Scott's mouth, but I never saw a sign of regret in him in regards to politics.
Well on the health side, he might not quite be Steve Jobs level, but he spent months taking complete nonsense "treatments" where his medical condition (predictably) worsened dramatically. That part's certainly a cautionary tale.
Sure, though I'm not sure why that matters as I am pretty sure we all have some sort of cautionary tale in our lives the further back you dig.
I don't agree that this is a clear-cut example of a cautionary tale. I think for most people it can be a cautionary tale since it's common to chase things that promise hope in a desperate situation. We also shouldn't dismiss that someone can weigh the risks and take a gamble on something working out. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong or stupid for someone trying something conventional even if it backfires.
It's important to try and see this from Scott's perspective. According to him, he had his use of his vocal cords restored by a treatment that was highly experimental and during a time when all the official information said there was no treatment. If we are to believe his words, it worked out for him once, so it makes sense that he would decide to try things that are unconventional when his entire life was at stake.
I don't recall where (Vic Berger?), but someone made a compilation of "regret" clips from Trump influencers (Alex Jones and others, and Scott Adams). This was in the circa January 6 days, where humiliation reigned, and they all felt betrayed because "RINOs" dominated Trump's term, "the deep state" was still standing, and he accomplished nothing of note. It's been memory-holed since then but that was the dominant mood back then (they blamed his mediocrity on "bad staffing", which later led to Project 2025).
Well Scott Adams was in there, venting (in a video) that his life had basically been ruined by his support for Trump, that he'd lost most of his friends and wealth due to it, and that he felt betrayed and felt like a moron for trusting him since it wasn't even worth it. Nothing had changed and the country wasn't "saved".
This video is so badly edited that it’s really difficult to figure out what he’s actually saying. It’s obviously cut to portray some kind of regret, but for example what does “he left me on the table” even mean? Who? How?
Sorry, as other commenter points out, the editing is only “bad” in a specific context. It’s brilliant for purposes of comedy and mockery. It’s definitely not good for purposes of understanding what Adams really thought.
Edit: and for what it’s worth, I have no idea who “Berger” is or that/if they edited that Vice video.
It’s edited well for its purpose, perhaps; it is not edited well for the purpose of understanding the context and intent of the Scott Adams quote being discussed, which is very much not its purpose. From the perspective of someone trying to understand the evolution of Adams’ views, it is badly edited, which is different than saying Berger is a bad editor, or even that it is badly edited from any other perspective.
Well okay, if you could find this compilation then I'd be interested. That really doesn't sound like the Scott Adams I've seen over the course of the last decade.
I’d be interested in seeing this. Not to doubt you, but I suspect a more accurate characterization is not “my life was ruined by my support for Trump” but rather “look what being right about everything gets you in a world of trump haters.”
> Nothing had changed and the country wasn't "saved".
Let's be precise and remove those scare quotes.
In 2015/2016 Trump was literally talking about saving U.S. critical infrastructure:
1. Promising to fulfill a trillion dollar U.S. infrastructure campaign pledge to repair crumbling infrastructure[1]
2. Putting Daniel Slane on the transition team to start the process to draft said trillion dollar infrastructure bill[2]
By 2017 that plan was tabled.
If anyone can find it, I'd love to see Slane's powerpoint and cross-reference his 50 critical projects against what ended up making it into Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.
Infrastructure Week was literally a running joke throughout Trump's first term because his staff would start by hyping up some substantive policy changes they wanted to pass, only for it to be completely derailed by yet another ridiculous/stupid/corrupt/insane thing Trump or one of his top people did.
Clearly Trump himself has no interest in these sorts of substantive projects, I mean just look at his second term. He has even less interest in policy this time around and isn't even pretending to push for infrastructure or similar legislation.
Don't forget his claim that master hypnotists are using camgirls to give him super-orgasms to steal his money. He was a nutter in more ways than just his politics.
> In other news, for several years I have been tracking a Master Wizard that I believe lives in Southern California. It seems he has trained a small army of attractive women in his method. The women create a specialized style of porn video clips that literally hypnotize the viewer to magnify the orgasm experience beyond anything you probably imagine is possible. Hypnosis has a super-strong impact on about 20% of people. And a lesser-but-strong impact on most of the rest.
> Once a customer is hooked, the girls use powerful (and real) hypnosis tools to connect the viewer’s enjoyable experience (a super-orgasm, or several) to the viewer’s act of giving them money, either directly or by buying more clips. Eventually the regular viewers are reprogrammed to get their sexual thrill by the act of donating money to the girls in the videos. There are lots of variations tied to each type of sexual kink, but that’s the general idea.
> My best guess is that 10% of the traffic that flows through their business model literally cannot leave until they have no money left. The Master Wizard is that good. The women are well-coached in his methods.
Many, many commenters here are themselves bathed in a political media echo chamber, just a different one. Ironic, isn't it?
If you treat your political opponents as 'insane' instead of trying to understand what moves them, it says more about you than about people you consider insane.
I have a two famous friends in the television industry. It seems they fall into the trap that since they produce popular TV shows that they then can think they know every thing about everything else, mostly because of the people that surround them want to stay friends so they can be associated with the fame. I think this is the trap Adams fell into as well. Whether that was with his knowledge or ignorance I do not know.
I do not let my friends get away with them thinking they are experts on everything.
Adams turned his fame of Dilbert into his fame for saying things online. I mean he even started a food company! Anyone remember the "Dilberito"??? Seems he was always just looking for more ways to make money. And reading his books it sounded like he wanted to get rid of religions.
So he was human, just like the rest of us. And he died desperate and clutching to life, leveraging whatever power he had to try to save it from who ever he could.
When I was young I didn't understand meaning of the words "do not bear false witness" and it was explained to me as "do not lie". As I've gotten older and now understand the words better, the much broader category of "do not bear false witness" seems like the better precept. Spreading false witness, even if sincere, has great harm.
And why did he say that? And what was the end result of him posting that?
You should add context so people know that Kaiser was delaying his treatment, Trump's team got Kaiser in gear so that he could receive it (Trump did indeed help him). Now imagine any other non-famous person with Stage IV cancer trying to get treatment without the help of a president.
When I was a lot younger I thought the comic strip was funny but I read a review of it circa 2005 which pointed out it was dangerously cynical and that Dilbert is to blame for his shit life because he goes along with it all. That is, if you care about doing good work, finding meaning in your work, you would reject everything he stands for.
It's tragedy instead comedy and it doesn't matter if you see it through the lens of Karl Marx ("he doesn't challenge the power structure") or through the lens of Tom Peters or James Collins ("search for excellence in the current system")
I mean, there is this social contagion aspect of comedy, you might think it is funny because it it is in a frame where it is supposed to be funny or because other people are laughing. But the wider context is that 4-koma [1] have been dead in the US since at least the 1980s, our culture is not at all competitive or meritocratic and as long we still have Peanuts and Family Circle we are never going to have a Bocchi the Rock. Young people are turning to Japanese pop culture because in Japan quirky individuals can write a light novel or low-budget video game that can become a multi-billion dollar franchise and the doors are just not open for that here, at all.
Thus, Scott Adams, who won the lottery with his comic that rejects the idea of excellence doesn't have any moral basis to talk about corporate DEI and how it fails us all. I think he did have some insights into the spell that Trump casts over people, and it's a hard thing to talk about in a way that people will accept. What people would laugh at when it was framed as fiction didn't seem funny at all when it was presented as fact.
Actually it’s more accurate to say Scott was always a far right troll and provocateur, but at some point he fell down a racist rabbit-hole. The book “The Trouble with Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh” shows how Scott Adams never cared about the plight of workers in the first place, using his own words. It was way ahead of its time, as the angry reviews from 1998 and 2000, back in Dilbert’s heyday, demonstrate.
I say this as someone who used to really enjoy Dilbert, but looking back with a critical eye, it’s easy to see an artist who deliberately avoids bringing up topics that might actually do something to improve corporate culture.
Scott Adams’s boss at Pacbell in 1985 was (still) an SVP (and my boss) at AT&T in 2012.
There was always a buzz and a whisper whenever someone was frustrated: “SHE’s the boss who inspired Dilbert.”
Internally there was a saying that ATT stands for “Ask The Tentacles.”
I haven’t really read the “funnies” since I was a kid but the few Dilbert comics I ever did read NAILED her org.
I will never forget being paged 1,000 times a night - not even kidding — or having my boss demand I “check sendmail” every time anything and I mean anything went down. Voice? Data? CALEA tunnels? IPTV? Fax? No, I can’t go immediately investigate the actual issue, I have to go into some crusty Solaris boxes the company forgot about 11 years ago and humor some dinosaur with three mansions who probably also directly inspired the Peter Principle in 1969 and are still working there.
As a product manager in the computer industry from the mid 80s into the 90s, Dilbert really resonated with me as satire--except, as you say, when it was barely satire. Not so much except for occasional later strips that really nailed some specific thing.
I do not know about anybody else, but I do not read comics, watch movies, listen to music, or read books [for pleasure] in order to learn a lesson, learn how to "improve corporate culture", or anything else. Entertainment is, for me, 100% escapist. I indulge in entertainment as a brief escape from reality. If Dilbert had been preachy, which A LOT of comics seem to be these days, I would not have enjoyed it.
This progressive movement is absolutely totalitarian.
As long as you adhere to all mainstream tenets, you're good and virtuous, like pre-2018 JK Rowling. Gay Dumbledore, yay!
But if the mainstream tenets change, and some previously loyal followers disagree with some of them, they should be ostracised, cancelled and vilified, like post-2019 JK Rowling.
The funny thing is that this is what real fascists and communists did to a T, yet, progressive people view themselves as anti-fascists.
The online world breeds extremism. It wasn't too long ago criticizing someone on their obituary was considered classless. This is the world we have made.
Well, if you think of person as a bunch of ideas, maybe with a mind attached, then by attacking a dead person you're attacking a bunch of vulnerable ideas that no longer have a mind to defend them. You can still call it a person, if you like.
Completely agree. If you're motivated enough about a topic to post about it online, you're probably emotional about it and unable to see it in a clear-headed manner.
The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online. The people who have developed unhealthy and biased obsessions are the ones who post constantly.
> If you're motivated enough about a topic to post about it online, you're probably emotional about it and unable to see it in a clear-headed manner.
> The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online.
And here you are posting your opinions online! How fascinating. I hope you recognize the extreme irony in the fact that you were motivated enough about this topic to post about it.
Unwillingness to engage with others breeds extremism. There are many who are silenced if they do not fit into the social dogma. Those people eventually lose it if they can't find a productive outlet.
Good to know that "Don't speak ill of the dead," is now truly dead. Ironic that an online post trying to push a political point is attempting to frame itself as rising above. There is no middle ground. There is no common decency.
The reaction to Adams death is simply a reflection of how he lived his life.
There’s this curious demand (often though not exclusively from right leaning folks) for freedom of speech and freedom from consequences of that speech. It doesn’t work that way.
You have the freedom to say reactionary things that upset people as much as you want. But if you do, then you die, people are going to say “he was a person who said reactionary things that upset people”.
I've never entirely understood "don't speak ill of the dead"; it seems like a vastly-scoped rule with far too many exceptions (and that can prevent learning any lessons from the life of the deceased). Forgive the Godwin's law, but: did that rule apply to Hitler? If not, then there's a line somewhere where it stops being a good rule (if it ever was one to begin with) – and I'd feel confident saying that there's no real consensus about where that "cutover" occurs.
To me, comments like "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" rings less of vitriol and more of a kind of mourning for who the man became, and the loss of his life (and thus the loss of any chance to grow beyond who he became).
That rings empathetic and sorrowful to me, which seems pretty decent in my book.
Because the dead can't respond or defend themselves. That's why you don't do it.
And it's the framing of the statement that is the problem. They didn't say "I disagreed with Scott" or "I didn't like Scott"; they framed it in a way that made it seem like truth. "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" makes it seem like he did something wrong and there is some universal truth to be had, when it's really just this person disagreed with Scott's political views. It's persuasion, which ironically I think Scott would have liked.
> they framed it in a way that made it seem like truth
"the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get the fuck away"
It is true that this is an evil and racist thing to say.
> when it's really just this person disagreed with Scott's political views
white supremacism isn't just a small policy difference.
If you hold hateful beliefs in which you believe certain people are inferior based on superficial traits like skin colour, why should you expect to be treated with respect? I disrespect such people because I don't respect them, I am if nothing else being sincere.
> I've never entirely understood "don't speak ill of the dead"
Agree. Much more hurtful to speak ill of the living. I can even see both R's and D's as people suffering in the duality of the world and have compassion for them. “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
You don't even really need to invoke Godwin's law, since you can just ask the same question about financier to the billionaires Jeffrey Epstein or beloved British presenter Sir Jimmy Savile (presented without speaking ill of the dead).
The dead man, whomever is in question, can no longer harm you. He was a man, maybe a husband and father, and speaking ill of them is of no tangible benefit. To those that respected or loved them, the relationship is gone, and it is not wise to add to their pain.
I have been to the funeral of bad men. His earthly power is gone and if there is an afterlife his judgment is sealed.
This goes for all enemies and tyrants and criminals. We use the term "I am sorry for your loss" because most times the loss is not ours.
I suppose you shouldn't jeer at them for being dead, for a start, and you should make allowances for their being dead when judging their actions. Treat them fairly.
This has been mentioned a few times in this thread. But it doesn't really make a lot of sense, especially in the case of someone famous.
If two or three days ago, not knowing he was sick (which I didn't), I had said to someone "That Dilbert guy seems to be sort of a whack job," why would it matter that he was alive to hypothetically defend himself? It's extremely unlikely that he would ever be aware of my comment at all. So why does it matter that he's alive?
