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Scott Adams has died

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Re: Scott Adams has died

#581

Post by ygjb »

addaon wrote: post #445
twalla wrote: post #319

"If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things." I'm certain at least some small part of my own success can be attributed to my exposure to this idea, and for that I…

> 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. Is this idea that top 25% is "very good" at something innumeracy, or a subtle insight I'm missing? There's got to be a million skills that you could assess rank at -- writing embedded C code, playing basketball, identifying flora, PacMan, archery, bouldering… I can't imagine ever being able to not continue this list -- and you should expect to be in the top 25% o…

I think it's generally accepted that at a high level being in the top quartile is considered very good. Not excellent. Not unicorn. Just very good.

Beyond that, it's not about becoming very good at two different, completely orthogonal things, it's about becoming very good at two things that are complementary in some way that is of value to others. Being good at PacMan and Bouldering is only particularly valuable if you are competing for opportunities to participate in a hypothetical mixed reality video game, or perhaps a very niche streaming channel. Being the top quartile of embedded c code, and flora identification could result in building software/hardware tools to identify flora, which is a niche that currently has multiple competing products that are high value to those interested.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#582

Post by jl6 »

munificent wrote: post #450
anonu wrote: post #258

One thing I appreciated from Scott was his "compounded skills" concept. He explained it: he wasn't a very good writer or illustrator. But he combined those skills with some humorous business insights to make Dilbert. That concept of merging skills stuck with me.

I'm very fond of a quote from Tim Minchin that I'll paraphrase as: "I'm not the best singer or the best comedian, but I'm the best voice of all the comedians and I'm the funniest singer." Don't max one stat. Be a unique, weird combination of several.

A.J. Liebling wrote: “I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.”

Re: Scott Adams has died

#583

Post by conartist6 »

bastardoperator wrote: post #564
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…

[flagged]

I didn't think that was AI writing at all. It used em-dashes, yes, but AI isn't capable of expressing such deeply human thoughts

Re: Scott Adams has died

#586

Post by stetrain »

reducesuffering wrote: post #520
pembrook wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

You missed a few:

"So I realized, as you know I've been identifying as Black for a while, years now, because I like to be on the winning team"

"But as of today I'm going to re-identify as White, because I don't want to be a member of a hate group, I'd accidentally joined a hate group."

"The best advice I would give to White people is to get away hell away from Black people, just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this, this can't be fixed, you just have to escape. So that's what I did, I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6TnAn7qV1s

Re: Scott Adams has died

#587

Post by GOD2026 »

stetrain wrote: post #522
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…

I think it’s interesting how many responses to this comment seem to have interpreted it fairly differently to my own reading. There are many responding about “ignoring racism,” “whitewashing,” or the importance of calling out bigotry. I’m not sure how that follows from a comment that literally calls out the racism and describes it as “unambiguous.” Striving to “avoid the ugliness” in your own life does not mean ignor…

[flagged]

Re: Scott Adams has died

#588

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

jacquesm wrote: post #245
munksbeer wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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"

Re: Scott Adams has died

#589

Post by mattmanser »

dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #576
mrweasel wrote: post #182

I loved Dilbert, having worked for more than one Dilbert-like company the humor frequently resonated with me. How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced, e.g. a stroke or something. It was incredibly sad to see him throw away his life's wo…

>How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced. No surprises for me. By my standards he was never radicalized just an objective thinker with a flair for humor.

Have you read anything of his from that era like Win Bigly?

I was expecting something insightful, an insider's view of why the right had coalesced around Trump.

Instead it was some of the most awful drivel I have ever read.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#590

Post by mdhb »

spankalee wrote: post #550
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.

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.
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