The Most Dilbert of Futures
A Prehumous Eulogy for Scott Adams

Memoria

On one of 2012's many long, sunny afternoons, I attended a Young Writer's Event of some kind. Several established, older authors spoke for the audience, giving advice of various kinds for the aspirant word-peddlers in the audience.

Eoin Colfer, the writer of a great deal of young adult books (including the Artemis Fowl series) was there, but the writer I remember most was an older man called Mal Peet. His talk featured a little promotion of his latest book, a few very dry jokes, and advice that boiled down to "writing is absurd, but so is life. Put down the self-consciousness. Pull from everywhere and don't pull punches."

That doesn't sound too revolutionary, but something about his manner captivated me, compelled me. I could tell I didn't really have the life experience to fully grasp some of the big, emotive things he was gesturing at, but that was part of the appeal. I hated being condescended to, and his advice felt like the opposite of that.

After the talks, Mal's book-signing table had a much, much shorter line than Eoin's. Single digits to the dozens. I lined up at his table, bought his book (Life, an Exploded Diagram), and asked him to sign it, even though I'd never heard of him or his work before his talk that afternoon.

I asked Mal, quite sincerely, what the densest, quickest, but most important bit of advice he could give to a young writer would be. He genuinely seemed to think about the question. Then, he signed the book with "Don't give up."

I devoured his book the instant I returned home. I had never read any of his work before, and I found it equal parts compelling and baffling. It read much like he spoke. There was a clear attitude towards life — gruff, straightforward, but nonetheless thoughtfully kind. The details were cherished, as were the people.

At other times and in other places, Mal talked (past tense, as he passed away in 2015) about his parents and extended family being "emotionally impaired", and much of his work seems to have involved him surmounting this learned limitation.

Certainly, Life, an Exploded Diagram is deeply emotive and nuanced. It is not the work of someone who was emotionally impaired.

"Mal Peet's work is notable for its refusal to submit to categories... His books to date prove that successful literature for young readers doesn't have to be didactic, or have overtly youthful themes, or even centre on young characters."
— Susan Tranter, apparently, although I can only find secondary sources.

At the time, some of what Mal said in his talk and in Life, An Exploded Diagram went over my head. As a late-stage teenager, I hadn't yet come to grips with the dual nature of memory.

These days, my relationship with his work is different.

Mal knew that memory is often a gift. My afternoon at the writer's festival is one such memory. I remember the pleasure of good company. The comfort, the ease of an adolescent summer. The anticipation of a new book. Simple joys.

Other times, as Mal knew perfectly well, the past is a dull, aching weight that demands to be cut free. This is a trap.

Such a severance merely trades the throbbing tooth for a raw, empty hole in the gumline; something your mind, like a wandering tongue, will return to again and again, an unignorable absence that is defined, in totality, by the once-present shape of the heavy ache you so desperately wanted to escape from.

I don't know if you can ever really excise the past. I think the best we can hope for is to grow around it.

For me, memory is the core of Life, An Exploded Diagram, and what Mal was being frank about — life is horrible, sometimes, but there are heady and enrapturing experiences despite it all. We grapple with it as best we can, in the moment and in retrospect.

Life is fleeting and drawn out in equal measure and often absurd. The things that will hold the most meaning to us are hard to predict. Life always has new surprises, if you stick around. Notably, Mal Peet wrote his first novel at 52.

"Don't give up," indeed.

It is impossible to write without laying some part of yourself bare in the words, whether or not you intend to.

If you’ve read this far, we have a relationship of sorts. It’s an author–reader relationship, but that’s good enough. We humans are wired to be easily influenced by the people who are in relationships with us, no matter what those relationships are.
— Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

It would be overstating to say that I knew Mal Peet to any meaningful, interpersonal degree, but everyone who reads his work has a chance to know some part of him. He made sure it's an important part, I think. People do not stop talking to you just because they're dead, after all.

As a child who had unfettered access to whatever happened to be on the lowest shelves of my parents bookshelves, I developed an understanding of one kind or other of a great deal of authors.

In particular, pre-teen me grew up browsing old-school comic books: big, omnibus editions of the things. There were dozens of serials — many of which weren't entirely child appropriate^[1.1] — that formed the bedrock of my emerging, precocious, and cynical personality.

But one book stood out above the rest, maybe in part because it wasn't just a collection of published strips but a standalone book, written by an author who put a lot of himself into his work — and who was thus, to me, just as tangible a character as any of his creations. It was a book about the future.

The Dilbert Future, by Scott Adams.

Lots of things have changed since I read that book for the first time. Nonetheless, I've remembered it fondly for the better part of two decades.

If Exploded Diagram can be thought of as a loadbearing component of my ability to come to terms with my past, The Dilbert Future's importance could be best described as my first real inoculation against the deceptive allure of three things: money, status, and promises of easy 'tricks and hacks' to success.

In other words, an inoculation against hustle culture.

And Now For Something Completely Different

What has Dilbert got to do with hustle culture?

At the most basic level, no serious deconstruction needed, the entire Dilbert franchise is predicated on a widespread disillusionment with the realities of white-collar work and a bitter scorn at the idea of corporate culture (or wealth and success in general) being a meritocracy.

Dilbert, the character, works in an office job. He does 'software', and he hates it. He is competent, but the world he finds himself in does not reward him for this, instead elevating liars and buffoons to positions above him — both in terms of social status and also in terms of material, financial compensation.

Dilbert was a comic that flourished in the wake of the 'dot com' era, for lots of reasons. Suffice to say that the Internet, software, and office jobs were turning out to be a mundane grind, not the paradise of infinite possibilities that was promised.

We (quite rightly) complain about the waves of worthless digital rent-seeking that wash over the internet every few years — too-smart appliances and the bloated 'internet of things', blockchain and NFTs, and now the use of neural networks to blindly generate everything from simple search results to the images in scam product listings — but this hype cycle has been part of the digital world since the very beginning.

Scott Adams started drawing Dilbert while he was in an unrewarding office job, and the corporate world around him was full of a receptive audience: tech and admin workers who, quite rightly, also thought that large portions of their jobs were unnecessary, demeaning busywork.

So, yes, the comic's general aura of discontent with labour and scepticism at the promises of the corporate world — and specifically of "weasel-worded" corporate sales pitches — proved valuable to teenage me.

See, I was vulnerable, very much so, very unavoidably so, to scams. I was primed to buy into all kinds of grifts, self-help and 'productivity' courses, and parasitic, resentment-based ideologies.

Why was I specifically vulnerable to these ideas? Well! As you may have guessed from my tendency to flit between seemingly disconnected topics^[2.1], I have ADHD.

Now, ADHD (also known as ADD, which stands for Attention Deficit Drive, the generation of digital data storage technology that preceded the Hard Disk Drive) has its sceptics. From the outside, ADHD apparently seems like an intangible, easy-to-overdiagnose condition that is often used a free pass to avoid the consequences of not trying hard enough or not caring enough.

I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD until well after I'd finished my bachelor's degree, but I first suspected something was 'wrong' with me the first years of high school, during my early teen years.

That wasn't when symptoms first appeared (indeed, my innatentiveness almost caused me to repeat a year in primary school when I handed in precisely zero items of homework for six straight months), but early high school was when I developed enough of an understanding of how other people's minds worked to realise I had... gaps... in mine.

Not only that, but I found that when I tried to fill those gaps and adapt, to meet the expectations the world seemed designed around, it was impossible. Not hard: impossible, for reasons I could not understand.

Everybody procrastinates and has avoidant behaviour: a common and useful feature of the human brain is its ability to protect us from doing things that will cause negative experiences. In ADHD, that ability works in overdrive, whether you want it to or not.

Think about the contrast in how your mind and body respond to thinking about doing these two activities: touching your hand to a burning hot stove and filling out tedious paperwork.

Touching a hot stove has no benefit. It will hurt. It will sting long after you take your hand away. You are likely to feel a physical inhibition in your body, a refusal of your limb to move, when you try to touch it.

However, there is an upside to the paperwork, even if it is initially unpleasant. You know there will be relief, at least, once it is done. It has utility. This helps you overcome your initial reluctance. Eventually.

Unfortunately, an ADHD brain may not feel that upside when weighing up such a task, even if you know the potential benefit exists. ADHD only anticipates (and over-weights) the negatives of trying to sort the paperwork out: the frustration, the tedium, the boredom so strong it is almost painful, the feelings of inadequacy when you inevitably make avoidable mistakes.

You might know a task has worth, but your brain won't feel it. And feelings are how we decide what to do, like it or not. Even 'knowing' is just, ultimately, a feeling of certainty.

I say, with no hyperbole, that without medication, my ADHD brain produces a stronger inhibition response to the paperwork than the stove. They are not just equivalent: my brain associates more negative potential with paperwork than physical pain. Or, as an adolescent, with homework.

ADHD has been the cause of some of the most scary, painful, and personality-undermining experiences I have ever had.

For almost all of my twelve years of schooling and all of my three years at university, this was how the vast majority of my out-of-class work got done: late at night, full of self-loathing and despair, cramming days or weeks (or months) of work into the final hours before (and after) deadline after deadline.