I didn't fear reprisal from Scott Adams when he was alive, either.
And there are plenty of people willing to step in for Scott and defend him, as evidenced by the contents here.
Someone dying doesn't mean the consequences of their words and actions disappear and acting like we should pretend that death washes away those consequences is silly.
As with many others here, I admired his early creative work, but found his political beliefs to be abhorrent. An illustration, I guess, that we are maybe all of a mixture.
I'm sorry about the manner of his dying, even if the world may also be a marginally better place without the bile he inflicted on it. Still, I'm sorry he's died. He was only ten years older than me.
And my favourite Dilbert cartoon is still the one about "eunuch programmers" [1].
He was from a kinder more tolerant time, when people thought being non-anonymous online was safe. Sort of the same problem that others from his generation, Julian Assange, many others had. But I wonder if time won’t prove these people right. If you do put yourself out there you make enemies and open yourself to the hatred on many psycho basement dwellers. But if you don’t the world never knows you. All if that is too many words to say there’s a price to be paid for fame. Anyway, Dilbert was an important part of our cultural landscape and made a lot of people feel good despite the pains of cubicle life. To make people smile and feel better, that’s a pretty great achievement after all. Rip Scott, hopefully you’ll be making many folks smile in the afterlife too.
For those who do not know, Adams was still putting up daily Dilbert strips, just for paid subs on Twitter instead of in a newspaper. I think it's impressive he didn't stop until the end, even though AIUI he was in serious pain for a while. (He did stop doing the art himself in Nov.)
I’m trans, I’m autistic, and I caught on how bad he was day one, as his comics had a very specific slant to them that felt less like truly looking at workplace dynamics, and more acting misanthropic and aggrieved.
I get you might have not caught on so soon - I’d call myself lucky - but you had plenty of time to figure out that not only he isn’t good, but also never was.
I don't get "avoiding the ugliness" when someone dies. We need to acknowledge the ugliness and try to do better.
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.
In the context of the above comment I read "avoiding the ugliness" as avoiding incorporating it and continuing it in your own life, not shying away from talking about and addressing it.
This comment actually makes a specific point of calling it out compared to some others here.
Care to elaborate on what flavors of bigotry have been lauded and socially rewarded/what valid viewpoints and statements have been mislabeled as bigotry? I feel like you're being intentionally vague to avoid taking a stance here.
If you don't recognize the patterns of incuriosity, groupthink and misguided confidence that have permeated western society in the last ten years, nothing I say here is going to enlighten you.
Ah, so you're socially conservative, support Trump but probably consider yourself a libertarian, secretly a big fan of the moves ICE has been making? I'm assuming you've used the term "liberal media" unironically in the last year. You didn't storm the capitol, but you consider the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 to be worse than January 6. Antifa is more of a danger than far-right agitators. Charlie Kirk's death hit hard. No social identity group is more persecuted than white, heterosexual, cisgender Christian men.
Any of those resonate? You're welcome to correct me.
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts
"lives lost based on the decline in outlays (current spending) may be in the range of 500,000 to 1,000,000 and potential lives lost based on the decline in obligations (commitments to future spending) are between 670,000 and 1,600,000."
What is your best estimate of deaths due to "woke" or whatever you consider the scourge of the "past decade" to be?
How many visas revoked due to the holder being not woke enough? How many people were deported from the US for being insufficiently woke? And so on. "Woke" may not be what you meant. Whatever you meant, present your measure and data.
They didn't, though. Plenty of people who had one reputation at their death have had that reputation change over time, especially with more information and awareness of what they did. Sometimes their reputations improve, sometimes they decline.
Speaking only positively about people distorts the reality.
Reputation guides your behavior toward that person. But they're no longer around. There is no behavior toward them. They're gone. Their reputation is no longer relevant.
> Reputation guides your behavior toward that person. But they're no longer around. There is no behavior toward them. They're gone. Their reputation is no longer relevant.
It also culturally informs someone's perceived suitability as a role model. It doesn't matter to the dead person if they are held in high or low esteem, but it may matter to people in their formative stages deciding whose influence they follow and whose they shun.
I suspect that racism is inherent in humanity, hard-wired into our brains by millions of years of evolution.
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.
Humanity and civilization are defined by going beyond any base instincts.
Even if you're correct (I don't agree), consider other things: if you look at someone and your body has an instinctive desire to have sex with them, you are obligated to realize that just doing so without regard for consent or other things is not OK. If you don't realize that and proceed based on instinct, that's rape.
You can feel whatever instincts you want. If you feel bad or harmful ones, you should acknowledge it. It doesn't really matter if you feel guilty or shame or whatever you want to call it, but you should absolutely internally recognize that these things are *wrong*.
>Humanity and civilization are defined by going beyond any base instincts.
Civilization is nothing more than "lives in cities". That's it. That's what the science of anthropology has to say on the matter. It's not even that big of a deal, you'd much rather be involved with some hunter-gatherer living in a tent who had noble ideas and a sense of fairness than with most of the very "civilized" people who live in Oklahoma City. Why?
You don't share their values. Humanity, for all its potential, does not scale beyond Dunbar's number, and attempts to do so have resulted in horrors beyond comprehension on a regular, cyclical basis, for many thousands of years. You're quite certain that your values should win out and exterminate their values (and if they're not enlightened enough to just let their values be obliterated, they too can be exterminated with them... leftists are, right now, trying to work up the nerve to go on the attack, we've both seen the internet messages and not all of them are russian bots).
> If you feel bad or harmful ones, you should acknowledge it.
I do. I like to acknowledge it. I despise dishonesty, but most of all I despise self-deception. But sometimes I need to keep my mouth shut, because others would be quick to punish me for words. For spoken-aloud thoughts. And it causes distress.
>but you should absolutely internally recognize that these things are wrong.
Why? What makes those things wrong? Can you explain, objectively and empirically what makes it wrong? From the other set of values (see above), you're the one with wrong thoughts, wrong feelings, and wrong desires.
What you really mean, but don't have the words to say, is that you want me to be one with your group. To accept its set of group-beliefs, to espouse no dissent (or at least below some tiny, acceptable threshold), and to support your causes. But I've seen what sort of world you want to make, and I do not want to live in that world. I do not think your group survives, even should it win.
The world I want might well have room in it for other peoples. They could do as they want, peaceful (distant) coexistence. Your world doesn't have any room in it for me.
Your strategy of indoctrinating young children in public education was working. It was absolutely foolproof, I think, none could fight against it. But then someone managed to sneak in behind its armor, to drop the torpedo in that trench, and now your death star blew up. I'm not even sure anyone on the left has noticed how bad this is for your movement.
But to address the point. There may be base instincts to which we are all subject. But that doesn't mean we should embrace them or proudly wear them as a badge. Violence is entirely natural. And yet most will agree it should not be embraced. Someone proudly declaring themselves as violent will (and should!) be judged harshly. I say the same holds true for racism, whether it is "natural" or not.
Much (all?) of civilisational progress is characterised by moving away from the natural state to a higher strata. The civil part of civilization is entirely unnatural
What's silly about it? I am neither unnatural nor supernatural, and my nature is who I am.
>But that doesn't mean we should embrace them or proudly wear them as a badge.
Maybe. But it also means that I shouldn't be ashamed of them or try to suppress myself into neuroticism. And since the left has made a point of that for decades now, has tried to bully people into doing just that, the pendulum was primed to swing the other way. So yeh, I think I will be proud. It feels good.
>Violence is entirely natural.
It is, but also something to be avoided unless there is no other reasonable option. I would recommend not trying to drive an SUV over the top of me. That's caused some strife recently. I can remain nonviolent indefinitely.
I'm missing the well-reasoned argument with subtlety. It sounds like parent is saying that "X is a natural product of evolution and hardwired" so "X must be ok".
I don't see subtlety here. As others pointed, the story of human civilization is one long arc of going against our base animal instincts in order to build a society that benefits everyone.
>As others pointed, the story of human civilization is one long arc of going against our base animal instincts in order to build a society that benefits everyone.
I'd add that it's cooperation and the ability to moderate impulsive behavior that, over the long term, differentiates us from our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzee.
If we were just our base instincts and nothing more, we wouldn't be having this conversation as we'd likely have died out, because our ability to accept and work together with each other allowed us to flourish despite the threats of predation, climate change, natural disasters and other challenges.
As such, making the argument that we're "hardwired" to hate and fear our fellow humans doesn't make sense, whether that argument is an intellectual one or an evolutionary one.
I feel sorry for folks who feel so isolated that they can't understand just how closely related we all are. It must be quite lonely.
> 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?
I think that there's a gap between "how can it be anything but OK" and "should I feel guilty." There are plenty of things that aren't OK, but about which you don't need to feel guilty. Should you feel guilty that your body intrinsically craves foods that aren't good for you? I'd say that no purpose is served by feeling that way, but that doesn't mean that it's healthy to indulge those cravings.
>The best we can do for the dead is remember them as they were, good and bad, not demonize them nor write hagiographies for them
I agree with your conclusion, but not with your premise.
We can't "do" anything for the dead. They're dead. What's more, since they're dead they don't care what we do or say because they're, you know, dead.
Anything we might do or say in reference to dead folks is for the benefit of the living and has nothing to do with the dead.
That said, you're absolutely right. We should remember folks for who they were -- warts and all -- to give the living perspective both on the dead and the dead past.
Respect is earned by your actions and deeds, not by your death.
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.
I was directly responding and replying to jchallis, but a mod detached my comment from its parent and now it makes less sense without the proper context. Great job.
The moderation on this site is really such garbage. Filled with all kinds of weird and subtle manipulation, almost never openly acknowledged and they are more than happy to gaslight you when you confront them about it.
Is "calling out the bigotry" useful? I feel like the Internet has been used for this purpose pretty consistently for the last 15 years. Is it effective? Is there less bigotry now than before?
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.
Think about all the things people have done in the real world the last 50 years to combat bigotry. During the civil rights movement of the 60s, black people sat at segregated lunch counters and marched peacefully in the street, and were consequently spat on and attacked by white mobs, beaten by police, sprayed with fire hoses, attacked by dogs, etc.
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.
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?
I agree with the sentiment. I think timing is pretty important, though, and a cooling-off period might be a kind gesture for his loved ones.
I posit that self-reflection might be a better avenue to understanding this world where Steven Miller is in the White House, at least in the immediate. Personally, I stopped reading Dilbert quite a while before he cancelled himself, just because it wasn't available in a medium that worked for me. I do have a couple books on the shelf of old Dilbert comics and I considered getting rid of them when the racism came out. I cracked one open and laughed out loud at a handful of the comics and so the books are still in my house. I abhor racism, but he already got my money. At least for me, and maybe I'm damaged, I still laugh at some of the comics, even after I knew he was a jerk. I think if one of my black friends told me he was offended that I had those books, I'd get rid of them.
How about Harry Potter? I'm certain that there are some folks here who have been hurt by Rowling's statements and I'm also certain that there are some folks here that would sacrifice a limb to live in the Harry Potter universe. Do you separate the artist from the art or what's the rational thing? I have the Harry Potter books on my shelf, I've actually read them out loud to my children. They also are aware of LGTBQ issues, they know and are around LGTBQ people and we have had conversations about those issues. Is that enough? Should one of my kids pick up the Dilbert books, I have a conversation locked and loaded and I already know that I've raised them to be anti-racism. I don't know that I'm super eager to put more money in to J. K.'s pocket, I probably won't go to Disney Harry Potter Land or whatever they come up with but I've bought and read the books and I haven't burned them.
And make no mistake, had I known he was a biggot in 1995, I don't think I would have continued reading Dilbert or ever bought books. The problem is it made me laugh, then years later I found out he was a jerk and I still laugh at the comics, I remember laughing the first time I read some of them, and I think of that more when I re-read them than I think about Scott Adams. Fact is, he still made me laugh all those years ago, I can't put that back in the bottle, it happened.
Agree with this. I didn’t agree with it in the past, but I can see now that it has caused the issue you raise. I don’t know if this is a great insight, but one reason I think people have not connected the results (Stephen Millers in the White House) back to the action (not speaking ill of the dead) is because THEY are not the ones affected. When Stephen Miller is in the White House, it’s all the non white people - including legal immigrants and naturalized citizens and citizens born here - that are living in fear of where the administration will go. I doubt others are aware that there is this fear, or even that the DHS’s official account tweets out threats to deport a third of the country.
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.
What exactly was the bad stuff? He was insensitive about empirical reality or he was literally wrong about something in the sense of being very confident about something despite having little data? Or something else? I only remember the cartons really but was aware some people seemed to be irked about him recently.
Some random internet poll said many people of race A agreed it was "not OK" to be a person of race B. Adams said if that were true, then people of race B should probably not hang out with people of race A that thought it was not OK to be race B. The internet did its thing and quoted him out of context, and tried to cancel him. He dug in his heels and doubled down. He also liked a certain president that many dislike. And here we are.
> The internet did its thing and quoted him out of context
Let's not act like this is some case of out of context quotes. Here's the actual quote for people to decide for themselves:
"I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off. I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying. I'm not saying start a war or do anything bad. Nothing like that. I'm just saying get away. Just get away."
'Don't speak ill of the dead' comes from an era where everyone genuinely believed that the dead could haunt you from the grave.
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.
In the modern era it's usually said because the dead person cannot defend himself.
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.
When I was a young man my mother did use that but explained ill more in the sense of unfair/unkind. I guess as an adult you realize everyone ends up living a somewhat complicated existence, and it's easier (maybe even sometimes safer) to say this person was bad than it is to say this person did unacceptable things.
