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Scott Adams has died

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Re: Scott Adams has died

#851
from Scott you learn to separate the idea from the person.

biggest impact was probably talent stacking + affirmations

I say this as a black person

Re: Scott Adams has died

#852

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…

Adam's arguing over a phrase "it's okay to be white" is ironic for an author, when the core misinterpretation was whether 'white' was an adjective or a verb.

He thought it was a label for who he was, while others saw it as a certain way of acting.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#853
post #215

Growing up I read Dilbert in the paper every morning. At some point I got one of the compilation books and for some reason in an epilogue Adams included his alternate theory of gravity which was essentially that gravity as force didn't exist and things pressed down on each other because everything was expanding at the same rate. He said he had yet to find anyone who could refute this. Even at 12 I could tell this guy…

"Everything expanding at the same rate" sounds vaguely similar to the truth that what we feel as gravity (standing on earth) is us and everything around us accelerating upwards from the center of the gravity well - and what we feel as "pressure" on our feet is from the earth "holding us up" (in crude terms). So, it sounds crazy but it's not too distant from the truth.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#854
I emailed him twice and he replied both times.

One was an incident involving expense reports in a large company.

The other was my manager's pep talk where he urged us to "increase our acceleration while keeping our momentum constant."

Re: Scott Adams has died

#855

I emailed him twice and he replied both times. One was an incident involving expense reports in a large company. The other was my manager's pep talk where he urged us to "increase our acceleration while keeping our momentum constant."

Your manager called you fat and suggested you lose weight ?

Nasty.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#856

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…

> 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 language for everything broken about corporate life. Same to me wh…

After hearing his vitriol over the years I do see his comics and writing very differently now. As someone else said, he views everyone as idiots or below him, and needs an out group to target. Dilbert read in that light just seems hateful more than insightful or relatable. I never plan on reading any Scott Adams material for the rest of my life or introducing anyone else to it.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#857
post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wasn't family. He created a product for money and you consumed it. Your relationship with Scott Adams was entirely transactional. Caring about the man this much is like caring about Colonel Sanders or Tony the Tiger, it's weird and kind of gross.

This has to be one of the more insane takes in the thread. Colonel Sanders and Tony the Tiger aren’t real people, Scott Adams is (was?) a real person. I listen to an artist who I feel changed my life with her music. When I heard she had attempted suicide I was deeply saddened. I had this irrational but deep feeling like I should have done something to help her, without knowing what that possibly could have been, sinc…

>Is that “weird and kind of gross” too? To care about people suffering and dying even if you don’t know them personally?

I promise almost no one one here spent so much as a second being concerned about Scott Adam's health until this thread came along, and now people are acting like they lost a parent. But what they're really mourning isn't the death of a person, but the death of a brand.

Meanwhile ICE is shooting people in the face, the US is sponsoring genocide in Palestine, and real suffering and death abound but as far as Hacker News is concerned all of it's just "politics" that doesn't stimulate the intellect or curious conversation.

Re: Scott Adams has died

#858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It's so weird. She's still convinced that woman boxer is secretly trans. Or how the primary concern TERFs like her have is that men will dress up as women to rape them in the women's room, instead of what they do now, which is rape women including in places that are women's rooms. It's fascinating (in a horrid way) what they consider important. It's also fascinating how the person who wrote "Fight Fascists as a teena…

Are you referring to Imane Khelif? The allegation is not that she is transgender, but that she is male. And based on what is publicly known now, this almost certainly true. JK Rowling was right.

(There is a bit of confusion around this topic, due to how different groups use the term transgender. Gender activists generally use transgender to mean anyone who identifies as a different gender than the one assigned at birth; laypeople tend to use the term to mean any person who identifies as a different gender than their sex at birth. The difference matters in cases where a biological male is assigned female at birth [or vice versa], as is likely the case for Imane Khelif: in that case, gender activists would consider Khelif intersex but not transgender, since her gender identity as a woman matches her gender assigned at birth, despite the fact that she is biologically male.)

To recap for those who have not been following along: Imane Khelif is an Algerian boxer who was assigned female at birth and raised as a girl. She was disqualified from the female division by the International Boxing Association (IBA) after failing two gender verification tests, performed in Turkey and India. The IBA has ties to Russia, and amidst sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) cut ties with the IBA, and no longer recognized their eligibility judgments. Since the IOC does not perform sex tests of their own, Khelif was allowed to compete and win gold in the women's division at the 2024 Olympics.

The argument that the IBA was lying about the sex tests was always quite weak, since it's not clear what the motivation would be: Algeria has traditionally been an ally of Russia rather than the West.

But the confirmation that the IBA was right came in 2025, when Imane Khelif refused to take the sex test required to participate in the 2025 world championships. Those were held in the UK and organized by World Boxing, an American organization that is also recognized by the IOC. They also required participants to undergo a sex test (specifically, a noninvasive PCR test to detect presence of the Y chromosone) performed either by the home country or the UK, so no corrupt Russians in the loop. If Khelif was in fact female, this would be the perfect opportunity for her to clear her name and prove to the world once and for all that she was not a male.

Of course, the opposite happened. She refused to take the test, and instead filed a lawsuit, claiming that it was unfair that she was required to undergo sex testing (even though all women had to undergo the same simple PCR test) and demanding that she be allowed to participate without a sex test. Her appeal was denied.

To any reasonable person this should prove with nigh-certainty that Khelif is male. Exactly as J.K. Rowling asserted based on the more limited evidence available in 2024.

> It's fascinating (in a horrid way) what they consider important.

It's fascinating (in a horrid way) how gender ideologues are willing to distort and deny reality. Truly Orwellian stuff.

And as to importance: this cuts both ways. Why is it so important for gender activists to allow males with DSDs to compete against biological women?

Re: Scott Adams has died

#859

Maybe his corpse can identify as 'living'? If you think that's repugnant, then I refer you to his comic where he parodies a black engineer as white. https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/uh21my/scott_adams_... The guy had a point about 1990s business culture, but lost that narrative down extremism and conspiracy theories. Guy was pure trash for the last 10 years.

> Maybe his corpse can identify as 'living'?

Kind of like the opposite of spending a year dead for tax purposes?

Re: Scott Adams has died

#860

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…

This is a kind and generous take. I couldn’t agree more.

I'll just say that I didn't know until now that he was under cancer treatment and I wouldn't wish Cancer on 99.9999999% of the population. I have my opinions on home but he does not not meet that prestigious landmark.
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