It wasn't simply that I'd avoid sitting down to start assignments. Even once I'd done that, I could spend hours at a time sitting in front of the unfinished or unstarted work, staring at it, crushed between an imminent deadline and a conceptually simple task that I physically could not make myself start even though I desperately wanted to, overcome with humiliation and panic.

This sucked.

It was also deeply frustrating, in no small part because I craved learning. When I was interested in something, I was unstoppable. It was a source of perpetual agony that I could never bend this seemingly unlimited capacity towards actually sustainably learning new skills, let alone demonstrating and practicing any kind of subject matter competence on command.

I had no control over when my brain worked. I wanted, so badly, to be good at even basic things like scheduling my time, planning ahead, sticking to routines, and working on tasks in ways that weren't compelled by deadline-induced panic.

Not only did I not know how, but all the advice from authority figures around me was fundamentally unfollowable. I totally lost the ability to judge good advice from bad in regards to personal development, because otherwise-trustworthy sources kept giving me actively harmful advice.

Literally nothing anybody told me about making my brain function or sorting my life out worked. I reached a point where all new and untried approaches I found sounded equally plausible. I was confused, frustrated, and more than a little desperate to just... be normal.

So, with largely unsupervised access to the internet, you can maybe see how having ADHD and living with this cycle of bizarre, seemingly causeless and unsolvable task avoidance absolutely primed adolescent me to fall for scams packaged as self-improvement and 'learning courses'.

Except, of course, I didn't end up actually falling for a single one of them. Because I'd been largely inoculated by a simple idea in The Dilbert Future: the 'confusopoly'.

Typical market capture (a monopoly, duopoly, etc.) is characterised by a small number of very influential entities. Their size, power, or lack of competition lets them avoid or abuse the regulations and market incentives that are meant to keep things fair for consumers (and workers).^[2.2]

In contrast, a 'confusopoly' can be defined as a market where consumers end up barraged with a torrent of true but intentionally confusing or misleading information from numerous competing companies.

All of these companies can coexist in relative harmony because they have each given up on actually improving their offerings, instead realising that if they all make it too hard for consumers to make meaningful, informed choices, they're each guaranteed to hold their slice of the market with comfortable profit margins and remain big enough to easily muscle out any new companies who try to enter the market.

For me, the concept was most applicable to the idea of learning itself. It was a concise, evocative way for an inexperienced teenager to learn and remember that it is very easy for any sales pitch about a service, particularly an intangible one like learning a skill, to be both partially true and mostly deceptive.

It worked. I didn't fall for any of the grifts. I'd read something on a long-scrolling webpage that sounded too good to be true and think... no, this is the sort of allegedly helpful but entirely useless sales pitch I should avoid.

Once I was into my mid teens, I'd realised the entire 'self help and personal development' industry and much of the 'skill course' industry was a total, deliberate, confusopoly.

As such, much like with Mal Peet, I have carried a little bit of Scott Adams with me in my mind for decades, because I owe some foundational part of my resilience to weasel-worded hucksters and scam artists to his work.

Which is why I was so upset to eventually find out that Scott Adams was not having a normal one, and in fact had not been having a normal one for the better part of two decades.

Now, I don't expect much in the way of 'normal' from serial cartoonists, but this went far beyond the bounds of the "all work and no play makes jack a dull boy" behaviour that is an occupational hazard of having a career that consists of sitting alone in a room drawing the same ten shapes and writing the same ten jokes over and over again.

Lying for Fun and Profit

Just as making art inevitably leaves part of you behind in your work, experiencing art involves an interpretation of and communion with those left-behind parts of the work's creator.

If you engage seriously with art, even if you fully subscribe to the 'death of the author' mode of analysis and refuse to consider their intentions for the work at hand, you cannot avoid them. If you take every effort to skirt around them, refuse to engage with them, turn your head and avert your gaze whenever they are pointed out, your experience of their work is still informed by them — only, in this case, by the gaps left by their absence.

"Why" is not a question you can easily ask of a work when setting aside its source. Skirting the outlines of an author just ends up looking like you've outlined a corpse at a crime scene.

Stephen Fry's semi-autobiographical novels, particularly The Liar, are, in my estimation, obsessed with the personal motivations of authorship. Reading them, it becomes impossible not to ask "Why?" in a descending spiral of questions that all provide partial answers to prior questions without really resolving anything.

Why did he set out to write clear-cut fiction, but then litter in sometimes obtrusive parts of his own life? Why are the parts of himself he chose to carry over not just obtrusive but unflattering? Why is the fictional narrator an open liar who, in-text, fibs about his own life story for very little gain? Why are the elements he lies about so often — but not always — very similar to allegedly autobiographical details from Fry's own life?

Why does this lying heavily, deliberately, imply Fry himself is a compulsive liar? And, for the love of god, if you're going to lie about yourself as an author, why do it in such a recursive way, and why make yourself out to be so sordidly unpleasant in ways that genuinely aren't reflective of reality?

There have to be easier ways to achieve self-flagellation or self-sabotage, surely?

"The purpose of ambiguity is to frustrate the audience, to deny a clean sense of diagetic closure, and thusly to force engagement with the metaphorical."
— Dan Olson, Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor

All of those questions are the point. Self-image is rarely a tidy thing. To examine one's self-image in a clean and tidy way would be almost disingenuous.

Therefore, without the author in view, The Liar is an obtuse mess and its protagonist is inconsistent, a sometimes-charming but equally sometimes-offputting caricature.

If you ask "why" enough, however, this apparent frustration to the reader turns in on itself. How else would someone extrude themselves onto the page after half a lifetime of extremes, of being the butt of their own jokes, and of being a chameleon, a liar, and brutally honest in equal measures just to survive? When being true and honest about themselves has been as much a weapon as a comfort?

There's this joke Fry has told in and out of fiction, in what seems like a dozen variations, that exemplifies this tension: "No, no, don't hit me," he says to a bully, "I'll get an erection!".

As a gay boy in the gender-segregated pressure cooker that was the boarding schools of the British education system of his youth, you were closeted or you exaggerated a persona. Neither were comfortable or healthy, but them's the breaks, then and now: when you're a faggot or a retard, you have to choose.

At any one time, you can relax, you can be honest, or you can be safe. All have their risks. Forget "you can have two" — you get one. We get one.

As a view into what that sort of experience does to a person's self-image, Fry's writing is unparalleled. By asking "why" in the face of blatant, obtrusive lies and recursive lies about lies, we can reach a truth that might have fallen flat, understated, if it was just... said out loud.

Engaging with the "why" of a work usually, then, involves modelling a version of the author in your mind. This is also an important social skill!

Now, as I've described, having undiagnosed ADHD impeded my ability to know how my own brain worked. I couldn't model myself, predict my own behaviour, because my knowledge and intentions were frequently overridden by my brain's total refusal to reliably perform certain tasks and execute certain behaviours.

With children and even teenagers, when queried about motivations behind their behaviour (particularly daft and impulsive actions), there's often a stereotypical refrain of "I don't know".

It's seen as more avoidant and deceptive the older you get, of course (how do you not understand your own behaviour!?), which is a problem when "I don't know why I didn't do this important thing" is very much a literal truth: meta-cognition, the ability to think about your own thoughts and accurately observe and assess them, is a skill that takes a long time to develop in an average life and is often delayed or outright obstructed by ADHD.

Following from that, if you can't apply a type of analysis to yourself, it is usually even harder to apply to others.

I think a lot of young people with ADHD or autism, or both, struggle with modelling the world and other people accurately. I know my mental model of "how my brain works, how other brains work, and how brains influence other brains" was fundamentally flawed when I was younger, even still when I was a young adult. And, due to the frequency that other people's advice was either useless or harmful, I was really cynical and kind of misanthropic when it came to "accepting other people knew things I didn't".

This combination of "not having a good mental model of the world" and "being primed for combative, negative interactions around knowledge and learning" isn't great. It's a pretty vicious one–two combo that hinders your ability to manage and be aware of your own self and life... and makes it harder to understand and learn from other people's lives through observation and interaction. At best, you end up insecure and mad at yourself for a while. At worst, you end up mad at everyone else as well.

Needless to say, it's always unpleasant to see other people showing the behavioural signs of being stuck in this trap.

Great Scott!!!

Okay. How is this about Scott Adams, again?

Well, I mentioned before that Scott had not been having a normal time of things. Specifically, since he'd written The Dilbert Future in 1997, he'd taken a very strange ideological path.

Specifically, he'd started out as the sort of person who is suspicious of the capital-driven corporate world's claims of 'meritocracy' and 'fairness', but eventually turned into a 'proud to be cancelled' pseudo-political commentator who was rabidly pro-Trump, anti-equality, anti-regulation, and an increasingly brazen science denialist.

The more I read of his blogging and post-2000 non-fiction writing, the more I found myself asking "Why?", because clearly the mental model I'd built of the author from his work was not up to purpose.

The more I read, the more I realised how strikingly his personal experiences about creating, having ideas, struggling with motivation, and failing to understand himself and others deeply matched with my experience of nearly three decades of pre-diagnosis ADHD.