No. Disbelief has always been around. That there is no Church of Disbelief is a feature not a bug. Not speaking ill of the dead has a range of connotations, probably most prominent being avoiding easy targets that can't defend themselves. Want to show righteousness and strength of conviction? Then try a live target. There are many.
I think this is a question of who you're talking to, and is something you have to evaluate on a case-by-case basis.
If the person/people you're speaking with, already followed this public figure, or was forced by society to be aware of the life of this public figure at all times — and so were surely also aware of the bad turn that person's career/life took — then to your audience, the ugliness would have already been long acknowledged. To your audience, the ugliness may be the only thing anyone has spoken about in reference to the public figure for a long time.
And, for an audience who became aware of the public figure a bit later on in their lives, the bad stuff might be all they know about them! (Honestly, there are more than a few celebrities that I personally know only as a subject of ongoing public resentment, with no understanding of what made them a celebrity in the first place.)
In both of these cases, if this is your audience, then there's no point to carrying on the "this is a bad person" reminders during the (usually very short!) mourning period that a public figure gets. They already know.
On the other hand, if you presume someone who has no idea who a certain person is, and who is only hearing about them in the context of their death — then yes, sure, remind away.
I think, given the audience of "people in a comment thread on Hacker News about the death of Scott Adams", people here are likely extremely aware of who Scott Adams is.
---
That said, on another note, I have a personal philosophy around "celebrations of life", that I formed after deciding how to respond to the death of my own father, himself a very complicated man.
People generally take the period immediately after someone's death as a chance to put any kind of ongoing negative feelings toward someone on pause for just a moment, to celebrate whatever positive contributions a person made, and extract whatever positive lessons can be learned from those contributions.
Note that the dead have no way of benefitting from this. They're dead!
If you pay close attention, most of a community does after the death of one of its members, or a society does after the death of a public figure... isn't really a veneration; there is no respect or face given. Rather, what we're doing with our words, is something very much like what the deceased's family are doing with their hands: digging through the estate of the deceased to find things of value to keep, while discarding the rest. Finding the pearls amongst the mud, washing them off, and taking them home.
Certainly, sometimes the only pearl that can be found is a lesson about the kind of person you should strive not to be. But often, there's at least something useful you can take from someone's life — something society doesn't deserve to lose grasp of, just because it was made by or associated with someone we had become soured on.
I think it's important to note that if we don't manage to agree to a specific moment to all mutually be okay with doing this "examination of the positive products of this person's life" — which especially implies "staying temporarily silent about the person's shortcomings so as to make space for that examination"... then that moment can never happen. And that's what leads to a great cultural loss of those things that, due to their association with the person, were gradually becoming forgotten.
Nobody (save for perhaps a few devoutly religious people) argues that you should never speak ill of the dead. People really just want that one moment — perhaps a week or two long? — to calmly dredge up and leaf through the deceased's legacy like it's a discount bin at a record store, without having to defend themselves at each step of that process from constant accusations that they're "celebrating a bad person."
And it is our current societal policy that "right after you die" is when people should be allowed that one moment.
Feel free to call out Adams' bigotry a week from now! The story will still be fresh on people's minds even then.
But by giving them a moment first, people will be able to find the space to finally feel it's safe to reminisce about how e.g. they have a fond memory of being gifted a page-a-day Dilbert calendar by their uncle — fundamentally a story about how that helped them to understand and bond with their uncle, not a story about Adams — which wouldn't normally be able to be aired, because it would nevertheless summon someone to remind everyone that the author is a bigot.
Personally, I despise an outspoken bigot like Scott Adams more when they die, not less, because now their window for growth and repentance has closed. The grotesqueness they harbored becomes permanently tied to their legacy.
I think there's a big difference between the following:
- 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 personally would go with no, because you're still propagating their cultural product. One rarely consumes media with the intention of keeping it a secret; half the point of watching a movie or tv show is to talk about it. The entire sociological function of celebrities is that we talk about them. "I am doing research on Scott Adams and I want to consume some Dilbert as a research device", um, sure, I guess, I dunno, why are you doing research on a recently dead bigot, what is the purpose of that. etc.
I'm not -your- conscience, I can only explain my own. To me? No, that's not fine.
Laws consist of words, but making a law is something different than just saying something. It is an act, and indeed American laws are often (or always?) called Acts.
In any period of history, there are people who know things are wrong and are vocal about it. There are artists prior to the Civil Rights Era that were not bigots. The problem you have is the artists that were celebrated AT THAT TIME which we know about were also those accepted by the status quo which allowed them to be known.
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.
Enjoy Bach's music all you want, but when I read his biography those difficult details better be in there, and if that ruins his music for you that's on you.
What's wrong with this tho? Maybe we should stop uplifting people when we find out they are nasty individuals. Acting like there aren't also artists that are good people is odd, these are the ones deserving our attention.
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.
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.
"Acknowledge the ugliness and try to do better" and purging art and history are different things. The comment you replied to above did not call for a purging of Adams' work or life from history.
It seems to me that, even here in this discussion, people call for avoiding work of such authors. Would that entail, say, pressure on galleries not to show such art? If so, that is more than half way to a purge.
People often like to conflate criticism and personal choice with censorship, but they're not the same.
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.
That's not purging at all, words have meaning. If you grep my comment you might be encountering a massive bug if you found the word purge.
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.
The purity spiral on the other side is already batshit. "If you support that we're going to say you're bad and not buy your work" is quite a way from widespread physical and media violence.
Adams was a mediocre bureaucrat who discovered he could make a living as a competent comedian. His success at that persuaded him that he was an Important Moral Authority.
He started as a banker and ended as a self-harming prosperity preacher - not exactly a rare archetype in the US.
The funny parts were funny. The rest, not so much.
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.
I see where you’re coming from. But I’d argue that there’s broad consensus that his bigotry at the end was bad. So in this one moment, when we’ve just learned that he’s died, we can recall the good as well as the bad.
It is shameful to have those views. But perhaps we can bring it up tomorrow rather than right this minute.
Sad news. Dilbert was a big part of my life for a long time, and brought much laughter and enjoyment to my life. But on the other hand, later in his life Scott said a lot of things I found frankly repugnant, and Dilbert more or less disappeared, all of which made me sad. But he was still an amazing writer of comedy at his best, and I hate to know that he has passed. Plus, every death is at tragedy for somebody - friends, family, loved-ones of all sorts - whether we specifically like someone or not.
I grew up with dilbert being referenced. I was on the early internet, so things were odd. It was full of nuts and wierdos.
Scott Adams stuck out to me because his cartoons were funny and sarcastic. His books felt like he was letting me in behind the scenes. He talked to me, the reader about dealing with large amounts (for the time) traffic to his website in a honest, funny and simple way.
His books also had a link to his website, which was pretty unique for a non-technical book at the time.
I also quite liked his TV show.
I stopped reading them regularly as I grew up. I would see the odd salient dilbert in slack or email.
during the trump primary, thats when I bumped into his other side. It was heart breaking to see someone who made what I thought was such observant cartoons shit out such bile.
I loved Dilbert and I really believe that you often have to separate art from artist if you want to enjoy many things. He put a very unique perspective on corporate and tech environments that made me laugh. Sad to see a human pass but also sadder that later he expressed some disappointing opinions that diminished his contributions.
"In November 2025, he said his health was suddenly declining rapidly again, and took to social media to ask President Trump for help to get access to the cancer drug Pluvicto. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. replied saying "How do I reach you? The President wants to help." The following month he said he was paralyzed below the waist and had been undergoing radiation therapy."
"On January 1, 2026, Adams said on his podcast that he had talked with his radiologist and that it was "all bad news." He said there was no chance he would get feeling back in his legs and that he also had ongoing heart failure. He told viewers they should prepare themselves "that January will probably be a month of transition, one way or another." On January 12, Adams' first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, told TMZ that Adams was in hospice at his home in Northern California."
Wow that is really fast, in my view, and I wonder how many more of his cohort will similarly crash out.
I don’t have an estate to get in order, so to speak. Then again, I also won’t pass along a house full of a lifetime of “collections” or “mementos” with little to no monetary value. The oncoming secondary market is about to be awash in Boomer junk. Nobody wants to send their precious collections to the dump or recycling.
One of my biggest mental hiccups to work through of late is the changing nature of collective memories, fame, and idols. Scott is a great example who was “big in the 90s” and 30 years later his method (print cartoons and books) is basically dead and can’t be folllowed. Gen Z will be spared Scott, and probably Elvis and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, ABBA, and Garth Brooks comparatively speaking.
This is a meandering way to note how fast we can be poof gone and life will move on with a pace quite breakneck.
> The oncoming secondary market is about to be awash in Boomer junk. Nobody wants to send their precious collections to the dump or recycling.
Maybe, maybe not. My mother died a couple years ago, and while she was too old to be a boomer, she still had plenty of accumulated possessions in her estate. We sold as much as we could, kept the few things we wanted and had space for, and the rest went to recycling or the dump. I'd guess 90% went to the dump.
The owner of that stuff may not want to send it to the dump. My mom would be mortified to hear some of the things she treasured held no value for anyone else, but when you're dead, you aren't making those decisions. The next generation probably isn't that sentimental about it.
I loved this guy. His writing and book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big particularly impacted me early and exposed me to First Principles, biases, and in particular not giving a f*k about what people care so much.
he was one of those people who was attacked during COVID and labeled and propagandized against as a scapegoat for the failings of our unaccountable leadership - the cancel culture was unfair and unwelcome towards him. I resonated with that too.
Another one was the one where he went to work in Marketing, and they were doing their research by yelling questions into a well. But I can't find that one.
Scott Adams was a legitimate genius. Nobody else could have made Dilbert.
People are saying that he said some bad things. I just want to encourage people to look past the ramblings of a dying man, even in our hyperpolarized age.
Sadly, Scott Adams' political opinions came to overshadow Dilbert, but I shall choose to remember him as Dilbert's creator and how Dilbert captured a moment in time and work so aptly.
Back when Dilbert was massive my company ran the following ad in cinemas in Silicon Valley: https://imgur.com/a/ZPVJau8 Everyone seeing that ad knew what we were referring to.
Loved Dilbert as a kid, even into college, but fell off it eventually. Even if he turned to right wing trolling, I'll always remember those big comic compilations fondly.
We say things like "you gotta separate the art from the artist" when we talk about folks like Scott Adams, whose take on the corporate world were unique in the comic industry and funny in general.
However, Scott Adams as an individual was deeply problematic and I would not ever stand him up as a role model for my children or behavior in general.
Of course, I wouldn't do the same for a vast number of famous people, politics aside.
The "problem" (which is in scare quotes because it's not a discrete identifiable sole-source issue but a complex and dynamic phenomenon that permeates every aspect of our modern-day life) is that we have collectively determined that if you're good at your art, you must be a person we should listen to for topics outside of your art.
To use an inflammatory but real-life example: Donald Trump is a great showman. He knows how to incite a crowd, and he knows how to feed into this modern-day mess we've made of our world. He is objectively a terrible manager of a country, and objectively a terrible human being.
But, for some reasons that have to do with politics, and some reasons that have to do with identity, folks who like Donald Trump as a showman are unable to disassociate his showmanship from his policies. To the point that if you were to write down the actual actions taken and attribute them to a leader of the other side (famous examples: Biden, Obama) as their policies, the same folks who are loudly cheering Donald Trump on would immediately castigate those actions if taken by someone on the "left".
It's a problem with no easy solution, and it requires more growth from humanity than we are at this moment exhibiting we possess. Scott Adams is a shining example of both this problem and our reaction to it, and while I mourn the passing of his art, I do not mourn his passing, and reading this comment section instead mourn our present state of wrapping ourselves in the cloth of identity politics while not engaging seriously on the fundamental underlying problems we face as a people.
Every Christmas since I was a teen I would get a Dilbert desk calendar from my mom (who worked in software startups since 1979). When my mom was dying of cancer during COVID the people in our small, red state town yelled at her for wearing a mask. She could barely move to go shop, and she was harassed to tears. It all turned me from hippy libertarian (that moved from California to a red state) to fuck conservatives. It's so weird to find out the lessons I learned from people like Scott Adams, they never learned from/for themselves.
I was vacationing in New York, and we went to some pretty standard-looking mall bookshop somewhere near Poughkeepsie some time in mid 90s. And I bought an interesting looking comic book, something I had never seen before.
I liked Dilbert for a long time, but Adams's Trump Dementia became so bad in the last decade that it completely tainted his legacy for me. His role in enabling Donald Trump to rise to power is undeniable, and his death makes me wish I had reserved a bottle of sparkling wine for the occasion.
I yearn for the time when it was possible to never meet your idols.
In a weird way, I want to give him credit for saying out loud what he actually thinks. It's a good reminder for people to see it out in the open.
The reality is that there are tens of millions of racists in the United States. In fact, they put a group of Christian Nationalist (Nat-C) white supremacists in the White House.
It's not a Scott Adams problem in particular, and trying to make the issue just about him is a cop out.
He was the creator of Dilbert, a comic strip that became a cultural touchstone for corporate life in the 1990s and 2000s. Through satire, Adams articulated the frustrations of office workers and popularized ideas about systems thinking, incentives, and the gap between organizational rhetoric and reality. For many in the technology and business sectors, Dilbert functioned as a shared language for workplace dysfunction.
In later years, Adams became increasingly known for provocative and polarizing commentary. His public statements grew more strident over time, culminating in remarks in 2023 that led to the widespread removal of Dilbert from newspapers. These comments were widely criticized as racist and effectively ended the strip’s mainstream publication.
Adams’ legacy is a complicated one. His early work influenced how a generation understood corporate systems and personal habits, while his later conduct overshadowed those contributions. Assessing that full record requires holding both facts at once, without simplification.
