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Scott Adams has died

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Re: Scott Adams has died

#511

Post by yellowapple »

embedding-shape wrote: post #259
jchallis wrote: post #188

Scott Adams died today. I want to acknowledge something complicated. He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared…

> You don’t choose family Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not? I think most people could actually "choose family" (or not, if it's better for you as individual). Why stick with people if they're mostly negative and have a negative impact on you? Just because you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human on the planet? Not to take away from the re…

My interpretation is that there are two different senses of “family” at play here:

- The people with whom we share close bonds, stronger than ordinary friendship; we absolutely can (and should) choose them, and choose them wisely.

- The people who've disproportionately shaped our development into who we are as persons today; barring sci-fi technologies like time machines or false memory implantation, that's pretty hard to change.

GP's comment seems to be more about the latter, and of Scott Adams being in that category. I agree with that in my case, too; both the Dilbert comics and The Dilbert Principle were formative for me both personally and professionally — which amplified the pain I felt when Adams started to “go off the deep end” and reveal himself to be less of a Dilbert and more of a PHB.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#512

Post by jakeydus »

CaptWillard wrote: post #509
spankalee wrote: post #290

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.

"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.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#513

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

mcv wrote: post #400

Scott Adams is a bit of a mystery to me. Like most here, I loved his comics in the 1990s and 2000s. I even joined the mailinglist for his werd rd and surely ironically intended Dogbert's New Ruling Class. Through Dilbert, he came across as a hero of underappreciated tech workers, and a critic of ignorant managers, so it feels really weird that he became such a supporter of the ultimate pointy haired boss. I remember…

This whole "Trump is very good at persuation therefore I support him" is bullshit.

Yes, Trump IS very good at persuation. But that is no justification to support him. No, he supported Trump because he liked the things that Trump says and does. Everything else is just trying to make himself sound less bad.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#515

Post by ekjhgkejhgk »

SoftTalker wrote: post #505
mcv wrote: post #400

Scott Adams is a bit of a mystery to me. Like most here, I loved his comics in the 1990s and 2000s. I even joined the mailinglist for his werd rd and surely ironically intended Dogbert's New Ruling Class. Through Dilbert, he came across as a hero of underappreciated tech workers, and a critic of ignorant managers, so it feels really weird that he became such a supporter of the ultimate pointy haired boss. I remember…

Supremely confident, charismatic people are very attractive. There's no "mass hypnosis" about it, other than that it's something that's baked in to many of us. Obama had those qualities also, and won the Presidency twice despite lacking much experience or traditional qualifications.

> Supremely confident, charismatic people are very attractive.

They're very attractive to vast masses of sheep, yes.

They're not attractive to everybody.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#516

Post by alecco »

TYPE_FASTER wrote: post #28

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.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#517

Post by tw-hnw99 »

tac19 wrote: post #390
RIMR wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes a lot of privilege to ignore a person's overt racism and only remember a person's more agreeable qualities. Whitewashing a person's legacy in this way is a disservice to all of the people that person directed hatred at, as if it didn't really happen. He was a racist person, and the people he was racist towards would prefer that people not forget that, even in death, because the problems that Scott Adams embo…

[flagged]

The term isn't racist. Whitewash is a lime-based "paint" often used to conceal faults, and is literally the most direct a metaphor could be for glossing over a person's faults. Please educate yourself.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#518

Post by [deleted] »

spankalee wrote: post #290

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.

[deleted]

Re: Scott Adams has died

#520

Post by reducesuffering »

pembrook wrote: post #356
jchallis wrote: post #188

Scott Adams died today. I want to acknowledge something complicated. He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared…

As someone who actively avoided cancel culture hysteria in the 2010s, can we have some context here? What did the guy say that has everyone stumbling over themselves to vaguely allude to it?

Adams: "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."
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