I'm not saying that, like Scott, I was on a path to becoming some kind of bigoted pundit. But Scott compulsively places himself at the forefront of his writing and commentary (he has very little in the way of impulse control), and I kept seeing exaggerated versions of patterns I recognised.

When asked specifically about having ADHD, Scott has emphatically denied it:

"I'm a bit dyslexic, [but not ADHD]. When I am interested in something, I have all the attention and concentration I need. But in the non-medical sense, I am ADHD like crazy. I'm all over the place in any five-minute span. That is more of a creative thing than an ADHD thing."
— Scott Adams, answering a direct question about ADHD on Quora

I don't want to say he's wrong, necessarily, about his own experiences, but... that description is fairly close to what I have said about the experience of actually having ADHD:

"When I was interested in something, I was unstoppable. It was a source of perpetual agony to me that I could never bend this seemingly unlimited capacity towards actually sustainably learning new skills[...]"
— Me, above, in the second section of this very article.

ADHD brains latch onto and bounce between any positive stimuli they can find and do not stop. There's a misconception that if you can concentrate on anything, ever, you must not really have ADHD, but no: our struggle is marked by an inability to regulate attention, not its total absence.

In saying what he said, Scott just listed two fundamental parts of hyperactive ADHD (deep concentration on interests, and otherwise rapid movement between things in short timeframes), and also said he had dyslexia, which is incredibly common among people with ADHD.

Also, have you seen the way Scott talks about coffee? The stimulant^[4.1] beverage that I and hundreds of thousands of undiagnosed ADHD-ers have at one point or another leaned on for mental functionality?

“If you don’t drink coffee, you should drink about two to four cups a day. It can make you more alert, happier, and more productive... An hour ago I considered doing some writing for this book, but I didn’t have the necessary focus to sit down and start working. I did, however, have enough energy to fix myself a cup of coffee. A few sips into it, I was happier to be working than I would have been doing whatever lazy thing was my alternative. Coffee literally makes me enjoy work. No willpower needed... I recommend it so strongly that I literally feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t developed the habit."
— Scott Adams, in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

Which... sounds like a testimonial from someone who doesn't realise how much of an outsized effect stimulants have on them. He conflates a lack of focus with a lack of energy, and then says that coffee makes him enjoy things?

Language can be imprecise, but most neurotypical people saythings like "coffee wakes me up and keeps me alert". Undiagnosed ADHD-ers say shit like "yeah, it makes me able to do stuff I want to do but can't usually focus on" and think that's totally normal (it's not). There's a really big difference between "more energy" and "more executive functioning".

Adams has always talked about creativity and concentration like they're odd, fickle spirits that he's worked out elaborate systems to tame, but has little to no direct control over. When asked for advice on how to generate ideas, he has said, multiple times, that he mostly has no idea how he does it.

“People often ask me how I come up with ideas. The fast answer is I’m just wired that way[...] Living brains generate ideas. If yours doesn't? Congratulations, you're dead and in hell."
— Scott Adams, in The Dilbert Principle

He has also talked semi-frequently about productivity, and in doing so revealed some behavioural and motivational quirks that are not that common in the population at large, but are in the community of people with ADHD and autism, or, to use a blanket term, people who have 'monotropic neurodivergence'.

For example, he struggles with starting tasks. He will often have to push himself get up and do tasks of obligation by saying them out loud to himself: "Get up and feed the cat. I'm going to get up, right now, and feed the cat."

This is literally something that gets passed around ADHD skill-learning groups as a quick hack that can sometimes override executive dysfunction and inertia. Saying an immediate intention out loud makes it more real, makes it harder to forget and easier to act on.

Or, take this Scott quote about 'couch lock':

“We’ve all experienced times when we wanted to get up and do something useful but we couldn’t talk ourselves into it... Your body sits there like a bag of potatoes while your helpless brain thinks that getting up and doing something would be a good idea. For some mysterious reason, your brain can’t give the order to your body to make it get off the couch. You might know you need to make a phone call or take a class to further your life ambitions, but for some reason you don’t do it... But the net result is that your brain can’t force your body to do the simple things you know you need to do to improve your situation. For all practical purposes, you’re locked in a mental prison of your own making."
— Scott Adams, in (ugh) Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

He then goes on to talk about tricking his brain to get around these blocks by instigating small physical movements that his brain will see as 'unrelated' to moving towards the task he's 'locked out' of starting.

I don't know how many times I can say "oh yeah, that's an ADHD problem, and that's an ADHD coping skill that is so common it's literally in ADHD therapy and skill-building workbooks".

Most importantly, in my eyes, Scott has literally written a book about how big or long-term goals don't work for him. He requires a 'system' to ensure productivity and fulfilment, not a goal which his brain frames as a single, far-off reward that, once reached, is "over far too fast".

He needs to structure his life by deliberately ignoring far-off goals in favour of an intense focus on constructing and mentally reinforcing (rewarding himself for) small, incremental, often daily habits and tasks that "add up" to forwards progress.

Which. You know. Again, sorry. Is exactly what skill development for coping with ADHD involves? It has its roots in the 'SMART' skill system that works for most people, but an almost myopic focus on the near- and immediate-term is often totally non-negotiable in order to keep oneself moving with ADHD.

Even with medication, some ADHD-ers move through life in a perpetual series of timers and carefully constructed short-term reward loops, deliberately avoiding ruminating on big, long-term goals because it can totally, counter-intuitively, sabotage our ability to actually work towards those achievements!

So: based on all this, Scott Adams shares a lot of very specific life experiences with people with ADHD and executive dysfunction.

This is interesting to me, not because I demand to see my exact neurotype in all the creative people I have ever related to, and not just because ADHD-related difficulties with self-regulation and modelling might begin to answer why he has had such an abnormal time of the last two decades, but also because he seems specifically susceptible to predatory ideologies about life, productivity, and the world in exactly the same way I used to be.

I can say this with confidence because, in The Dilbert Future, he ends the book with a section where he says, (and I'm paraphrasing):

"I know this sounds completely bugshit nonsense and I don't know how it works, but I believe that writing down highly specific Affirmations over and over again, fifteen to twenty times a day, changed my life — not because it helps me focus on my goals, but because it literally bends reality towards making those Affirmations true, even retroactively."

System Shock

A decade after I read The Dilbert Future, while I was struggling through university, Scott released another non-fiction book, this one titled How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.

I picked it up on a whim. In it, despite being largely quiet on the Affirmations front in the intervening years, he doubled down on his sincere belief that writing things down repeatedly could shift reality.

He didn't provide anything close to a satisfying explanation as to why. It was a massive blind spot, a dead zone in his ability to self-assess. It was the sort of thing you might latch onto if so much of the world seemed random and unpredictable, frankly, and you needed a lifeline to keep believing you had control.

It felt like he'd fallen for a hustle, in part because one of the supporting experiences he gave for believing Affirmations and similar phenomena were plausible... was that a psychic once cold-read that he had a rash and a fear of water stemming from a barely remembered childhood memory.

There was plenty else in the book How to Fail. A large portion of it was dedicated to espousing that "systems-centric" approach to productivity I mentioned before. Struggling as I was with the lack of structure in university learning, that book probably helped me graduate.

Now, the affirmations thing was weird, but there's not much more to say about it. It's weird that Scott fell into a borderline spiritual belief and justified it with pseudoscientific jumbo about quantum uncertainty.

Looking back, I have a different question. Why did Scott Adams publish what amounted to an actual memoir crossed with a non-Dilbert-related self-help book at that stage of his career?

"I took two deep breaths and looked around. I smiled at the audience. I was happy to be there—genuinely happy. I was born for this. The stage always feels like home."
— Scott Adams, in How to Fail

That's Scott, talking about walking on stage many years prior and facing an audience while he was struggling with an affliction that had left him, embarrassingly, frequently unable to speak coherently.

This speech-preventing affliction is something he describes as traumatising, humiliating, and alienating. Struggling with it for three years was, as he heavily implies, something that made him think dying might be preferable to never finding a cure.

Despite actively going through this, he was happy about going on stage as a paid public speaker, even though he faced down a possible total failure to speak in front of dozens and dozens of people.

This is because, above all else, Scott has always liked to be 'in the room'; to be talked about, thought about, seen, heard, and respected, by as many people as possible. He craves social capital.

We all enjoy at least some social validation and attention. We're a social species! But he really, really wants to be agreed with, and he wants to be agreed with about important things (specifically, things that are not comics).

The talk worked out okay, by the way, and eventually he did get his voice back and fully relearn to talk. What he doesn't mention in the How to Fail book is that, in the year before it was released, he was losing his access to his social capital very fast for a different reason.

In 2013 through 2014, after divorcing his wife of almost a decade, Scott Adams started blogging about how the then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump was a "master persuader" who was only "pretending" to be a buffoon.

According to Scott, Trump's of rhetorical and "hypnotist" persuasion techniques would allow him to become an incredibly effective president and a fantastic negotiator on the world stage. This quickly escalated from an unconventional but rational examination of Trump's bluster-laden speaking style to outright adulation.

It was... a bad pivot. It was not well received.