Scott Adams did me a considerable and unsolicited kindness almost 20 years ago, back in 2007. One day my site traffic logs showed an unexpected uptick in traffic, and recent referrals overwhelmingly pointed to his blog. Of course I recognized him from Dilbert fame, both the comic strip and The Dilbert Principle.
I sent him a thank you email for the link, and he replied graciously. This began a conversation where he referred me to his literary agent, and this ultimately led to a real-world, dead-tree-and-ink book publishing deal[1]. He even provided a nice blurb for the book cover.
I can't say that I agreed a lot with the person Scott Adams later became--I only knew him vaguely, from a distance. But he brought humor into many people's lives for a lot of years, and he was generous to me when he didn't have to be. Today I'll just think about the good times.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-damn-interesting-book/
Edit: I found the relevant Dilbert Blog link via the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20071011024008/http://dilbertblo...
I got to interact with Scott just once on Twitter. I shared one of his strips in response to a tweet he made. My intent was tongue-in-cheek and very inline with the themes of his work, but he reacted very aggressively and then blocked me.
It was a bit of a crushing moment because inside my head I was thinking, "I know and love this guy's work. Surely if I just engage him at his level without being a jackass, we can add some levity to the comments section." My instinct was that maybe he really was just a jackass and I should label him as such in my brain and move on.
But then my cat got sick last year and went from being a cuddly little guy to an absolute viscious bastard right up to the day he died. It was crushing. One day I realized it felt similar to my experience with Scott. I wondered if maybe Scott was just suffering really badly, too. I have no idea what the truth of the matter is, and I don't think that people who suffer have a free pass for their behaviour. But I think I want to hold on to this optimism.
Always give the benefit of doubt. Perhaps him acting aggressively and blocking you was a misunderstood attempt at humor. A lot of comments I make online are tongue in cheek but people take everything very seriously. Adding emojis doesn’t solve that problem and can even make it worse. It’s really impossible to know for certain. Online communication is totally different from the real world where feedback is instantaneous. Better to assume good intent, even when there’s a very high likelihood of being wrong. If nothing else it’s better for you to err towards rose colored glasses.
Confession:
Quite frankly, this is a worry for me. I have noticed that I've become shorter with people and less tolerant as I've got older. I've started to feel some resentment in certain situations where I felt I was being unfairly treated.
I recognise these feelings and things, which I am grateful for. So I work hard to correct this, and I hope I succeed, but I seriously worry about my brain changing and becoming someone quite unpleasant. You look at people from the outside, and it is so easy to judge, but we're all just a big bag of chemicals and physics. Personality change does happen, it could happen to any of us.
As I grew older I changed from being a person who never got angry, to having very distressing bouts of rage.
I gave up caffeine, and the rages completely vanished.
Worth a try?
As you get older time is more precious so you want to waste less of it. This is a factor, how much of a factor it is differs from person to person.
As they say - "I don't suffer fools gladly"
It's a sad moment for me. I got into Dilbert at the tender age of eight years old. I don't know why I liked it so much when half the jokes went over my head, but I loved computers and comics, and I plowed through every book at my local library. It was my real introduction to software engineering, and it definitely influenced me in many ways that certainly shaped the man that I am today.
I never agreed with him politically, and I honestly think he said some pretty awful stuff. However, none of that changes the positive impact that his comics had on my life. Rest in peace.
> I got into Dilbert at the tender age of eight years old. I don't know why I liked it so much when half the jokes went over my head, but I loved computers and comics
Same! Or at least I got into them as a young kid I don’t remember the exact age, it was probably a few years older but definitely tweens max.
I’m also not sure why I liked them so much, other than that I loved computers and always knew I’d end up working in the industry, so maybe it was like a window into that world that I liked. I also loved the movie Office Space, so maybe I just had a thing for office satire.
very interesting to find other folks who jibed with this comic at a young age. My mom and aunt had cubicle jobs and the entire idea seemed very fun to me. I recall looking at my 4th grade classroom and thinking we could really benefit from some cubicles.
Sadly I'm doomed to work in an open floorplan.
I wasn't exactly a daily reader at the time, but I was sad to hear when dilbert was pulled, and why. I tried to send him some fan mail when I heard he had fallen ill, but the email of his that I found had been deleted.
Same! My dad worked in corporate HR and loved Dilbert (I guess it spoke to him), so we usually had a few of his books and/or a strip-a-day desk calendar around the house that I would read. I never considered it before, but maybe I'm the cynical software engineer I am today because of Scott Adams. The world is a funny place sometimes.
I have a Catbert doll in my kitchen. I think an HR person I knew gave it to me at a going away party at a long-ago job.
“Engineers, Scientists and other odd people” chapter in the book “The Dilbert Principle” is one of the funniest things I have ever read
There was a super weird alignment at a previous job where the appearances, personalities, and seniority/rank of some of my co-workers matched characters in Dilbert to the T. It was really funny and almost eerie, like Scott Adams was hiding in a cube taking notes.
Once, for a whole week, every Dilbert cartoon matched something that happened in our office of ~50 people the day before. People started getting freaked out like we were in the Matrix or someone was feeding it to Adams.
The VP who "raises issues" reminded me perfectly of someone at a prior workplace.
IIRC he did get a lot of ideas from fans talking about their own workplaces …
There were a number of Motorola-inspired ideas that made their way to Dilbert while I was working there in the late 90s.
I didn't always agree with Scott Adams on everything he did and said, but "The Dilbert Principle" taught me more about living in a corporation and management than any other book on business and his dilbert comics were a source of endless wisdom and amusement, which I use often today.
Farewell Scott, you are now God's debris.
Really love Scott for creating Dilbert one of the best all-time comic strips, teaching the psychology of persuasion, and for writing How to Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big. It taught me to focus on systems and habits as a preference over goals (goals are still useful, but can be unrealistic and less adaptable). Plus God's Debris was an interesting thought experiment about the origin of the universe. Really great thinker and humorist. RIP Scott.
Came here to say this, I really appreciated "How to Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big".
I'm not here to judge the man or everything he did, I'm here to say thanks for the stuff I loved.
I always enjoyed Dilbert, one of the few of my friends who did as it was a bit of a specific sense of humor. But Scott Adam’s really, really fell off a cliff into some very odious takes in his recent years. Feels like he should have stuck to Dilbert, but he lived long enough to see himself become the villain instead.
He fell off the cliff when he left his day job to write the comic full time. At least that is my opinion. Falling down the cliff took a while, at first he was still close enough to corporate reality to still be realistic in his exaggerations and thus funny, but the longer he was a way the less his jokes were grounded in reality and so they became not funny because they felt a little too far out.
Of course writing a comic takes a lot of time. I don't begrudge him for wanting to quit, and others have made the transition to full time humorist well - but he wasn't the first to fail to make that switch. He should have retired when he was a head....
Let the above be a warning to you. I don't know how (or if) it will apply, but think on it.
The story I read long ago was that he had a long-standing agreement with his manager that if his cartooning ever became an issue for his day job, he would leave. Then a new manager came in who basically said "OK."
No idea how true it is of course.
He always had dubious takes (he was anti-evolution for as long as I can remember) but that doesn't make Dilbert any less good.
Worth the read: “The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh” https://a.co/d/7b7Jnt6
I couldn’t read Dilbert the same after that. Adams avoids, with surgical precision, things like unionization, while the author simultaneously supports downsizing despite seeming to mock it in his strips.
Anyway, shame he’s dead, but to me he died a long time ago. I only feel sad when thinking about how I used to enjoy Dilbert.
Very true, loved Dilbert. I guess I was unaware of his dubious takes early on because my only interaction was seeing the comics. Later on the interactions became Dilbert + Reddit post on how Scott Adams is an antivaxxer.
Dilbert was pretty influential for me in the 90s and early 2000s. I enjoyed those comics a bunch while I was kid. He seemed to struggle a bit with his fame, and apparently his divorce caused him a pretty big psychic trauma, which was unfortunate.
His later personality was.. not my style.. and I dumped all of his books into little free libraries a few years back. The only things I really found interesting from his later work was focusing on systems rather than process.
Can't deny the early influence, though. The pointy-haired boss will live on forever.
Why does every other comment apologize for adams' political views? It's like a bunch of people were conditioned or brainwashed into reflexibly regurgitation nonsense.
>It's like a bunch of people were conditioned or brainwashed into reflexibly regurgitation nonsense.
Has happened on a grander scale in the past in China, Germany, Russian and others. This is hardly anything.
Long ago where one's politics is elevated to the position of identity the culture shifted and continues to shift.
I realized early on through IRC that some people cannot have a professional or cordial relationship with someone opposed to their position. The moment someone found out I believed in the opposite of the group I was attacked.
Because Adams views were crap.
Always gave a sensible chuckle to his comics. One of my favorite scenes from the show was about "The Knack". My dad originally shared this with me, reminding me that I'm "cursed" for inheriting the knack from him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8vHhgh6oM0
There was a time when his insight was relevant and spoke to a lot of people. I hope he finds peace in whatever is next.
He was on a livestream either yesterday or the day before, and was still interacting with people.
He was generous with his time to the end.
Regardless of his political views, Dilbert was truly brilliant.
Dilbert definitely captured a 90s era corporate zeitgeist. But, after he departed PacBell, although there was the occasional strip that really nailed it, Dilbert never really moved on to modern SV/startup/open floor plan tech and it mostly felt like been there, done that. That said, Dilbert in its prime was easily in the top comics I enjoyed.
That’s exactly it. I got into the industry right at that transition, at a startup that sold software into telcos. At the startups we found out what happens when Wally becomes the CEO…
Someone I knew taped a cloud-related strip to my half-cube wall. It was perfect. (I had been hired in early cloud-related days for that purpose.) But there were increasingly fewer things in that vein latterly.
I discovered Dilbert because Omega Instruments distributed collections of his comics on individual cards.
I loved Dilbert back in the day, and even the books were witty and poignant.
I would like to point out that the quality of his satire really feel of as time went on. He came from an office life in the late 90s and had a lot of insight into it's dysfunctions. But after decades of being out of that world, he had clearly lost touch. The comics often do little to speak to the current corporate world, outside of squeezed in references.
As I see it, decline in quality and the political radicalization go hand in hand. You cannot be a good satirist and be so long removed from the world you are satirizing.
The political radicalization and the divorces. The strips he created after being fired by his syndicate are a bleak insight into his mindset in his final years. https://x.com/WyattDuncan/status/2011102679934910726
Oh wow. First time I’ve seen that shit.
Taking his anodyne setup-punchline-sarcastic quip formula and applying it to aggressively unfunny shock material is actually low key brilliant, albeit unintentionally so.
It’s like if Norm MacDonald didn’t posses a moral compass.
I think that a lot of us on here can give credit to Scott Adams for helping develop their cynicism, for better or worse.
He was a role model to me for helping me to make sense of the corporate world and its denizens. This might not sound like a compliment, but it is. He was my Mr. Miyagi for mental resilience by providing good arguments for most people not being evil, despite how it might seem.
at age 68, which is relatively young
"The Day You Became A Better Writer" is still my favorite piece on writing. Short, simple, useful. Worth saving: https://archive.ph/yomrs
This guy was always interesting...because he understood satire so well, he understood nuance and made comedy from it...then he became chronically online and went down insane alt-right rabbit holes.
Even those of a logical mind may not have the fortitude to protect themselves from propaganda that exploit their victimhood.
Unfortunately, examples abound.
I disagreed with him politically, especially during the last few years, but I'm very appreciative of Dilbert and in particular the Dilbert cartoon. The Knack is one of those clips that I keep coming back to and sharing with friends whenever someone shows signs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams
> After a 2022 mass shooting, Adams opined that society leaves parents of troubled teenage boys with only two options: to either watch people die or murder their own son.
That's something.
At 10:25am ET, HN is more up-to-date than Wikipedia (article hasn't been updated yet to reflect his passing).
Which is at it should be. Wikipedia isn't a news source, and especially for something like this should be careful about allowing edits to stand until they can cite sources.
Wikipedia is waiting for news sources to confirm things.
> Later (incorrect) predictions repeatedly featured in Politico magazine's annual lists of "Worst Predictions", including that one of Trump, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden would die from COVID-19 by the end of 2020,[98] that "Republicans will be hunted" if Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election
> In a 2006 blog post, Adams asked if official figures of the number of deaths in the Holocaust were based on methodologically sound research.
Jesus christ.
> Republicans will be hunted" if Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election
I don't know how he got there from Biden's literal pitch to donors that "nothing will fundamentally change".
Projection. The Republican pitch was to start hunting their enemies, so he and a lot of other people assumed the reverse applied too.
It's not about assumptions, it's rationalization. The tribal playbook requires one to demonize the enemy in order to justify what they want to do to them.
The entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale.
To go from a brilliant satirist to becoming terminally online and just completely falling off the far right cliffs of insanity is incredibly sad. And unfortunately, this is plight is not uncommon. It is incredibly dangerous to make politics part of your identity and then just absolutely bathe yourself in a political media echo chamber.
I read the Dilbert Principle when I was young, but still old enough to appreciate a lot of its humor. Later, when I discovered Scott was online and had a blog, I couldn't believe it was the same person. To me, the Scott Adams of comic strip fame had already died many years ago.
> just absolutely bathe yourself in a political media echo chamber.
It seems to me that social media belongs in the same "vice" category as drinking, drugs, and gambling: lots of people can "enjoy responsibly", some make a mess but pull back when they see it, and some completely ruin their lives by doubling down.
The danger is those three are usually done in social situations where others can "pull you back" - which is why online gambling and drinking/drugs alone can get so bad so fast.
Social media has nobody to pull you back, you just get sucked in to the whirlpool.
