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Scott Adams has died

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Re: Scott Adams has died

#681

Post by jquery »

razingeden wrote: post #286
jquery wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, d…

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…

You’ll get no argument from me. Dilbert did accurately skewer corporate culture. But what was its solution? Unstated, but omnipresent, was that workers and bosses just needed to be more efficient. Not a whisper of unionization or anything that might threaten profits. This was a deliberate choice by Adams and he proudly bragged about it in interviews.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#682

Post by codezero »

violetthrift wrote: post #665
Waterluvian wrote: post #144

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 a…

For what it's worth, banter on social media with someone you're not familiar with is almost always playing with fire. It's really easy for something to come across wrong or just be kind of exhausting, and this effect is magnified the more of a spotlight that person has. You're just one of thousands of interactions they've had that day/week/month, and so unless you know they enjoy that kind of playfulness, I find it's…

It really doesn't have to. I thought I was being clever when in a thread I likened something Michael Godwin said to being Nazi, because I thought it was a funny self-reference, and he just gave me the Twitter equivalent of an eye roll and moved on.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#683

Post by rchaud »

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…

Sometimes people just get to retirement age, realize they don't have much longer to go and choose to stop hiding who they are. Morrissey of The Smiths is another guy who's alienated his audience. Moe Tucker, drummer in the legendary NYC '60s counterculture band The Velvet Underground was picketing at a Tea Party rally in 2009 and saying "Obama is destroying America from the inside".

Re: Scott Adams has died

#684

Post by DonHopkins »

Speaking of evil trolls: The EVIL Scott Adams should not be confused with the GOOD Scott Adams who made Adventures for microcomputers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)

I found a great bug in Zork, the original one on MIT-DM, and it was also in the Infocom version. The troll that confronted you under the white house would gobble anything you gave to him. And he had an axe that he menaced you with. So I tried "GIVE AXE TO TROLL", and he ate his own axe, then cowered in the corner! So then I tried "GIVE TROLL TO TROLL" and he unceremoniously ate himself and POOF disappeared in a puff of logic.

Unfortunately it forgot to clear the troll flag, and whenever I tried to exit the room, the troll would reappear, block me from exiting, and disappear. Decades later the Zork source code was leaked and I was able to verify that yes, there WAS a troll flag.

Let's hope the EVIL Scott Adam's troll flag was cleared, and he doesn't ever reappear to menace innocent people, like he accused Black people of being a hate group, and said White people should stay the hell away from Black people!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23108936

    #ROOM {"MTROL"

    "You are in a small room with passages off in all directions. 
    Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the
    walls."
           "The Troll Room"
           % #EXIT {"WEST" "CELLA"
              "EAST" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "CRAW4" %,TCHOMP}
              "NORTH" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "PASS1" %,TCHOMP}
              "SOUTH" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "MAZE1" %,TCHOMP}}
           (#FIND-OBJ {"TROLL"})}

Re: Scott Adams has died

#685

Post by avalys »

jquery wrote: post #125
DharmaPolice wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t see the supposed hypocrisy of mocking the absurd and incompetent ways in which downsizing is handled, yet acknowledging that it is sometimes a net benefit to carry out.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#688

Post by beastcoast »

michaelt wrote: post #649
stetrain wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Generally the idiom "like family" implies very close and durable bonds of friendship and loyalty. That you'd drive several hours to help them bury a body, if they asked. The idiomatic use is a much higher standard than literal family - members of the same family can hate each other. As jchallis used the idiomatic term in the latter, more literal sense, I can understand people getting confused.

My therapist frames this as "family of origin" (FOO) vs "family of choice" (FOC).

Re: Scott Adams has died

#689

Post by Dady-Fredy »

nemomarx wrote: post #660
Dady-Fredy wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

can you share the prompt and model for study here

Claude Opus 4.5. My family runs an electrical contracting business—nobody asks if my dad used power tools or did the wiring with his bare hands. The sentiment is mine, the craft got assistance. Scott would probably appreciate the systems-over-goals irony: I used a tool to do the job better.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#690

Post by TurdF3rguson »

gcanyon wrote: post #386
throw4436y54 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment reminds me of when I talked to a few Chinese friends about their thoughts on Mao. They all acknowledged the failed policies which led to famine, yet they also admired that he basically gave Chinese people their pride back. They related him to an uncle figure who became a mean drunk.

I used to say the same thing about Ronald Reagan -- a president who did many questionable/bad things, but he lifted the U.S. out of the doldrums we experienced in the late '70s. Over time I've learned context about how those doldrums occurred, and more about what Reagan actually did, and the trade seems much less worthwhile. :-/

Are you talking about Iran-Contra? Because that's quaint by today's standards. Trump could do Iran-Contra on a Tuesday and people would be done talking about it by Thursday.
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