"'My speaking career ended because of this,' the Bay Area-based cartoonist said of his once-lucrative side business. Although his book sales have stayed healthy, Adams said that many off-put readers now view Dilbert through more critical glasses, which has affected his licensing sales. All told, Adams said, his income has dipped precipitously."
— Michael Cavna, in Why Scott Adams of ‘Dilbert’ fame risked his reputation, Washington Post, 2016

Though I didn't know it at the time, with How to Fail, Scott wasn't just writing for its own sake. He was trying to put himself back on top, repositioning himself in the public eye as a smart, kind, and wise man via this self-help/memoir amalgamation.

He was starting to see his comic legacy crumble — the Dilbert animated movie he was working hard on never took off — and his public writings on 'important topics' kept getting him into trouble.

As much as he has often scoffed that "no publicity is bad publicity" — a view he has specifically espoused when critiqued for being a total dumbass in the public eye — he was scared people were turning on him. He wanted to keep being in the limelight, to keep being on stages. Being popular. Being seen as correct.

This is why he wrote How to Fail. It is an even mix of his life story and failings, in part attempting to mirror the positive sentiment his 'lost and then regained his voice' arc netted him, all scrambled in with his ideas about how best to organise a life.

This is also why its tone (positive and optimistic and upbeat) is so totally different to his prior comedic cynicism, his then-contemporary antagonistic blogging, and his future open disdain for huge swathes of society.

And, this is why, after so long leaving it on the back shelf, he brought out Affirmations again. He thought it was an important idea that carried some weight, was some genuine way to affect the fabric of reality, even if he couldn't explain why. Part of a less controversial non-Dilbert legacy he could create for himself. He did, of course, hedge his wording on the topic:

"My perception (which I assume for the sake of consistency is flawed) is that affirmations are useful and I have no idea why."
— Scott Adams, in How to Fail

Today, returning to How to Fail a decade after it was published is a grim experience, specifically for the stunning contrast it provides to all of his other work.

It remains (mostly) an interesting, nuanced, and compassionate exploration of motivation, happiness optimisation, and finding meaning in life despite the inevitability of failure. It gives meaningful, actionable advice, which sets it above a great deal of the other books in this genre.

It is a genuine indication that Scott Adams understood how not to be a total dumpsterfire of a human being.

However, it did not cause public perceptions of him to change for the better, because far fewer people read it than saw his blog and twitter posts. And they just kept getting worse.

Let Me Tell You About Hate

As I alluded to before making several hard tangents, during and after 2014, Adams would go on to have an increasingly non-normal time of things after his divorce.

He designed and had built a custom mansion partly shaped like Dilbert's head; decided that instead of Dilbert his atheistic-leaning books and writings on 'religion and philosophy' would be his strongest legacy; tried his hand at pivoting to political satire cartoon strips; married and then swiftly divorced an instagram model; and began doubling down on and exaggerating his experiences of being 'discriminated against for being a white male'.

In the following several years, Scott Adams ultimately became so indistinguishable from the swirling sea of aging, grievance-seeking self-martyrs of the fringe right-wing conserva-sphere who buy into their own bullshit that he was, in 2023, dropped by Dilbert's then-distributor and newspaper syndicator after he called all black people a "hate group" because of a twitter poll.

Let's take a second to process all that.

I have found myself unable to stop thinking about this pivot because of the contrasts. There's a dichotomy between his self-awareness and self-delusion. Scott Adams is one of the reasons I started to care about systemic unfairness, and seemingly he used to as well, but then he came out vocally in favour of those same systems.

Scott's writing was why I started to mentally deconstruct social expectations of productivity, and even masculinity, but he then became so insecure about these things that he desperately tried to pivot his public image from 'nerd who makes comics' to 'productivity guru who is really fit'.^[6.1]

This is the guy who created the archetypal 'useless boss' trope as it stands in pop culture. The 'pointy-haired boss' was the way to describe every incompetent manager you've ever had. Every rich failson who schmoozed and weaselled their way up the chain of influence with unearned success, oblivious to their own lack of actual skill, operating on cruelty and exploitation.

And yet Scott has sunk the last decade of his life kissing the ass of the most alchemically pure, distilled example of this caricature: Donald Trump.

Most annoyingly of all (on a personal level), his work was part of how I began to get to grips with the way my ADHD brain just refused to engage with all the requirements expected in order to "succeed" in the world. And he, the person who handed out that advice... did the exact opposite, never truly examining those societal expectations of 'success' or how his own brain was sabotaging him.^[6.2]

But, even now, I can take comfort in one thing: his older work was still worthwhile, and it's all still there.

Well, I've moved houses something like ten times in the last thirteen years, so my specific copy of The Dilbert Future is probably in landfill somewhere, but I can pull up a pirated pdf any time I want and get that nice little hit of nostalgia from reading the words of a cynical-but-not-hateful Scott from before he went redpilled.

"I'd love to see crosshairs appear in my viewfinder every time I looked at someone. It would make me feel menacing, and I'd like that. It would also be great to have my computer built into my skull. That way I could surf the Net during useless periods of life, such as when people talk to me."
— Scott Adams, in The Dilbert Future

Ah.

When I started to re-read The Dilbert Future for the first time in well over a decade, I didn't really like what I was finding. It felt petulant and bitter in a way I didn't remember it being.

Part of me hoped I could read around the presence of Scott, but at a certain point, it just wasn't possible.

Even the very first page of The Dilbert Future oozes with a deep-seated misanthropy — the kind you get from edgelords who make snide comments about how we "need a population cull" because there are "too many stupid people on the planet".

In fact, of Scott Adams's entire catalogue, How To Fail was the only thing I could find that consistently read like a compassionate, rational human had written it.

Everything he published afterwards (with titles that included phrases like 'loserthink' and 'win bigly') was unsurprisingly rancid, but his work beforehand wasn't actually much better. He was just more low-key about it.

Why had I never seen this before? Was I just soured on the idea of him and doing a bad-faith reading informed by his future conduct? No.

Of the few people who've written about his fall from grace, almost none of them have done the hard yards to put together a long-form profile that ties the values in his works to his actions. But I think, on reading back, that the signs were always there.

Mostly, of course, few have bothered, because Scott fell off pretty hard as a cultural force. Garfield has persisted, but Dilbert has not, even before Adams's ignoble self-immolation led to its de-syndication in 2023.

Nobody has really cared enough to do, or fund, an extended deep-dive on a washed up bigot of a cartoonist. But it's all there for the browsing.

All of Scaddams's non-fiction works are partly autobiographical. He puts a lot of himself into them. I think we can build a decent model of him from his work. So let's see what else turns up.

Fear is the Dilbert-Killer, Destroyer of Comics

The conceit of The Dilbert Future is that Scott Adams has observed a lot of things in his time in the corporate world and is going to give you, the reader, some hyperbolic predictions about the future of the human race — and by that, completely unexamined, he of course means the future of those in his immediate worldview, this being the lower and middle class men of the USA.

Dilbert has always been the starring character of a mean-spirited office comedy. I understand all too well that working in an office culture full of meaningless bullshit tasks and demeaning responsibilities fosters a vague and undirected sense of misanthropy. I was promised a meritocracy, and this ain't one. Been there, done that, got the novelty company-branded coffee mug to prove it.

However, there's something I learned very quickly: it doesn't matter if I am the person with the most merit in the room, or if I think I have the most important tasks, or if my co-workers around me are slacking and making my life harder. I'm not always the best-qualified person to analyse whether those statements are even true.

Scott Adams may pay lip service to the idea that he has some serious humility about his own smarts and importance, but in practice he simply does not act that way.

Society at large, and office work in specific, can be accurately described as a collaborative environment. Unfortunately, to operate in any collaborative environment, you kind of need humility.

Like most people, I have a bias towards focusing on the requirements of my own position or role when working in a group. That's pretty normal.

This tendency, arising in part from the limited information and perspective available to people operating within a larger whole, is what good management solves: in essence, task prioritisation, resource allocation, and mediating conflicts that arise from perceived imbalances. Good management is necessary for most projects, no matter how much we might protest otherwise.

The other thing I learned from my time in offices is that pretty much everyone else in the office is usually an alright person. It's probably not their fault that we have conflicting workplace needs, or if I have to take a hit for the team and wait for a resource I need because they're using it.

In short, it's my responsibility to manage my expectations and frustrations — and avoid projecting a false, simplified, or demeaning impression of other people and their intent onto their actions. The system of the office pits us against each other, either uncaringly or deliberately, and so it should be the target of my ire, not them, even if I am right about a co-worker being a useless asshole who couldn't care less about making my life harder.

In his years in tech-focused offices, Scott Adams, sitting in his cubicle, did not learn any of these things.

Somewhere along the way, the character of Dilbert curdled into existence from an abundant vat of resentment. Soon, the comics he starred in went from being snarky at management's expense to cruel and bitter at everyone's expense.

The first page of The Dilbert Future is an extended joke about how there are too many stupid people (or "in-duh-viduals") on the planet: they're all annoying and have no meaningful interior life or decision-making abilities, so the best way to deal with being surrounded by them is to exploit them for profit with no regard for cruelty or fairness.