Social drinking and smoking can also pull you forward. What pulls you back is having something else to do (in other words a greater life to go back to), and that is why behavior problems fit in to a larger picture of a not-having-anything-to-do crisis, which is referred to in the media as a mental health crisis, a loneliness crisis, alienation of labor, or anything that involves the natural cycles regulating normal human behavior (socializing, working to make stuff, having balanced views) being interrupted.
Absolutely. Social media is designed to elicit a constant stream of dopamine hits, prey on our need for social validation, keep the amygdala engaged, stoke conflict, and bolster whatever beliefs we carry (no matter how deranged). It’s the ultimate distortion machine and is wildly dangerous, particularly for individuals who struggle to keep it at arm’s distance and fail to equip mental PPE prior to usage.
He gave a tour of his house on YouTube a long time ago and on every tv in nearly every room he has Fox News playing.
Just watching it now (and what a house it is). There's a TV in almost every room, and Fox News is on each of them. He says: "Yes, it is the same station on every television, because that's how the system is designed. It's designed so it'll play the same station all over the house. It happens to be Fox News, but I do flip around. It's not nailed on Fox News, in case you're wondering."
Narrator: “It was nailed on Fox News.”
I think the "TV in every room" is far more concerning than the choice of station. That cannot be good for the mind.
I have no television in any room. Having a tv in nearly every room sounds like a nightmare. Doubly so if playing Fox News.
https://theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesn...
Scott Adams would've approved, I think.
I own three colanders.
How many rooms in your home though? These are crucial details.
Social media is a poison and Mr. Adams drank deep from the well. It's a shame.
What makes it cautionary? From what I can tell, he hardly suffered from what you described. I'm not saying that I agree with everything that came out of Scott's mouth, but I never saw a sign of regret in him in regards to politics.
Well on the health side, he might not quite be Steve Jobs level, but he spent months taking complete nonsense "treatments" where his medical condition (predictably) worsened dramatically. That part's certainly a cautionary tale.
Sure, though I'm not sure why that matters as I am pretty sure we all have some sort of cautionary tale in our lives the further back you dig.
I don't agree that this is a clear-cut example of a cautionary tale. I think for most people it can be a cautionary tale since it's common to chase things that promise hope in a desperate situation. We also shouldn't dismiss that someone can weigh the risks and take a gamble on something working out. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong or stupid for someone trying something conventional even if it backfires.
It's important to try and see this from Scott's perspective. According to him, he had his use of his vocal cords restored by a treatment that was highly experimental and during a time when all the official information said there was no treatment. If we are to believe his words, it worked out for him once, so it makes sense that he would decide to try things that are unconventional when his entire life was at stake.
This was recorded before he publicly came out as racist[1] and anti-vaccine[2]: https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/scott-adams-...
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/02/23/dilberts-scott-adams-...
[2] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jan/26/scott-adam...
I don't recall where (Vic Berger?), but someone made a compilation of "regret" clips from Trump influencers (Alex Jones and others, and Scott Adams). This was in the circa January 6 days, where humiliation reigned, and they all felt betrayed because "RINOs" dominated Trump's term, "the deep state" was still standing, and he accomplished nothing of note. It's been memory-holed since then but that was the dominant mood back then (they blamed his mediocrity on "bad staffing", which later led to Project 2025).
Well Scott Adams was in there, venting (in a video) that his life had basically been ruined by his support for Trump, that he'd lost most of his friends and wealth due to it, and that he felt betrayed and felt like a moron for trusting him since it wasn't even worth it. Nothing had changed and the country wasn't "saved".
Is this the video? Scott Adams talks about losing friends, money, etc. around the 3:35 mark: https://youtu.be/HFUr6Px99aQ?t=215
Thanks, it's better to have the real quotes than my recollections.
This video is so badly edited that it’s really difficult to figure out what he’s actually saying. It’s obviously cut to portray some kind of regret, but for example what does “he left me on the table” even mean? Who? How?
You're confused if you think Berger is a bad editor
Sorry, as other commenter points out, the editing is only “bad” in a specific context. It’s brilliant for purposes of comedy and mockery. It’s definitely not good for purposes of understanding what Adams really thought.
Edit: and for what it’s worth, I have no idea who “Berger” is or that/if they edited that Vice video.
He's the editor of the video, which is obviously humorous
It’s edited well for its purpose, perhaps; it is not edited well for the purpose of understanding the context and intent of the Scott Adams quote being discussed, which is very much not its purpose. From the perspective of someone trying to understand the evolution of Adams’ views, it is badly edited, which is different than saying Berger is a bad editor, or even that it is badly edited from any other perspective.
Well okay, if you could find this compilation then I'd be interested. That really doesn't sound like the Scott Adams I've seen over the course of the last decade.
I’d be interested in seeing this. Not to doubt you, but I suspect a more accurate characterization is not “my life was ruined by my support for Trump” but rather “look what being right about everything gets you in a world of trump haters.”
> Nothing had changed and the country wasn't "saved".
Let's be precise and remove those scare quotes.
In 2015/2016 Trump was literally talking about saving U.S. critical infrastructure:
1. Promising to fulfill a trillion dollar U.S. infrastructure campaign pledge to repair crumbling infrastructure[1]
2. Putting Daniel Slane on the transition team to start the process to draft said trillion dollar infrastructure bill[2]
By 2017 that plan was tabled.
If anyone can find it, I'd love to see Slane's powerpoint and cross-reference his 50 critical projects against what ended up making it into Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OafCPy7K05k
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdvJSGc14xA
Edit: clarifications
Infrastructure Week was literally a running joke throughout Trump's first term because his staff would start by hyping up some substantive policy changes they wanted to pass, only for it to be completely derailed by yet another ridiculous/stupid/corrupt/insane thing Trump or one of his top people did.
Clearly Trump himself has no interest in these sorts of substantive projects, I mean just look at his second term. He has even less interest in policy this time around and isn't even pretending to push for infrastructure or similar legislation.
I’m a believer in the idea of “twitter poisoning”, but of course it applies to all social media.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/trump-musk-kanye-...
Part of his arc was posting about himself on Reddit using sockpuppets, calling himself a genius:
https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpupp...
Don't forget his claim that master hypnotists are using camgirls to give him super-orgasms to steal his money. He was a nutter in more ways than just his politics.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201108112121/https://www.scott...
> In other news, for several years I have been tracking a Master Wizard that I believe lives in Southern California. It seems he has trained a small army of attractive women in his method. The women create a specialized style of porn video clips that literally hypnotize the viewer to magnify the orgasm experience beyond anything you probably imagine is possible. Hypnosis has a super-strong impact on about 20% of people. And a lesser-but-strong impact on most of the rest.
> Once a customer is hooked, the girls use powerful (and real) hypnosis tools to connect the viewer’s enjoyable experience (a super-orgasm, or several) to the viewer’s act of giving them money, either directly or by buying more clips. Eventually the regular viewers are reprogrammed to get their sexual thrill by the act of donating money to the girls in the videos. There are lots of variations tied to each type of sexual kink, but that’s the general idea.
> My best guess is that 10% of the traffic that flows through their business model literally cannot leave until they have no money left. The Master Wizard is that good. The women are well-coached in his methods.
Many, many commenters here are themselves bathed in a political media echo chamber, just a different one. Ironic, isn't it?
If you treat your political opponents as 'insane' instead of trying to understand what moves them, it says more about you than about people you consider insane.
I have a two famous friends in the television industry. It seems they fall into the trap that since they produce popular TV shows that they then can think they know every thing about everything else, mostly because of the people that surround them want to stay friends so they can be associated with the fame. I think this is the trap Adams fell into as well. Whether that was with his knowledge or ignorance I do not know.
I do not let my friends get away with them thinking they are experts on everything.
Adams turned his fame of Dilbert into his fame for saying things online. I mean he even started a food company! Anyone remember the "Dilberito"??? Seems he was always just looking for more ways to make money. And reading his books it sounded like he wanted to get rid of religions.
So he was human, just like the rest of us. And he died desperate and clutching to life, leveraging whatever power he had to try to save it from who ever he could.
I never pegged him for a liar though. He believed what he said, unlike so many political commentators.
When I was young I didn't understand meaning of the words "do not bear false witness" and it was explained to me as "do not lie". As I've gotten older and now understand the words better, the much broader category of "do not bear false witness" seems like the better precept. Spreading false witness, even if sincere, has great harm.
He actually believed Trump would normalize relations with DPRK and send special forces to take out fentanyl factories in mainland China?
Of all the things people believe(d) Trump will/would do this one would not make top-100 list :)
Does it matter?
How can you tell anyway?
That's the most important thing that matters, when choosing whose words to even allow to enter one's ears.
Consistency of explanations and of the underlying logic.
He "mainlined" Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. That is pure poison for the soul.
I think the world was better with him in it despite his controversies. Dilbert was great. Rest in peace
> "terminally online"
Bad choice of words.
yes, posts like these do not look like they were made by a mentally stable individual https://bsky.app/profile/dell.bsky.social/post/3mccx32hklc2f
And why did he say that? And what was the end result of him posting that?
You should add context so people know that Kaiser was delaying his treatment, Trump's team got Kaiser in gear so that he could receive it (Trump did indeed help him). Now imagine any other non-famous person with Stage IV cancer trying to get treatment without the help of a president.
Notch too.
I never understood the urge to self destruct online. Jesus, take the money and fame and disappear like Tom of myspace.
When I was a lot younger I thought the comic strip was funny but I read a review of it circa 2005 which pointed out it was dangerously cynical and that Dilbert is to blame for his shit life because he goes along with it all. That is, if you care about doing good work, finding meaning in your work, you would reject everything he stands for.
It's tragedy instead comedy and it doesn't matter if you see it through the lens of Karl Marx ("he doesn't challenge the power structure") or through the lens of Tom Peters or James Collins ("search for excellence in the current system")
I mean, there is this social contagion aspect of comedy, you might think it is funny because it it is in a frame where it is supposed to be funny or because other people are laughing. But the wider context is that 4-koma [1] have been dead in the US since at least the 1980s, our culture is not at all competitive or meritocratic and as long we still have Peanuts and Family Circle we are never going to have a Bocchi the Rock. Young people are turning to Japanese pop culture because in Japan quirky individuals can write a light novel or low-budget video game that can become a multi-billion dollar franchise and the doors are just not open for that here, at all.
Thus, Scott Adams, who won the lottery with his comic that rejects the idea of excellence doesn't have any moral basis to talk about corporate DEI and how it fails us all. I think he did have some insights into the spell that Trump casts over people, and it's a hard thing to talk about in a way that people will accept. What people would laugh at when it was framed as fiction didn't seem funny at all when it was presented as fact.
[1] 4-panel comics
See also: Elon Musk
Actually it’s more accurate to say Scott was always a far right troll and provocateur, but at some point he fell down a racist rabbit-hole. The book “The Trouble with Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh” shows how Scott Adams never cared about the plight of workers in the first place, using his own words. It was way ahead of its time, as the angry reviews from 1998 and 2000, back in Dilbert’s heyday, demonstrate.
I say this as someone who used to really enjoy Dilbert, but looking back with a critical eye, it’s easy to see an artist who deliberately avoids bringing up topics that might actually do something to improve corporate culture.
Scott Adams’s boss at Pacbell in 1985 was (still) an SVP (and my boss) at AT&T in 2012.
There was always a buzz and a whisper whenever someone was frustrated: “SHE’s the boss who inspired Dilbert.”
Internally there was a saying that ATT stands for “Ask The Tentacles.”
I haven’t really read the “funnies” since I was a kid but the few Dilbert comics I ever did read NAILED her org.
I will never forget being paged 1,000 times a night - not even kidding — or having my boss demand I “check sendmail” every time anything and I mean anything went down. Voice? Data? CALEA tunnels? IPTV? Fax? No, I can’t go immediately investigate the actual issue, I have to go into some crusty Solaris boxes the company forgot about 11 years ago and humor some dinosaur with three mansions who probably also directly inspired the Peter Principle in 1969 and are still working there.
Dilbert was BARELY satire.
And that’s enough out of me.
As a product manager in the computer industry from the mid 80s into the 90s, Dilbert really resonated with me as satire--except, as you say, when it was barely satire. Not so much except for occasional later strips that really nailed some specific thing.
I do not know about anybody else, but I do not read comics, watch movies, listen to music, or read books [for pleasure] in order to learn a lesson, learn how to "improve corporate culture", or anything else. Entertainment is, for me, 100% escapist. I indulge in entertainment as a brief escape from reality. If Dilbert had been preachy, which A LOT of comics seem to be these days, I would not have enjoyed it.
See also: JK Rowling.
Pre-2018: Inclusion! Weirdos are people too! The marginalized need a voice!
Post-2019: Transsexuals are a blight on society! They cause cancer in puppies!
Sadly I suspect many people aren’t really driven by ideology as much as they wave around ideology when they think it gets them something they want.
Outside that… ideology is out the window.
It's a long list. Sadly, Dawkins is also on there. And I'd argue Elon fits the bill, too.
To argue that, you’d have to find someone who disagrees.
This progressive movement is absolutely totalitarian.
As long as you adhere to all mainstream tenets, you're good and virtuous, like pre-2018 JK Rowling. Gay Dumbledore, yay!
But if the mainstream tenets change, and some previously loyal followers disagree with some of them, they should be ostracised, cancelled and vilified, like post-2019 JK Rowling.
The funny thing is that this is what real fascists and communists did to a T, yet, progressive people view themselves as anti-fascists.
His politics were not insane just because you disagreed with him.
What he practiced was the exact opposite of a political media echo chamber.
You just labeled him far right and insane without providing any positions you disagreed with.
edit: downvoted and flagged for saying we shouldn't hurl ad-hominem attacks
Seems like he aligned pretty perfectly with the Fox News/Newsmax echo chamber.