Scotto also deposits this forward-looking gem:

"In a departure from the past, I will also say as many controversial and inflammatory things as I can (i.e., pretending to have actual opinions). If lots of gullible Induhviduals get mad at me, it might generate enough publicity to get me invited as a guest on Larry King Live."
— Scott Adams, in The Dilbert Future

Pseudo-ironic deflection at its finest.

Now, pretending to hold an inflammatory opinion for publicity is absolutely something people do. It tends to be corrosive to them as people, but they do it, and sometimes it pays off!

This is not what Scott is doing. His opinions are far too consistent for that.

Unfortunately, these sorts of cloaked-in-protective-irony disclaimers are par for the course in all of his work, because Scaddams cannot stand feeling vulnerable or daft.

He will only straightforwardly admit to fault or weakness when he has managed to convince himself it is a perfectly reasonable weakness that he can justify. Everything else is a joke or plausibly deniable, even if it's painfully obvious he genuinely holds a belief or thought an idea would work.

Here's an example about a burrito.

In an interview in 2013, Scott Adams was asked the following:

"Employees who worked at your [now closed] restaurant have said that you’re not a very good manager. As one put it, “Scott should be shielded from tough decisions the way a crawling infant needs to be protected from household hazards.” True?"
— Dan McGinn in 'Scott Adams on Whether Management Really Matters', an interview for Harvard Business Review

Now, this is a pretty rough quote. I'd be embarrassed if someone said that about me, let alone to my face. But Scott didn't respond in an embarrassed way. He didn't make a joke or even downplay the criticism.

"They were probably too kind. You know, there’s a tough balance involved in being a manager. You can’t be too liked, and I like to be liked, so I’m completely incapable of being a day-to-day manager. So, yes, I was largely incompetent at that and many other things I did. With the restaurant in particular, I had gone into that to be an investor, not a manager. I ended up managing toward the end just to see if I could make a difference, and I couldn't."
— Scott Adams in 'Scott Adams on Whether Management Really Matters'

Now, a key failing here is definitely the idea that you can't be 'too liked' as a manager or you don't get the needed respect or efficacy. That is the sort of wrongheaded sentiment that's made working in commercial kitchens and start-ups so absolutely miserable. People like good managers — a lot. Even when they make hard decisions.

Nonetheless, Scott is able to be open about this failed venture because of how he views many of his failures. In How to Fail, Scott has a whole section on failing — it's in the title, after all. Early on in that book, he says the following:

"Over the years I have cultivated a unique relationship with failure. I invite it. I survive it. I appreciate it. And then I mug the shit out of it. Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value. I have a long history of profiting from failure. My cartooning career, for example, is a direct result of failing to succeed in the corporate environment."
— Scott Adams in How to Fail

This is a bit self-aggrandizing, but it is nonetheless a healthy way to approach failing. Much better than how many do it, and leagues better than how desperately, reactively sensitive to failure and criticism many people become after a lifetime of having undiagnosed ADHD.^[7.1]

But Scott's avoided that, right? Well, in How to Fail, after talking in detail about his failed restaurants, he says this about the Dilberito^[7.2]:

"In each [major grocery chain] the product failed to sell for a variety of reasons, mostly related to shelf placement [and sabotage from competitors]."
— Scott Adams, talking about his Dilbert-branded burrito, in How to Fail

This is a total lie, and it's a really, really revealing one.

In a section where he purports to tell us honestly all about his failings, Scott frames the resounding failure of his Dilbert-branded 'all-in-one meal replacement' (an interesting enough idea) as primarily a fault of complex factors outside his control.

But, if you read literally any contemporary media coverage, the core problem was that it tasted weird and made you incredibly gassy.

The weird taste was partly because there was too much vitamin fortification, an absurd amount, primarily because Scott didn't understand nutrition and nobody could persuade him that the damn thing didn't need literally 100% of the recommended daily intake of like... every nutrient?

"I wonder how we got to the point where everyone thinks we have to get 100 percent of the Recommended Daily Allowance in every food we eat... I don't know any evidence that having multiples of the Recommended Daily Allowance is better for you than having your R.D.A. once."
— Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition and molecular biologist, interviewed in EATING WELL; At Last, a Vitamin Pill Wrapped in a Tortilla by Marian Burros

In fact, having too much of many micronutrients can (obviously) be bad for us — that NYT article highlights iron, for example, which the burrito had 100% of the average RDI of.

So... if you ate the Dilberito, and then anything else with iron in it on the same day you eat a Dilberito (like red meat, oats, or even a bunch of spinach), you're exceeding the average adult RDI.

You keep doing that on a daily basis, and you'll put yourself at risk of heart problems. Which, given that the Dilberito was also high in salt, was already kind of iffy territory.

Plus, the thing had less than 600 calories, so you couldn't only eat one and have nothing else in a day — that's just not enough caloric fuel to keep your body going sustainably, no matter the micronutrients.

Not that the extra salt made it taste any better, by the way:

"Dilberitos, which are $2.29 to $2.69 each, could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste. But that makes them pretty much like every other microwaved frozen burrito."
— Marian Burros, writing in EATING WELL; At Last, a Vitamin Pill Wrapped in a Tortilla

Scott seems genuinely embarrassed about how and why the Dilberaito failed, and he covers it up by obscuring the truth.

But it was him, his business partners, the scope of their lack of knowledge, and their apparent refusal to seek out experts.

Adams thinks, or thought, that his Dilberito failure was more embarrassing than the time he completely, arrogantly fucked up an interview as a young adult, which he has no problem being honest about:

"I explained that I had no sales experience but loved to argue. And what is selling, I asked rhetorically, if not a form of arguing with customers until you win?"
— Scott Adams, relating an incident that gives me so much visceral second-hand embarrasment I genuinely don't like contemplating the anecdote for too long at any one time, in How to Fail

He'll admit to that, but not that he didn't do enough research before attempting to design a product that would provide all the nutrition you'd need in a day and sending it to market. That is too sensitive a topic. That's something he will obfuscate, consistently, for decades.

In fact, in his later 2019 book Loserthink, he comes back to this idea and finds a totally new way to excuse himself for the Dilberito failing: he claims all nutritional science let him down, and was too hard to evaluate anyway, because nutritional scientists are all wrong all the time.

"The consensus of scientists on the topic of nutrition was wrong for decades... [including] the USDA’s food guide pyramid in 1992, which recommended that consumers eat more bread, cereal, rice, and pasta than vegetables and fruits. That is opposite what nutrition experts recommend today... Personally, I believed what nutrition scientists were saying in the nineties—so much so that I started a food company dedicated to making the most nutritious food item possible, using science as my guide. I called it the Dilberito, and it was fortified with all of the vitamins and minerals the government said you needed, based on science, I thought. The Dilberito also had a good ratio of protein to carbs. Sounds great, right? The problem, which I learned the hard way, was that what the experts “knew” about nutrition kept changing."
— Scott Adams, being a blame-shifting loser, in Loserthink

But he doesn't get to shift this one. The problem wasn't the researchers, it was that he didn't actually do the research.

Nutritionists knew that 600 calories wasn't enough for a whole day of food, and even casual food reporters of the time managed to find nutritionists who said "too many nutrience at once can be bad, this Dilberito thing isn't a good way to do food".

The consensus on the issues of micronutrient oversaturation and the effect of large and atypical intake of legumes (gas) hasn't changed from then to now, either. The nuances of scientific knowledge on nutrition definitely change, but the core mistakes Scott made were known to be mistakes by nutritional science from well before the time he started out to make and market his burrito.

By returning unecessarily to dig even more in this hole, years later in Loserthink, he's just making this more embarrassing, isn't he? As he says, succeeding is about failure. Learning from failure is important, and not failing is impossible.

"I include this section [on my failures] because successful people generally gloss over their most aromatic failures, and it leaves the impression that they have some magic you don’t."
— Scott Adams in Loserthink

In contrast to other successful people (apparently), Scott only glosses over the failures he personally finds too embarrasing to spin into self-aggrandizing anecdotes or advice.

This reveals four things:

1) Scaddams can be perfectly self-aware and even healthily self-critical if a critique doesn't make him uncomfortable;

2) Scaddams is insecure about arbitrary failings that most people would actually think are fairly normal and, even when alleging to be honest about his failings, he will consistently attempt to lie and distort to avoid those topics being framed honestly;

3) Scaddams doesn't quite understand how to be a good manager — he's not good at doing it well, sure, but more importantly, he doesn't actually know what to try and aim for;

4) Scaddams, we can thus conclude, really wants people to like him, but also doesn't understand people or what they think is embarrassing. This makes him defensive at best and seethingly bitter at worst.

Contrast his honest self-appraisal and humility with the jokes he makes in Future about himself possibly getting things wrong:

"I will delve into many areas in which I am thoroughly incompetent, including politics, history economics, physiology and particle physics. My intellectual shortcomings will manifest themselves as inaccuracies, misconceptions, and logical flaws. I recommend that you read it quickly so you won't notice."
— Scott Adams in The Dilbert Future

Yes, jokes, it's jokes, I know, but he makes the same kind of joke over and over. Noticeably absent are any jokes poking fun at his actual core attitude — that people, at large, are useless.

He is happy to make fun of people he thinks are stupid, but seems disinterested in even passing acknowledgements of how he might be wrong about other people being stupid. Miserable, hostile cynicism is the name of the game.

One thing that really struck me on re-reading Future is that huge parts of his worldview, then and now, seem stuck in the phase you'd expect a young adult to grow out of before they hit their mid-twenties. All these jokes about how 'people suck' and 'women weird' and 'men horny'... it's stunted.

Over his life, these perspectives escalate. Instead of maturing, Scott retreats further into the comforts of juvenile misanthropy and solipsism. It'd be one thing if it was a performance, limited to his comedic persona. His blogging, non-fiction writing, and general behaviour indicate it is not.

The Dilbert Future is, emotionally rather than literally, what he genuinely expected from the world. He didn't understand people, and this made him feel alienated and justified in being pre-emptively hostile and dismissive of pretty much everyone on the planet.

Scott let that resentment stew and shape his worldview until he became indistinguishable from an MRA who frames every problem as a man's problem and is incapable of genuinely thinking that women might have the exact same set of problems and feelings.

This is extra disappointing, given that How to Fail contains a fair amount of empathy. The contrast between the pro-social optimism in that book and the rancid, sneering superiority in all of his other published works is, as said before, truly immense.

"Only a sociopath or a hermit can find happiness through extreme selfishness. A normal person needs to treat others well in order to enjoy life."
— Scott Adams in How to Fail

Despite the effort, genuine or not, that he makes in How to Fail, he was, and remains, scared of damn near everyone. Of losing their approval and attention, but also of having it.

Fear of a Blackened Planet

Because it is a book about the future, the first substantial section of The Dilbert Future is mostly about how "kids are dumb, sure, but they're going to notice that my generation has completely fucked the planet and economy".

This is remarkable, because (in another contradiction) the man has since decided to ignore basically every aspect of human-driven pollution and environmental damage in favour of solely focusing, ad nauseum, on how he's not 100% sold on carbon-driven climate change. He has become a total science denialist.

This total about-face is made clear in Loserthink, which he opens by talking about the nature of truth and persuasion. Well, actually, he starts by calling almost everyone except himself bad at thinking.

"Most of us have never learned how to think effectively.... We don’t teach thinking in schools, and you can see the results of that nearly every day. [If you] make the mistake of paying attention to other people’s opinions in any form, you’re probably seeing a lot of absurd and unproductive reasoning that I call loserthink. Loserthink isn’t about being dumb, and it isn’t about being underinformed. Loserthink is about unproductive ways of thinking. You can be smart and well informed while at the same time being a flagrant loserthinker. That is not only possible; it’s the normal situation."
— Scott Adams in Loserthink

So, not only is he apparently one of a very small number of people trained in enough different modes of thinking to actually think well, but even most smart and informed people are bad at thinking.

Scott had previously complained about people's willingness to believe 'experts' who keep straying outside their area of actual expertise, but his perspective in Loserthink is a serious step up on the 'mistrust of experts' ladder.

He goes on to properly open up the book's thesis by talking about the nature of truth and persuasion... by using climate change as an example.

Despite previously saying that the world is difficult and complex to navigate if you have to work everything out yourself, all the time, Scott instead insists that the very idea of placing trust in a consensus of experts is 'loserthink'.

Scott proceeds to engage in a rhetorical game akin to "I'm not touching you", wherein he waggles his eyebrows repeatedly in the direction of "climate change experts are not to be trusted" without ever outright saying he does not, in fact, believe in climate change in any meaningful way.

This is how it starts:

"[This famous artist] is saying, in effect, that we can be sure climate change is real and dangerous because of the massive number of scientists who say so... If your experience in life has been concentrated in the arts, it would seem entirely reasonable to rely on the consensus of climate science experts. And if you observed that others were not doing the same, you might conclude that those folks are morons who can’t see the obvious."

People who do not work in the sciences, and specifically the scientific publishing industry, might not have a fully accurate idea of what a 'scientific consensus' actually entails. This is fairly reasonable to critique. This is not what Scott is doing.

"Now let’s say you had experience in economics and business, as I do. In those domains, anyone telling you they can predict the future in ten years with their complicated multivariate models is automatically considered a fraud."

Yes, anyone who says their long-term predictive economic model has an extreme degree of certainty and high degree of detail/granularity is almost certainly trying to hustle. However, people keep building the damn things.

This is because, as it turns out, models are a pretty handy tool for iterating on permutations and possibilities and can often have a reasonable amount of useful predictive power — as long as you keep in mind that they don't model what they don't model.

A model doesn't automatically hold weight any more than an equation. Both can be wrong. It helps to understand what their assumptions and inputs are.

Also, Scott's sneakiness here is that he switches topics. We weren't originally talking about economic models, which are trying to model human behaviour in aggregate. We were talking about climate models, which work with... the climate. The analogy doesn't fully transfer.

"Climate scientists discard climate models that don’t fit with observations. The public doesn’t hear about the models that are discarded. If you start with hundreds of different predictions, and you discard the ones that miss their initial predictions, you are nearly guaranteed to end up with some models that seem to predict the future, but only by chance."

This is not, of course, an honest recounting of how climate models are developed.

If you undertake an analysis to determine which, if any, variables in a dataset might be linked with other variables, use that analysis to build predictive models, test those models on separate prior-collected data, and then discard or refine models you test that don't match with that historical or present data... then you're going to end up producing models that do fit, which you can then test by validating their predictive power on real historical and future data that wasn't part of the original dataset.

What's the alternative process for building a model, exactly? Just 'know' the effects of every single possible variable from the start, without iterative testing and validation?

Truly, this is such a wonderfully underhanded reframing of 'it takes time and repeated attempts to figure out how things work'. There's literally no other way to arrive at a tested conclusion. That's the scientific process being framed as malpractice.

Scott himself has, repeatedly, extolled the necessity of failure on the path to success... and here in Loserthink he's heavily implying that when it comes to climate science, any evidence of iteration is evidence of scientists scrubbing around for random and unverified correlations they can wave excitedly at the public to obtain more funding.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Scott's conclusions about models are the product of faulty knowledge transposition. By his own definition in this book, he is doing loserthink in his explanation of how everyone else (but not him) does lots of loserthink.

Scott takes his known fact that "economic long-term models are unreliable" and applies it to a new context, without adapting how he thinks to accomodate the new context. This is not a transferral of a 'way of thinking', but the creation of a thought-terminating cliche. That's not a confidence-inspiring way to open a book about how to think.

"Thousands of climate scientists agree with the idea that the planet is warming in an unprecedented way. But how many of those scientists are directly involved in measuring temperatures versus how many are simply relying on the data from a smaller group that does that work? How many scientists in the world do you imagine have worked directly on determining historical proxy temperature measurements, such as tree rings and ice cores? A handful? A thousand? I have no idea. And neither do you. Based on my experience in corporate America, I’m biased toward thinking only a handful of scientists worldwide have top-level direct experience estimating global temperature measurements for years prior to 1979 and the satellite era. And that group of scientists, however large or small it is, seems to control the foundational argument that our current warming rate is unprecedented and human-caused. I’ll bet no more than a handful of people in the world are true experts in measuring global temperatures."

Saying "I have no idea, and neither do you" is a tactic meant to make it seem like the answer isn't easily knowable. It's also wrong. If you wanted to, you could find this out.

If you were publishing a book with this as an argument, you should find this out. You could find the methods used. You could find out how they differ between groups who have done this. You could find academic discourse between these groups. You could just look up "ice core samples + temperature" in any of several free, open-access (or pirate) journal-publishing sites and have a nosey around.

You could email any of the dedicated groups that work specifically on the engineering required make machines that extract and analyse ice cores. Or operate monitoring satellites. Or maintain and verify historical records. Or read what they publish, for free, online, because it turns out that the process of (for example) extracting ice cores has a lot of public-facing information, including layperson-friendly and technical descriptions of the challenges involved and factors that go into it all.

Scott's deliberate lack of context isn't making a sincere point: it's a dishonest misframing. It's coward shit.

You might say "oh but this is a lot for a layperson to learn", to which I'd say, yeah, it kind of is, isn't it? Experts are useful.

But, importantly, what Scott is describing is not something a layperson is somehow unable to know how to learn, even though he implies it is. It's a series of factual and straightforward unknowns that are possible but time-consuming to follow up on and resolve (although he is refusing to do so), not a fundamental inability for most people to 'think correctly'.

While I obviously can't read Scott's mind, it doesn't seem like he's using climate science as an attempt to actually illustrate the problems with science, or with thinking across multiple domains, or how expertise doesn't always transfer between domains (although, inadvertently, this is an excellent example of that last point).

What Scott is trying to do is throw so much plausible-seeming doubt at the reader that they second-guess the idea that 'experts and scientists' are worth listening to, and instead Scott, who is a multi-discipline WinnerThinker or whatever, is Better At Thinking (and also, because climate is a personal bugbear of his, he wants the reader to doubt climate science specifically).

Why am I belabouring this? Because Scott opens up an allegedly non-partisan book about 'persuasion' and 'ways of thinking' by trying to smuggle heavily conservative talking points to the reader in the guise of 'thinking across domains', while actually making serious factual and logical mistakes that have nothing to do with "cross-domain thinking" and everything to do with ideological bias. And he knows what he's doing.