> His politics were not insane just because you disagreed with him.
Literally nobody is claiming that his politics were insane because they disagreed with him.
> edit: downvoted and flagged for saying we shouldn't hurl ad-hominem attacks
Absolutely not what "ad hominem" means.
The online world breeds extremism. It wasn't too long ago criticizing someone on their obituary was considered classless. This is the world we have made.
> It wasn't too long ago criticizing someone on their obituary was considered classless.
It's very easy to avoid getting criticized in your obituary, don't be an asshole.
If you devote your life to being an asshole, the civilized response gloves will come off and maybe more people should learn this lesson.
The implication is that you are attacking the defenseless. There is none more defenseless than the dead.
Not true.
1. Plenty of living people defend the reputations of dead people.
2. There's no proof that anything we say or do has any impact on dead people.
Well, if you think of person as a bunch of ideas, maybe with a mind attached, then by attacking a dead person you're attacking a bunch of vulnerable ideas that no longer have a mind to defend them. You can still call it a person, if you like.
>You can still call it a person, if you like.
No thanks, because a person is not a group of ideas + a mind.
No one cares less about defending themselves being attacked than the dead.
No one is less tolerant of attacks than the dead.
Godwin's law approaching
Completely agree. If you're motivated enough about a topic to post about it online, you're probably emotional about it and unable to see it in a clear-headed manner.
The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online. The people who have developed unhealthy and biased obsessions are the ones who post constantly.
> If you're motivated enough about a topic to post about it online, you're probably emotional about it and unable to see it in a clear-headed manner.
> The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online.
And here you are posting your opinions online! How fascinating. I hope you recognize the extreme irony in the fact that you were motivated enough about this topic to post about it.
Unwillingness to engage with others breeds extremism. There are many who are silenced if they do not fit into the social dogma. Those people eventually lose it if they can't find a productive outlet.
What a distasteful comment. The man did way more good than harm to everyone around him.
He also just passed away, show some respect.
>He also just passed away, show some respect.
It takes more than dying to earn respect.
No. You show respect for those who have just died, period. It's proper manners to do so.
Right, be like the US president!
Based on his later years I think the best way to honor him is with an internet shitshow and simping for Donald Trump. I volunteer for the former.
Good to know that "Don't speak ill of the dead," is now truly dead. Ironic that an online post trying to push a political point is attempting to frame itself as rising above. There is no middle ground. There is no common decency.
The reaction to Adams death is simply a reflection of how he lived his life.
There’s this curious demand (often though not exclusively from right leaning folks) for freedom of speech and freedom from consequences of that speech. It doesn’t work that way.
You have the freedom to say reactionary things that upset people as much as you want. But if you do, then you die, people are going to say “he was a person who said reactionary things that upset people”.
I've never entirely understood "don't speak ill of the dead"; it seems like a vastly-scoped rule with far too many exceptions (and that can prevent learning any lessons from the life of the deceased). Forgive the Godwin's law, but: did that rule apply to Hitler? If not, then there's a line somewhere where it stops being a good rule (if it ever was one to begin with) – and I'd feel confident saying that there's no real consensus about where that "cutover" occurs.
To me, comments like "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" rings less of vitriol and more of a kind of mourning for who the man became, and the loss of his life (and thus the loss of any chance to grow beyond who he became).
That rings empathetic and sorrowful to me, which seems pretty decent in my book.
Because the dead can't respond or defend themselves. That's why you don't do it.
And it's the framing of the statement that is the problem. They didn't say "I disagreed with Scott" or "I didn't like Scott"; they framed it in a way that made it seem like truth. "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" makes it seem like he did something wrong and there is some universal truth to be had, when it's really just this person disagreed with Scott's political views. It's persuasion, which ironically I think Scott would have liked.
Kind of crazy your original post got flagged, it was completely reasonable.
---
> which ironically I think Scott would have liked
Agreed, RIP.
> they framed it in a way that made it seem like truth
"the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get the fuck away"
It is true that this is an evil and racist thing to say.
> when it's really just this person disagreed with Scott's political views
white supremacism isn't just a small policy difference.
If you hold hateful beliefs in which you believe certain people are inferior based on superficial traits like skin colour, why should you expect to be treated with respect? I disrespect such people because I don't respect them, I am if nothing else being sincere.
> I've never entirely understood "don't speak ill of the dead"
Agree. Much more hurtful to speak ill of the living. I can even see both R's and D's as people suffering in the duality of the world and have compassion for them. “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
This is even encoded in our laws. It is definitionally impossible to defame the dead, for example.
You don't even really need to invoke Godwin's law, since you can just ask the same question about financier to the billionaires Jeffrey Epstein or beloved British presenter Sir Jimmy Savile (presented without speaking ill of the dead).
Why shouldn’t you speak ill of the dead?
Good question.
The dead man, whomever is in question, can no longer harm you. He was a man, maybe a husband and father, and speaking ill of them is of no tangible benefit. To those that respected or loved them, the relationship is gone, and it is not wise to add to their pain.
I have been to the funeral of bad men. His earthly power is gone and if there is an afterlife his judgment is sealed.
This goes for all enemies and tyrants and criminals. We use the term "I am sorry for your loss" because most times the loss is not ours.
> His earthly power is gone
Well... unless he has follower, right? I would argue that Jesus remains a powerful force today despite being dead for 2000 years.
I don't think people go out of their way to talk shit about everyday shitty people. It's the ones who remain influential that issue is raised.
> no tangible benefit
On the contrary, if his beliefs were especially toxic, it is extremely beneficial to speak against them.
I suppose you shouldn't jeer at them for being dead, for a start, and you should make allowances for their being dead when judging their actions. Treat them fairly.
They weren't dead yet when they did the actions for which they are judged, right?
Actions, inactions, same difference.
It's mostly because the dead cannot defend themselves. You are attacking someone who you have no fear of reprisal from.
This has been mentioned a few times in this thread. But it doesn't really make a lot of sense, especially in the case of someone famous.
If two or three days ago, not knowing he was sick (which I didn't), I had said to someone "That Dilbert guy seems to be sort of a whack job," why would it matter that he was alive to hypothetically defend himself? It's extremely unlikely that he would ever be aware of my comment at all. So why does it matter that he's alive?
I didn't fear reprisal from Scott Adams when he was alive, either.
And there are plenty of people willing to step in for Scott and defend him, as evidenced by the contents here.
Someone dying doesn't mean the consequences of their words and actions disappear and acting like we should pretend that death washes away those consequences is silly.
You can’t have a middle ground when your tenets offer up personal harm to a significant portion of the population.
May he rest in peace. His characters were quite charming and funny.
As with many others here, I admired his early creative work, but found his political beliefs to be abhorrent. An illustration, I guess, that we are maybe all of a mixture.
I'm sorry about the manner of his dying, even if the world may also be a marginally better place without the bile he inflicted on it. Still, I'm sorry he's died. He was only ten years older than me.
And my favourite Dilbert cartoon is still the one about "eunuch programmers" [1].
[1] https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1993-11-09
(Edit: url)
Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1993-11-09>
Thanks! Edited.
He was from a kinder more tolerant time, when people thought being non-anonymous online was safe. Sort of the same problem that others from his generation, Julian Assange, many others had. But I wonder if time won’t prove these people right. If you do put yourself out there you make enemies and open yourself to the hatred on many psycho basement dwellers. But if you don’t the world never knows you. All if that is too many words to say there’s a price to be paid for fame. Anyway, Dilbert was an important part of our cultural landscape and made a lot of people feel good despite the pains of cubicle life. To make people smile and feel better, that’s a pretty great achievement after all. Rip Scott, hopefully you’ll be making many folks smile in the afterlife too.
For those who do not know, Adams was still putting up daily Dilbert strips, just for paid subs on Twitter instead of in a newspaper. I think it's impressive he didn't stop until the end, even though AIUI he was in serious pain for a while. (He did stop doing the art himself in Nov.)
Thanks for the laughs, Mr. Adams. May you rest in peace.
Thank you for the several decades of smiles over human foibles.
Bye, nobody will miss you.
I’m trans, I’m autistic, and I caught on how bad he was day one, as his comics had a very specific slant to them that felt less like truly looking at workplace dynamics, and more acting misanthropic and aggrieved.
I get you might have not caught on so soon - I’d call myself lucky - but you had plenty of time to figure out that not only he isn’t good, but also never was.
Never has so much goodwill been squandered so completely.
Sadly, there are a great many contenders for that crown. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Cosby
I read every Scott Adams book as a kid - insightful and approachable.
I don't get "avoiding the ugliness" when someone dies. We need to acknowledge the ugliness and try to do better.
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.
In the context of the above comment I read "avoiding the ugliness" as avoiding incorporating it and continuing it in your own life, not shying away from talking about and addressing it.
This comment actually makes a specific point of calling it out compared to some others here.
"We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again"
Interesting way to put it. For the past decade or so, many flavors of bigotry have been lauded and socially rewarded.
At the same time, many valid viewpoints and statements have been mislabeled as "bigotry" by the incurious and hivemind-compliant.
These things are balancing out lately, but quite a lot of damage was done.
Care to elaborate on what flavors of bigotry have been lauded and socially rewarded/what valid viewpoints and statements have been mislabeled as bigotry? I feel like you're being intentionally vague to avoid taking a stance here.
No, I think my stance is pretty clear.
If you don't recognize the patterns of incuriosity, groupthink and misguided confidence that have permeated western society in the last ten years, nothing I say here is going to enlighten you.
Your stance isn't clear at all. Do you have any specifics?
Ah, so you're socially conservative, support Trump but probably consider yourself a libertarian, secretly a big fan of the moves ICE has been making? I'm assuming you've used the term "liberal media" unironically in the last year. You didn't storm the capitol, but you consider the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 to be worse than January 6. Antifa is more of a danger than far-right agitators. Charlie Kirk's death hit hard. No social identity group is more persecuted than white, heterosexual, cisgender Christian men.
Any of those resonate? You're welcome to correct me.
> These things are balancing out lately
What measures and data do you base that claim on?
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts "lives lost based on the decline in outlays (current spending) may be in the range of 500,000 to 1,000,000 and potential lives lost based on the decline in obligations (commitments to future spending) are between 670,000 and 1,600,000."
What is your best estimate of deaths due to "woke" or whatever you consider the scourge of the "past decade" to be?
How many visas revoked due to the holder being not woke enough? How many people were deported from the US for being insufficiently woke? And so on. "Woke" may not be what you meant. Whatever you meant, present your measure and data.
The thinking is that not "speaking ill of the dead" is not just respect, but doing anything else is pointless.
You will not change them, and everyone present already made up their mind on their behavior.
They didn't, though. Plenty of people who had one reputation at their death have had that reputation change over time, especially with more information and awareness of what they did. Sometimes their reputations improve, sometimes they decline.
Speaking only positively about people distorts the reality.
Why is their reputation relevant? They're dead.
Reputation guides your behavior toward that person. But they're no longer around. There is no behavior toward them. They're gone. Their reputation is no longer relevant.
> Reputation guides your behavior toward that person. But they're no longer around. There is no behavior toward them. They're gone. Their reputation is no longer relevant.
It also culturally informs someone's perceived suitability as a role model. It doesn't matter to the dead person if they are held in high or low esteem, but it may matter to people in their formative stages deciding whose influence they follow and whose they shun.
I'm not saying it's right to not "speak ill of the dead". Just that that's the reasoning I've seen in my family.
I was not weighing in on whether one should or shouldn't speak ill of the dead, only trying to answer:
> Why is their reputation relevant? They're dead.
Adams stated he was racist and thought that was aok.
I'd say calling him out as a racist is not exactly speaking ill of the dead in this case.
I suspect that racism is inherent in humanity, hard-wired into our brains by millions of years of evolution.
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.
Humanity and civilization are defined by going beyond any base instincts.
Even if you're correct (I don't agree), consider other things: if you look at someone and your body has an instinctive desire to have sex with them, you are obligated to realize that just doing so without regard for consent or other things is not OK. If you don't realize that and proceed based on instinct, that's rape.
You can feel whatever instincts you want. If you feel bad or harmful ones, you should acknowledge it. It doesn't really matter if you feel guilty or shame or whatever you want to call it, but you should absolutely internally recognize that these things are *wrong*.
>Humanity and civilization are defined by going beyond any base instincts.
Civilization is nothing more than "lives in cities". That's it. That's what the science of anthropology has to say on the matter. It's not even that big of a deal, you'd much rather be involved with some hunter-gatherer living in a tent who had noble ideas and a sense of fairness than with most of the very "civilized" people who live in Oklahoma City. Why?
You don't share their values. Humanity, for all its potential, does not scale beyond Dunbar's number, and attempts to do so have resulted in horrors beyond comprehension on a regular, cyclical basis, for many thousands of years. You're quite certain that your values should win out and exterminate their values (and if they're not enlightened enough to just let their values be obliterated, they too can be exterminated with them... leftists are, right now, trying to work up the nerve to go on the attack, we've both seen the internet messages and not all of them are russian bots).
> If you feel bad or harmful ones, you should acknowledge it.
I do. I like to acknowledge it. I despise dishonesty, but most of all I despise self-deception. But sometimes I need to keep my mouth shut, because others would be quick to punish me for words. For spoken-aloud thoughts. And it causes distress.
>but you should absolutely internally recognize that these things are wrong.
Why? What makes those things wrong? Can you explain, objectively and empirically what makes it wrong? From the other set of values (see above), you're the one with wrong thoughts, wrong feelings, and wrong desires.
What you really mean, but don't have the words to say, is that you want me to be one with your group. To accept its set of group-beliefs, to espouse no dissent (or at least below some tiny, acceptable threshold), and to support your causes. But I've seen what sort of world you want to make, and I do not want to live in that world. I do not think your group survives, even should it win.