There is a tactic often used by conservative pundits, adjacent to the Gish Gallop (a firehose of bullshit), which relies on seeding doubt that the truth can be known at all. This, naturally, is a great advantage if you are a frequent liar.

Trump, as the inevitable example for disingenuous rhetoric, does this a lot. This is where Scott is taking the reader. What started as blogging about underhanded political persuasion in 2013 has turned, in 2019, to a full-throated endorsement of (and replication of) truth-eroding tactics in service of harmful, anti-science, anti-social conservative talking points (and his own ego).

Only twenty fucking pages in, and reading Loserthink is already a profoundly depressing experience.

Anyhow, in 1997, in The Dilbert Future, where we started this little climate tangent, Scott wasn't quite there yet.

"As dense as kids might be, they will eventually notice that adults have spent all the money, spread disease, and turned the planet into a smoky, filthy ball of death. Brainwashing the children is the only logical solution to our problems. The alternative is for adults to stop running up debts and polluting. For this to happen, several billion Induhviduals would have to become less stupid, selfish, and horny. This is not likely."
— Scott Adams in The Dilbert Future

The "spread disease" thing^[8.1] is also ironic because he's now also on the fringe of vaccine denialism, having said in 2022 that "the unvaccinated are the winners from the COVID pandemic".

Vaccine skepticism and COVID conspiracies are a whole other series of tangents that I am NOT going to chase. It's loser talk, though, and he's a loser for saying it. I'm aware that's not particularly logically sound, as arguments go. You could argue I'm even being rhetorically underhanded, even, but fuck it. Vaccine denialism is a loser ideology.

Anyway, back to actually engaging with Scott's ideas. He thinks children are impressionable and war and pollution is bad, and is making jokes about how his generation, having broken things very badly, kind of seem so cartoonishly evil that they might also create a future where, out of a kind of self-preservation, they brainwash their kids into believing war is the best possible approach and pollution is fine^[8.2].

As per his later blogging, this sort of joke hinges on the inversion of established consensus about reality — an absurd reversal of an obvious truth (that there are better approaches).

Now, by 'brainwashing', Scott just means "convincing someone of something that clashes with their other beliefs or their best interests". He lists some things the USA already, as a society, viewed (and still views) as acceptable brainwashing: age commands respect, god is real, drugs are bad, low-paying jobs are honest work, and- okay, he also jokes that democracy is bad.

These are all insights into genuine views he held and largely still holds — he thinks age does not automatically confer respect (in part because much of life and success is luck, not skill), god isn't real and religion shouldn't be part of the default culture, illicit drugs aren't evil and the category is arbitrary, low-paying jobs are often demeaning and should pay more, and... well, and most people are dumb and democracy gives them too much power.

That's all unsurprising, but it's when he then says, jokingly, that we might consider brainwashing kids with some extra things, he tells on himself pretty hard — not about kids, but about his own fears about what young people, and people at large, think about a specific topic.

The extra items are all fears about ageing. Scott Adams was scared about getting old. But not for the reasons you'd think.

Getting Old Sucks

The title to this section isn't a pun or reference, and that's for a reason. As I am putting the final edits to this long-in-the-making essay, Scott Adams is actively dying of metastasised prostate cancer.

""I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones..." Adams said. "I expect to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer... If you're wondering if I'll get better, the answer is no, it will only get worse," he said. "There's only one direction this goes now.""
— Rachel Treisman, quoting Scott Adams, in 'Dilbert' creator Scott Adams says he's dying in NPR

I was very unkind when I first put this section to the page. Given that the man is currently dying of an age-linked illness, I have moderated the tone of this section significantly. Nonetheless, it is not kind. I cannot find a kind way to outline just how badly Scott's insecurities around age and desirability kneecapped his personal growth.

I am existentially terrified of dying, which is a very reasonable perspective, given the scope and context of human consciousness, but my signs of ageing are reminders that I am still here to grow older. My life did not end at twenty, or thirty. I get to age. So far, in all respects, it is better than the alternative.

Unfortunately, this was apparently never a perspective available to Scott, because he has consistently been disgusted by old people and being old. I don't know if that ever stopped.

When Scott jokes in Future about other things it might be useful to 'brainwash' future generations into believing, he suggests the following:
It is an honor to give your money to old, ugly people.
Wrinkles are sexy.
Forgetfulness is a sign of wisdom.
Baldness, huge thighs, and potbellies are all signs of intelligence and sexual potency.

Later on in Future, Scott sums things up when he talks about his ideal tech-augmented clothes:

"I want my clothes to have a fake Batman-like muscular torso and head cover. That way I'll look more like a studly superhero and less like a little bald guy."

He does not fantasize about technology that would make him fit and healthy. He fantasizes about appearing that way.

Scott has always been very insecure about being viewed as weak and unattractive, and this is where his hang-ups about aging came from. It's not about having a healthy and capable body — it's about being perceived as strong and powerful to get social capital.

Bodily insecurity is normal and expected. For all the brain-hacking you can try and do, brains love feeling shame. It's their favourite hobby. Feeling bad and insecure about how you look is a cornerstone of the human condition, as far as I can tell (accentuated by forces of capital that benefit from selling us 'beautification' for our entirely normal bodies).

Most people I know came to or are coming to terms with this in their thirties. Generally, you either grow to appreciate bodies of all kinds and in turn know that yours is appreciated, or you become Leonardo DiCaprio or Drake and exclusively chase youth.

It is important, actually, that the way most people seem to overcome body-related neuroses is by loving other people and, of course, being loved back.

When you are in a relationship with someone, it is not uncommon for you to think that person gets hotter the more you care about them. In many romantic and sexual relationships, particularly in the long term, people get more appealing to you as you grow older together.

I am aware that this sounds like a cliche and overly-didactic 'special episode' of a tv show targeted at young teens, themed around body positivity. But, nonetheless, it is true. Externally imposed standards of beauty suck. They are arbitrary. They are not healthy or achievable. They do not serve you or your partners.

Scaddams in 1997 agrees, in his own way, that people internalising this truth is the greatest possible weapon against the churning industry of beauty, an industry that actively works to sabotage people's self-image and their expectations of other people's bodies.

"Television is our biggest threat as a species, but not because of the sex and violence. Its because Hollywood pipes an endless stream of impossibly attractive people into our consciousness. It's awfully hard to get naked in front of someone who has just watched Body Shaping on ESPN."

Scott is scared of being judged and found wanting. He is, or was, very explicitly worried that superficial physicality would come between him and meaningful connections. I get that.

Unfortunately, this was not something he overcame. Bizarrely, he never even seemed able to fully internalise the idea that the women in his life might feel the same way about their bodies.

In fact, Scooty also divorced his wife and married an instagram model. Well, he married a self-described pilot, businesswoman, and neurologist-in-training, but she was thirty years his junior and he repeatedly described her as an instagram model first and foremost, not those other things, because he thought it was a flex on the haters.

They divorced after less than three years, because, as she says, "the age difference became an issue."

I keep coming back to Scott's quotes in How to Fail about how being happy is all about caring about others. He says maximising your own happiness shouldn't be harmful to others, because maximising one's own happiness almost inevitably involves making sure the people around you are happy. He repeatedly says that he views the happiness of others as totally inextricable from one's own.

He tells us he thinks it's just the smart move to make sure you put effort into considering how others feel, and that he thinks it takes a particularly rare and unpleasant type of person to genuinely derive happiness from, or even just in spite of, the unhappiness of others.

Scott then turns around and says heinous shit in basically every other bit of written work he has ever produced, either by advocating for awful things or deliberately phrasing what should be nuanced perspectives in inflammatory and, frankly, stupid ways.

He performs cruelty so often and to such an extent that someone was able to produce a staggering amount of comics where, just by putting Scott's own words in Dilbert characters' mouths, he comes off unavoidably sounding like a bigoted asshole.

That above example is just fantastic. He does an end-run around the glaringly obvious "a huge part of sexism is where men actively consider women's contributions and abilities as less valuable", spikes the ball into the ground with "if I end up interrupting more women than men it's their fault for having bad ideas", and... thinks he's made some kind of cogent argument, rather than one of the most severe self-tells I've ever seen?

These are not the words of someone who particularly cares about avoiding the misery of others.

The Beauty Game

It sucks when fear pushes us into cruelty. It's not inevitable, but it happens so often that I think we're on solid ground saying that it's not a problem unique to well-off idiots like Scott Adams, even if he has made an art of it.

Young Scott was an average-looking white dude worried he was ugly and unfit. Worried that ageing was going to accentuate the features he viewed as unattractive. He felt like he'd already missed out on intimacy and the fading beauty of youth, and that it was only going to get worse.

Scaddo has been relatively vague about the details of his youth, but has generally indicated that he didn't have strong or stable relationships. He grew up as an art geek and then a computer-based professional in an era where the negative "dweeby bespectacled computer nerd" stereotype dominated pop culture.

Even when he was young, the culture he worked so hard to serve was probably telling him in dozens of ways that men like him weren't really men, or desirable. As a weedy, queer little geek who got 'un-manned' plenty during my youth, I get it.