The world I want might well have room in it for other peoples. They could do as they want, peaceful (distant) coexistence. Your world doesn't have any room in it for me.
Your strategy of indoctrinating young children in public education was working. It was absolutely foolproof, I think, none could fight against it. But then someone managed to sneak in behind its armor, to drop the torpedo in that trench, and now your death star blew up. I'm not even sure anyone on the left has noticed how bad this is for your movement.
I really didn't think that "don't rape people" was a left/right issue (or something that should have to be explained why it's wrong), but here we are.
This is a silly appeal to nature.
But to address the point. There may be base instincts to which we are all subject. But that doesn't mean we should embrace them or proudly wear them as a badge. Violence is entirely natural. And yet most will agree it should not be embraced. Someone proudly declaring themselves as violent will (and should!) be judged harshly. I say the same holds true for racism, whether it is "natural" or not.
Much (all?) of civilisational progress is characterised by moving away from the natural state to a higher strata. The civil part of civilization is entirely unnatural
What's silly about it? I am neither unnatural nor supernatural, and my nature is who I am.
>But that doesn't mean we should embrace them or proudly wear them as a badge.
Maybe. But it also means that I shouldn't be ashamed of them or try to suppress myself into neuroticism. And since the left has made a point of that for decades now, has tried to bully people into doing just that, the pendulum was primed to swing the other way. So yeh, I think I will be proud. It feels good.
>Violence is entirely natural.
It is, but also something to be avoided unless there is no other reasonable option. I would recommend not trying to drive an SUV over the top of me. That's caused some strife recently. I can remain nonviolent indefinitely.
You're trying to make a well-reasoned argument that includes subtle points. That is beyond the scope of a comments section like this.
I'm missing the well-reasoned argument with subtlety. It sounds like parent is saying that "X is a natural product of evolution and hardwired" so "X must be ok".
I don't see subtlety here. As others pointed, the story of human civilization is one long arc of going against our base animal instincts in order to build a society that benefits everyone.
>As others pointed, the story of human civilization is one long arc of going against our base animal instincts in order to build a society that benefits everyone.
I'd add that it's cooperation and the ability to moderate impulsive behavior that, over the long term, differentiates us from our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzee.
If we were just our base instincts and nothing more, we wouldn't be having this conversation as we'd likely have died out, because our ability to accept and work together with each other allowed us to flourish despite the threats of predation, climate change, natural disasters and other challenges.
As such, making the argument that we're "hardwired" to hate and fear our fellow humans doesn't make sense, whether that argument is an intellectual one or an evolutionary one.
I feel sorry for folks who feel so isolated that they can't understand just how closely related we all are. It must be quite lonely.
> 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?
I think that there's a gap between "how can it be anything but OK" and "should I feel guilty." There are plenty of things that aren't OK, but about which you don't need to feel guilty. Should you feel guilty that your body intrinsically craves foods that aren't good for you? I'd say that no purpose is served by feeling that way, but that doesn't mean that it's healthy to indulge those cravings.
ah, hacker news. Such a reliable source of the dumbest fucking takes on the entire Internet.
But no, don't let me stop you from justifying your hatred of certain people through the ever-convenient excuse of "evolution".
It's not OK to poop on the floor yet humans had no toilets for tens of thousands of years. Try doing some more thinking on this one
also no, racism is not genetic
The best we can do for the dead is remember them as they were, good and bad, not demonize them nor write hagiographies for them
>The best we can do for the dead is remember them as they were, good and bad, not demonize them nor write hagiographies for them
I agree with your conclusion, but not with your premise.
We can't "do" anything for the dead. They're dead. What's more, since they're dead they don't care what we do or say because they're, you know, dead.
Anything we might do or say in reference to dead folks is for the benefit of the living and has nothing to do with the dead.
That said, you're absolutely right. We should remember folks for who they were -- warts and all -- to give the living perspective both on the dead and the dead past.
So, no need to speak of them at all
Respect is earned by your actions and deeds, not by your death.
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.
I was directly responding and replying to jchallis, but a mod detached my comment from its parent and now it makes less sense without the proper context. Great job.
The moderation on this site is really such garbage. Filled with all kinds of weird and subtle manipulation, almost never openly acknowledged and they are more than happy to gaslight you when you confront them about it.
Is "calling out the bigotry" useful? I feel like the Internet has been used for this purpose pretty consistently for the last 15 years. Is it effective? Is there less bigotry now than before?
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.
> Is "calling out the bigotry" useful?
There is immense value in acknowledging and learning from the mistakes of others, yes, even after their deaths.
Making the bigotry known is helpful, because while it might not cause a reduction, it is valuable information for all members of society.
Think about all the things people have done in the real world the last 50 years to combat bigotry. During the civil rights movement of the 60s, black people sat at segregated lunch counters and marched peacefully in the street, and were consequently spat on and attacked by white mobs, beaten by police, sprayed with fire hoses, attacked by dogs, etc.
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.
One good reason to avoid it is because you're probably wrong.
Wrong about what?
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?
I agree with the sentiment. I think timing is pretty important, though, and a cooling-off period might be a kind gesture for his loved ones.
I posit that self-reflection might be a better avenue to understanding this world where Steven Miller is in the White House, at least in the immediate. Personally, I stopped reading Dilbert quite a while before he cancelled himself, just because it wasn't available in a medium that worked for me. I do have a couple books on the shelf of old Dilbert comics and I considered getting rid of them when the racism came out. I cracked one open and laughed out loud at a handful of the comics and so the books are still in my house. I abhor racism, but he already got my money. At least for me, and maybe I'm damaged, I still laugh at some of the comics, even after I knew he was a jerk. I think if one of my black friends told me he was offended that I had those books, I'd get rid of them.
How about Harry Potter? I'm certain that there are some folks here who have been hurt by Rowling's statements and I'm also certain that there are some folks here that would sacrifice a limb to live in the Harry Potter universe. Do you separate the artist from the art or what's the rational thing? I have the Harry Potter books on my shelf, I've actually read them out loud to my children. They also are aware of LGTBQ issues, they know and are around LGTBQ people and we have had conversations about those issues. Is that enough? Should one of my kids pick up the Dilbert books, I have a conversation locked and loaded and I already know that I've raised them to be anti-racism. I don't know that I'm super eager to put more money in to J. K.'s pocket, I probably won't go to Disney Harry Potter Land or whatever they come up with but I've bought and read the books and I haven't burned them.
And make no mistake, had I known he was a biggot in 1995, I don't think I would have continued reading Dilbert or ever bought books. The problem is it made me laugh, then years later I found out he was a jerk and I still laugh at the comics, I remember laughing the first time I read some of them, and I think of that more when I re-read them than I think about Scott Adams. Fact is, he still made me laugh all those years ago, I can't put that back in the bottle, it happened.
Agree with this. I didn’t agree with it in the past, but I can see now that it has caused the issue you raise. I don’t know if this is a great insight, but one reason I think people have not connected the results (Stephen Millers in the White House) back to the action (not speaking ill of the dead) is because THEY are not the ones affected. When Stephen Miller is in the White House, it’s all the non white people - including legal immigrants and naturalized citizens and citizens born here - that are living in fear of where the administration will go. I doubt others are aware that there is this fear, or even that the DHS’s official account tweets out threats to deport a third of the country.
>We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again,
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.
The difference is Orson Scott Card only seemed to have been called out for being a bog-standard Mormon, at least as far as I know.
That's the best I can tell. But mormonism is supposed to change their doctrine to follow the left's social standards.
Ok, fair, even I couldn't keep a straight face typing that out. Touche.
What exactly was the bad stuff? He was insensitive about empirical reality or he was literally wrong about something in the sense of being very confident about something despite having little data? Or something else? I only remember the cartons really but was aware some people seemed to be irked about him recently.
Some random internet poll said many people of race A agreed it was "not OK" to be a person of race B. Adams said if that were true, then people of race B should probably not hang out with people of race A that thought it was not OK to be race B. The internet did its thing and quoted him out of context, and tried to cancel him. He dug in his heels and doubled down. He also liked a certain president that many dislike. And here we are.
> The internet did its thing and quoted him out of context
Let's not act like this is some case of out of context quotes. Here's the actual quote for people to decide for themselves:
"I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off. I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying. I'm not saying start a war or do anything bad. Nothing like that. I'm just saying get away. Just get away."
'Don't speak ill of the dead' comes from an era where everyone genuinely believed that the dead could haunt you from the grave.
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.
In the modern era it's usually said because the dead person cannot defend himself.
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.
When I was a young man my mother did use that but explained ill more in the sense of unfair/unkind. I guess as an adult you realize everyone ends up living a somewhat complicated existence, and it's easier (maybe even sometimes safer) to say this person was bad than it is to say this person did unacceptable things.
We've done this with our kid(s). Saying "you're being bad" or "you are bad" is very different from "You're choosing to do bad things."
No. Disbelief has always been around. That there is no Church of Disbelief is a feature not a bug. Not speaking ill of the dead has a range of connotations, probably most prominent being avoiding easy targets that can't defend themselves. Want to show righteousness and strength of conviction? Then try a live target. There are many.
I think this is a question of who you're talking to, and is something you have to evaluate on a case-by-case basis.
If the person/people you're speaking with, already followed this public figure, or was forced by society to be aware of the life of this public figure at all times — and so were surely also aware of the bad turn that person's career/life took — then to your audience, the ugliness would have already been long acknowledged. To your audience, the ugliness may be the only thing anyone has spoken about in reference to the public figure for a long time.
And, for an audience who became aware of the public figure a bit later on in their lives, the bad stuff might be all they know about them! (Honestly, there are more than a few celebrities that I personally know only as a subject of ongoing public resentment, with no understanding of what made them a celebrity in the first place.)
In both of these cases, if this is your audience, then there's no point to carrying on the "this is a bad person" reminders during the (usually very short!) mourning period that a public figure gets. They already know.
On the other hand, if you presume someone who has no idea who a certain person is, and who is only hearing about them in the context of their death — then yes, sure, remind away.
I think, given the audience of "people in a comment thread on Hacker News about the death of Scott Adams", people here are likely extremely aware of who Scott Adams is.
---
That said, on another note, I have a personal philosophy around "celebrations of life", that I formed after deciding how to respond to the death of my own father, himself a very complicated man.
People generally take the period immediately after someone's death as a chance to put any kind of ongoing negative feelings toward someone on pause for just a moment, to celebrate whatever positive contributions a person made, and extract whatever positive lessons can be learned from those contributions.
Note that the dead have no way of benefitting from this. They're dead!
If you pay close attention, most of a community does after the death of one of its members, or a society does after the death of a public figure... isn't really a veneration; there is no respect or face given. Rather, what we're doing with our words, is something very much like what the deceased's family are doing with their hands: digging through the estate of the deceased to find things of value to keep, while discarding the rest. Finding the pearls amongst the mud, washing them off, and taking them home.
Certainly, sometimes the only pearl that can be found is a lesson about the kind of person you should strive not to be. But often, there's at least something useful you can take from someone's life — something society doesn't deserve to lose grasp of, just because it was made by or associated with someone we had become soured on.
I think it's important to note that if we don't manage to agree to a specific moment to all mutually be okay with doing this "examination of the positive products of this person's life" — which especially implies "staying temporarily silent about the person's shortcomings so as to make space for that examination"... then that moment can never happen. And that's what leads to a great cultural loss of those things that, due to their association with the person, were gradually becoming forgotten.
Nobody (save for perhaps a few devoutly religious people) argues that you should never speak ill of the dead. People really just want that one moment — perhaps a week or two long? — to calmly dredge up and leaf through the deceased's legacy like it's a discount bin at a record store, without having to defend themselves at each step of that process from constant accusations that they're "celebrating a bad person."
And it is our current societal policy that "right after you die" is when people should be allowed that one moment.
Feel free to call out Adams' bigotry a week from now! The story will still be fresh on people's minds even then.
But by giving them a moment first, people will be able to find the space to finally feel it's safe to reminisce about how e.g. they have a fond memory of being gifted a page-a-day Dilbert calendar by their uncle — fundamentally a story about how that helped them to understand and bond with their uncle, not a story about Adams — which wouldn't normally be able to be aired, because it would nevertheless summon someone to remind everyone that the author is a bigot.
Ah, yes. Trump and friends are in the White House because nobody called them racist. Excellent political analysis.
Personally, I despise an outspoken bigot like Scott Adams more when they die, not less, because now their window for growth and repentance has closed. The grotesqueness they harbored becomes permanently tied to their legacy.
By this standard, many, of not most of the artists that lived prior to the Civil Rights Era are to be thrown out.
I don't really want to study fluctuating levels of religious bigotry in Bach's life when I listen to his works.
I think there's a big difference between the following:
- 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".
Is it fine to pirate such works, then?
I don't think I ever paid for a Dilbert comics strip, though I never downloaded them from somewhere illegal either.
I personally would go with no, because you're still propagating their cultural product. One rarely consumes media with the intention of keeping it a secret; half the point of watching a movie or tv show is to talk about it. The entire sociological function of celebrities is that we talk about them. "I am doing research on Scott Adams and I want to consume some Dilbert as a research device", um, sure, I guess, I dunno, why are you doing research on a recently dead bigot, what is the purpose of that. etc.
I'm not -your- conscience, I can only explain my own. To me? No, that's not fine.
We can hold people today to modern standards.
You can’t burn a woman at the stake today and say ”oh well, 300 years ago it was normal so”.
I can agree with this when it comes to actual violent actions, but not with regard to words or thoughts.
Laws are words
Laws consist of words, but making a law is something different than just saying something. It is an act, and indeed American laws are often (or always?) called Acts.
In any period of history, there are people who know things are wrong and are vocal about it. There are artists prior to the Civil Rights Era that were not bigots. The problem you have is the artists that were celebrated AT THAT TIME which we know about were also those accepted by the status quo which allowed them to be known.
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.
People also "knew" that being gay was wrong, being atheist was wrong, universal suffrage was wrong or consuming marijuana was wrong.
This isn't a reliable method of determining morality.
Enjoy Bach's music all you want, but when I read his biography those difficult details better be in there, and if that ruins his music for you that's on you.
What's wrong with this tho? Maybe we should stop uplifting people when we find out they are nasty individuals. Acting like there aren't also artists that are good people is odd, these are the ones deserving our attention.
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
Why is it so difficult to separate the work from its creator?
Without the creator no work. Can i like the work and hate the creator? Absolutely.
"What's wrong with this tho?"
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.
"Acknowledge the ugliness and try to do better" and purging art and history are different things. The comment you replied to above did not call for a purging of Adams' work or life from history.
It seems to me that, even here in this discussion, people call for avoiding work of such authors. Would that entail, say, pressure on galleries not to show such art? If so, that is more than half way to a purge.
People often like to conflate criticism and personal choice with censorship, but they're not the same.
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.
That's not purging at all, words have meaning. If you grep my comment you might be encountering a massive bug if you found the word purge.
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.
Personally avoiding consumption and calling for a purge from history are not equivalent.
Even calling for a boycott or lack of commercialization of something is not purging from history.
The purity spiral on the other side is already batshit. "If you support that we're going to say you're bad and not buy your work" is quite a way from widespread physical and media violence.
Adams was a mediocre bureaucrat who discovered he could make a living as a competent comedian. His success at that persuaded him that he was an Important Moral Authority.
He started as a banker and ended as a self-harming prosperity preacher - not exactly a rare archetype in the US.
The funny parts were funny. The rest, not so much.
Personally I think this (admittedly long) video makes a good agument on the subject.
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.
I see where you’re coming from. But I’d argue that there’s broad consensus that his bigotry at the end was bad. So in this one moment, when we’ve just learned that he’s died, we can recall the good as well as the bad.
It is shameful to have those views. But perhaps we can bring it up tomorrow rather than right this minute.
He was just 'trolling' for leftist Democrats. So no ugliness. There.
https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2011127129354744155
Sad news. Dilbert was a big part of my life for a long time, and brought much laughter and enjoyment to my life. But on the other hand, later in his life Scott said a lot of things I found frankly repugnant, and Dilbert more or less disappeared, all of which made me sad. But he was still an amazing writer of comedy at his best, and I hate to know that he has passed. Plus, every death is at tragedy for somebody - friends, family, loved-ones of all sorts - whether we specifically like someone or not.
All of that said... RIP, Mr. Adams.
I think it's time hn added obituaries.
Rest in peace, Scott.
Your Dilbert era was scary with how accurate it portrayed real life.
And your Coffee With Scott Adams era was impressive in explaining the goings on of life.
You will be missed!
I grew up with dilbert being referenced. I was on the early internet, so things were odd. It was full of nuts and wierdos.
Scott Adams stuck out to me because his cartoons were funny and sarcastic. His books felt like he was letting me in behind the scenes. He talked to me, the reader about dealing with large amounts (for the time) traffic to his website in a honest, funny and simple way.
His books also had a link to his website, which was pretty unique for a non-technical book at the time.
I also quite liked his TV show.
I stopped reading them regularly as I grew up. I would see the odd salient dilbert in slack or email.
during the trump primary, thats when I bumped into his other side. It was heart breaking to see someone who made what I thought was such observant cartoons shit out such bile.
I loved Dilbert and I really believe that you often have to separate art from artist if you want to enjoy many things. He put a very unique perspective on corporate and tech environments that made me laugh. Sad to see a human pass but also sadder that later he expressed some disappointing opinions that diminished his contributions.
Prostate cancer. 68yo.
From Wikipedia:
"In November 2025, he said his health was suddenly declining rapidly again, and took to social media to ask President Trump for help to get access to the cancer drug Pluvicto. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. replied saying "How do I reach you? The President wants to help." The following month he said he was paralyzed below the waist and had been undergoing radiation therapy."
"On January 1, 2026, Adams said on his podcast that he had talked with his radiologist and that it was "all bad news." He said there was no chance he would get feeling back in his legs and that he also had ongoing heart failure. He told viewers they should prepare themselves "that January will probably be a month of transition, one way or another." On January 12, Adams' first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, told TMZ that Adams was in hospice at his home in Northern California."
Wow that is really fast, in my view, and I wonder how many more of his cohort will similarly crash out.
I don’t have an estate to get in order, so to speak. Then again, I also won’t pass along a house full of a lifetime of “collections” or “mementos” with little to no monetary value. The oncoming secondary market is about to be awash in Boomer junk. Nobody wants to send their precious collections to the dump or recycling.
One of my biggest mental hiccups to work through of late is the changing nature of collective memories, fame, and idols. Scott is a great example who was “big in the 90s” and 30 years later his method (print cartoons and books) is basically dead and can’t be folllowed. Gen Z will be spared Scott, and probably Elvis and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, ABBA, and Garth Brooks comparatively speaking.
This is a meandering way to note how fast we can be poof gone and life will move on with a pace quite breakneck.
> The oncoming secondary market is about to be awash in Boomer junk. Nobody wants to send their precious collections to the dump or recycling.
Maybe, maybe not. My mother died a couple years ago, and while she was too old to be a boomer, she still had plenty of accumulated possessions in her estate. We sold as much as we could, kept the few things we wanted and had space for, and the rest went to recycling or the dump. I'd guess 90% went to the dump.
The owner of that stuff may not want to send it to the dump. My mom would be mortified to hear some of the things she treasured held no value for anyone else, but when you're dead, you aren't making those decisions. The next generation probably isn't that sentimental about it.
Scott Adams is dead, but Dilbert will be alive forever: https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com
I loved this guy. His writing and book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big particularly impacted me early and exposed me to First Principles, biases, and in particular not giving a f*k about what people care so much.
he was one of those people who was attacked during COVID and labeled and propagandized against as a scapegoat for the failings of our unaccountable leadership - the cancel culture was unfair and unwelcome towards him. I resonated with that too.
I hope his legacy lives on - it will in me.
RIP.
This is one of my favorite strips of his: https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/...
Another one was the one where he went to work in Marketing, and they were doing their research by yelling questions into a well. But I can't find that one.
Feels like an appropriate time to remind folks of one of his stranger pieces of work, this board game commissioned by Lockheed Martin: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/60686/the-ethics-challen...
Ooof, he fell for Pascal's Wager at the end. Cringe.
I believe it was written in a tongue-in-cheek manner.
There are no atheists in the foxhole... I'll bet most people do in the end. Me. You. And most people in that situation.
Eh, it's hard to find fault with someone staring eternity in the eye and getting a little nervous.
You're going to find out all too late that pascals wager was correct. But it was Quetzalcoatl you should have been worshipping.
Pascal’s Wager is a refinement of Marcus Aurelius’ views; were you aware of that?
Since there are many fans here, perhaps people can share some of their favourite comics for the others.
I appreciated Scott Adams, and am sad he has passed away. I learned a lot from him and his perspective helped me through difficult times.
The comments here are very unfortunate. When someone dies, it is appropriate to speak of what you appreciated about them.
That's it. That's all you need to say. And you aren't required to say anything at all.
Apologizing for liking him because of x or y or explaining that you liked him despite z is in poor taste and, frankly, cowardly.
I appreciated Scott Adams, and am sad he has passed away.
Sad news. Rest in peace.
Scott Adams was a legitimate genius. Nobody else could have made Dilbert.
People are saying that he said some bad things. I just want to encourage people to look past the ramblings of a dying man, even in our hyperpolarized age.
rot in hell scott!
Very sad news.
Famously hard-hitting People magazine goes with "Scott Adams, Disgraced Dilbert Creator, Dies at 68".
Sadly, Scott Adams' political opinions came to overshadow Dilbert, but I shall choose to remember him as Dilbert's creator and how Dilbert captured a moment in time and work so aptly.
Back when Dilbert was massive my company ran the following ad in cinemas in Silicon Valley: https://imgur.com/a/ZPVJau8 Everyone seeing that ad knew what we were referring to.
I will forever love the Dilbert cartoons. They were a masterpiece.
Loved Dilbert as a kid, even into college, but fell off it eventually. Even if he turned to right wing trolling, I'll always remember those big comic compilations fondly.
Cancers a terrible way to go.
Rest in Peace Scott. Thanks for everything!
Irrespective of any political views, or whatsoever be it as a human, a brilliant creator has gone from the face of the Earth!
I have always enjoyed Dilbert! Thanks for that!
Fuck cancer...
Fuck any disease that takes away human lives...
An old, Dilbert-related comment of mine seems relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034220
RIP Scott Adams.
I hate cancer.
What a long and unpredictable path his life took. Too bad he isn't still with us.
I really loved Dilbert (the Gen X defining comic), and especially his first couple books.
Very sad news, RIP Scott.
This guys's work hung on more cubicle walls over the years than anything else.
Where's the black bar?
Agreed. Lets get the black bar. The times he made us laugh and think during the 90s and 2000s!
Can’t have a black bar for someone with near genocidal views.
That is news to me. Source? Controversial yes but he was a character.
“Get the hell away from black people” is close to suggesting next steps after that.
It's called "economy of information" -- something that would have served Iryna Zarutska well.
If she had stayed away from Russian men none of this would have happened. You can turn anything racist which you’re choosing to do.
New euphemism just dropped
SCOTT ADAMS IS DEAD, THANK FUCKEN GOD!
NYT obituary:
Scott Adams, Audacious Creator of the ‘Dilbert’ Comic Strip, Dies at 68
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/arts/scott-adams-dead.htm...
non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/arts/scott-adams-dead.htm...
Sad to hear, RIP
We say things like "you gotta separate the art from the artist" when we talk about folks like Scott Adams, whose take on the corporate world were unique in the comic industry and funny in general.
However, Scott Adams as an individual was deeply problematic and I would not ever stand him up as a role model for my children or behavior in general.
Of course, I wouldn't do the same for a vast number of famous people, politics aside.
The "problem" (which is in scare quotes because it's not a discrete identifiable sole-source issue but a complex and dynamic phenomenon that permeates every aspect of our modern-day life) is that we have collectively determined that if you're good at your art, you must be a person we should listen to for topics outside of your art.
To use an inflammatory but real-life example: Donald Trump is a great showman. He knows how to incite a crowd, and he knows how to feed into this modern-day mess we've made of our world. He is objectively a terrible manager of a country, and objectively a terrible human being.
But, for some reasons that have to do with politics, and some reasons that have to do with identity, folks who like Donald Trump as a showman are unable to disassociate his showmanship from his policies. To the point that if you were to write down the actual actions taken and attribute them to a leader of the other side (famous examples: Biden, Obama) as their policies, the same folks who are loudly cheering Donald Trump on would immediately castigate those actions if taken by someone on the "left".
It's a problem with no easy solution, and it requires more growth from humanity than we are at this moment exhibiting we possess. Scott Adams is a shining example of both this problem and our reaction to it, and while I mourn the passing of his art, I do not mourn his passing, and reading this comment section instead mourn our present state of wrapping ourselves in the cloth of identity politics while not engaging seriously on the fundamental underlying problems we face as a people.
Fuck cancer.
Every Christmas since I was a teen I would get a Dilbert desk calendar from my mom (who worked in software startups since 1979). When my mom was dying of cancer during COVID the people in our small, red state town yelled at her for wearing a mask. She could barely move to go shop, and she was harassed to tears. It all turned me from hippy libertarian (that moved from California to a red state) to fuck conservatives. It's so weird to find out the lessons I learned from people like Scott Adams, they never learned from/for themselves.
He was a brilliant observer and reporter on the behaviors of humanity.
He will be missed.
I was vacationing in New York, and we went to some pretty standard-looking mall bookshop somewhere near Poughkeepsie some time in mid 90s. And I bought an interesting looking comic book, something I had never seen before.
I liked Dilbert for a long time, but Adams's Trump Dementia became so bad in the last decade that it completely tainted his legacy for me. His role in enabling Donald Trump to rise to power is undeniable, and his death makes me wish I had reserved a bottle of sparkling wine for the occasion.
I yearn for the time when it was possible to never meet your idols.
SCOTT ADAMS IS DEAD! THANK F GOD!
In a weird way, I want to give him credit for saying out loud what he actually thinks. It's a good reminder for people to see it out in the open.
The reality is that there are tens of millions of racists in the United States. In fact, they put a group of Christian Nationalist (Nat-C) white supremacists in the White House.
It's not a Scott Adams problem in particular, and trying to make the issue just about him is a cop out.
Loved Dilbert anyway.
[Obituary by ChatGPT]
He was the creator of Dilbert, a comic strip that became a cultural touchstone for corporate life in the 1990s and 2000s. Through satire, Adams articulated the frustrations of office workers and popularized ideas about systems thinking, incentives, and the gap between organizational rhetoric and reality. For many in the technology and business sectors, Dilbert functioned as a shared language for workplace dysfunction.
In later years, Adams became increasingly known for provocative and polarizing commentary. His public statements grew more strident over time, culminating in remarks in 2023 that led to the widespread removal of Dilbert from newspapers. These comments were widely criticized as racist and effectively ended the strip’s mainstream publication.
Adams’ legacy is a complicated one. His early work influenced how a generation understood corporate systems and personal habits, while his later conduct overshadowed those contributions. Assessing that full record requires holding both facts at once, without simplification.