The trouble is, despite his success, and despite actively becoming fitter, more emotionally repressed, and ultimately more 'manly' than I'll ever be, Scott's never come to terms with any of his insecurity.

Instead, he let his fears curdle into gendered hostility. He refused to engage with the idea that everything outlined above is not exclusive to men.

Our culture does the exact same thing to women twice over. The 'male loneliness' epidemic is just a loneliness epidemic. Young people are increasingly alienated and unable to form meaningful, stable relationships, not just young men.

Men were never in it alone, Scott. You just refused to see women as fully realised people. You refused to see any value in old people. You perpetuated and endorsed the very value judgements that scared and alienated you.

In How to Fail, which I must stress is his by-far most optimistic book, Scott Adams uses the word "love" twenty-four times. He uses it to refer to receiving love in his own life four times. Of those, just one time is in reference to his friends and family.

The other three times are to do with people "loving" Dilbert, or him via Dilbert. Only thrice does he mention what he himself loves, in the context of loving practical jokes and diet coke and not loving certain kinds of work. Never does he mention his love for... people. Or relationships. Even conceptually.

Of the remaining mentions of love, nine are times he talks about how people generally want love, in the context of promising his book will help with that, and the last few are offhand jokes and contextual descriptions that don't involve relationships.

Scott, I don't know if I want to take your advice on love.

Adams has likely had these really understandable and common fears because of his life experiences under capital-driven beauty culture, but he fixated on them, indulged them, let them ooze out in his work, and they helped to destroy large parts of his life and mutated into bizzare ideological hangups.

It's awfully ironic that, in the first sentences of The Dilbert Future, he made a joke about him screwing over other people, who are obviously dumb, for profit, specifically. In a book where, in addition to the intentional jokes about profit ruining things, he unintentionally reveals far more of his own profit-derived neuroses — and then turns around and insists the system that they derive from is the best.

He just doesn't quite join the dots. And, later on, in Fail, even when he fairly reasonably highlights that being "healthy, fit, and selfish" can often actually mean thinking long-term, taking care of yourself so you can better help others, he takes it... further than he really needed to.

The most important form of selfishness involves spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your family and friends. If you neglect your health or your career, you slip into the second category — stupid — which is a short slide to becoming a burden on society.

It's never simple, with Scott. He's not afraid of aging because it comes with health and capability limitations: he's worried it'll make him less attractive. When he does worry about staying fit, it's partially because those who aren't as healthy are... stupid and a burden on society.

It's never just about 'doing good for yourself', but 'not becoming valueless, a burden'. He also has hang-ups around the value of intelligence vs literally any other personal trait, but we'll get to that.

While he goes on in his books and blogs, joking and serious, about how men's attractiveness to women varies based on various manipulatable, arbitrary factors? He mostly just uses that as an excuse to be kind of condescending about women.

He's never been able to deconstruct the 'why', or apply even that limited perspective to men's attraction to women. He cannot properly dissect why others might find him attractive, but he really can't understand why men (like himself) find women attractive.

He won't fuck older women. That's what I'm trying to say, above all else. He just can't do it.

He's spent decades growing into his final form: an insecure old man who never overcame his seemingly life-long baggage about not having enough of a specific set of arbitrarily chosen aesthetic traits.

He spent years being neurotic about finding partners, expressing blatant insecurity at his horrible qualities of 'being older than 30' and 'getting a bit wrinkly', and couldn't seem to see why anyone would partner with him unless he contorted himself to meet standards that nobody else was holding him to, turning into a bigot in the process.

And he fucked up a perfectly good anti-capitalist cartoon along the way too, the idiot.

We Need to Talk About Dilbert

Fear and unhappiness has long been at the core of Dilbert (the franchise). Unfairness. Being a sopping wet, pathetic little meow-meow, bullied from all sides by incompetents and smart but unpleasant people, your own (obviously justified) unpleasantness and rudeness barely a drop in the ocean in comparison. A world of money-driven greed and incompetence-driven hierarchies.

Dilbert (the character) regularly gets the shit end of the stick because, per the construction of the comic, he's one of the few people in his world that's smart and also... okay, not nice per se, but only like, moderately selfish and rude to strangers. Even if that's less due to altruism and more because he's too anxious to be the dickhead he wants to be.

Because that's mostly what holds him back: meekness and a lack of ambition.

Dilbert might be an anti-authority comic, 'by a worker for other workers', but it is ultimately one where, because it is a comic that was published week-on-week, the status quo cannot change. Many comics do this by establishing strong outside forces that hold things in place. Dilbert does this by making the titular character, Dilbert, unable and unwilling to meaningfully challenge the world he is in.

Scott, as the author, correctly assumed that the perpetual plight of a slightly-too-meek dweeb might appeal to weary office workers more than a successful, slightly-too-bold everyman.

Thus, the world Dilbert inhabits is a funhouse mirror that can both reflect the frustrations of the viewer and also be pointed to with "at least we're not there, it could be worse" by weary subjects trapped in office buildings, leashed to demeaning jobs they used to want in service of lives and goals that aren't making them happy.

To appeal, Dilbert has to suffer. He has to not be enough. His own mother looks down on him. His dog looks down on him (so does his cat, but that's par-for-the-course for cartoon cats).

His boss treats him like an amusing little toy, his co-workers regularly take advantage of him or threaten him, his neighbourhood's trashman condescends to him, women find him generally offputting and fish want to fuck hi- well, fish probably deride him too, actually.

Dilbert is every office-worker's Mary Sue. You ever read a self-insert fanfic or original story where the woe-is-me main character is just beset on all sides by a comically unfair world? Where misfortune upon misfortune just pisses down upon them so the author can eventually textually justify any amount of cathartic retaliation?

Yeah, Dilbert and Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way (from My Immortal) basically have the exact same character archetype. That's my thesis.

Dilbert does not have friends, not really. He has antagonists and victims. By nature of the format, he never gets his catharsis. It's a bleak world, with an equally bleak view on other people.

The Global Confusopoly

Through Dilbert (the comic), Scott Adams illustrates a view of the world where most people are malicious, stupid, or both. In this, it depicts an unkind half-truth.

I said before that living in a cooperative environment necessitates that you learn not to take every inconvenience personally, or as an indicator of the moral quality of whoever is inconveniencing you.

You fuck up just as often as most people. This doesn't mean you're 'one of the stupid ones': it just means you're normal.

People make daft mistakes so often because 1) there's about fifty billion ways to make daft mistakes in every aspect of life, often by design, 2) oh my god there are so many aspects of life, and 3) we're all so tired and stressed and distracted (again, often by design).

I don't know a single person who hasn't made a borderline humiliating mistake while on the phone to some kind of helpline. I know people whose job it is to regularly design horrendously complex systems that need to have perfectly consistent internal logic... who also, regularly, cannot handle the herculean task of ordering takeout without making a mistake. The world is full of unintuitive systems, and we are all just tired, busy apes.

To contrast Scott and Dilbert's myopic cynicism, there's this quote I find applicable from Mark Phisher, author of Bullshit Jobs, that does a good job summarizing the external problems that cause so many people to make frustrating-to-deal-with mistakes in daily life:

"I live in a crumbling and defective world. I'm too busy or too clueless to fix any of it. Every year, it takes more brains to navigate this complicated world. More people are falling below what I call the 'incompetence line,' through no fault of their own. I fell below the incompetence line this year. We make random, often stupid choices, because we don't have the brains or time to do better."

Except, aha, that wasn't Fisher at all! He didn't even write that book, and that wasn't even how you spell his last name.^[12.1] That was actually Scott Adams's writing, in The Dilbert Future! I lied to you in service of a predictable twist!

Ultimately, this quote is a great example of the way the main contradiction in Scott's writing (where he alternates between praising capital-driven society and pinning all his ills on it without ever reconciling the two ideas) is often accentuated by his secondary tendency to oscillate between extremely concise explanations of why we should have a great deal of empathy for people struggling under broken systems... and naked disdain for anyone who so much as breathes in the direction of 'burdening' society by not being perfectly optimal.

Barely twenty pages after Scott goes on about how he (with his alleged IQ of around 180) finds the average member of the public effectively about as smart and useful as a literal dog, just less likeable? He basically just says "oh yeah, society is fuckin overly complicated because the forces of capital benefit financially from us all being confused and overwhelmed, I make stupid mistakes all the time".

After cogently laying this stuff out, Stuart Little goes right back to being unexaminedly cruel about the average person, saying their mistakes make them irritating and worth less to society, and disregarding the idea that their happiness has any value at all, let alone to him. Why should he care?

As his career progressed, Scott made fewer and fewer attempts at wrapping these views in jokes.

Scott never really got to grips with the idea that capital and people's values can meaningfully diverge, or that this can pose serious problems for individual people or society as a whole. He hasn't even grappled with long- vs short-term incentives! In Fail, he says the following:

The central genius of capitalism is that all of its complexities, all of the differences across companies, all of the challenges, decisions, successes, and failures can be boiled down into one number: profits. That simplification allows capitalism to work... Profits tell management when they are doing something right and when they need to do something different. That one simplification—the idea of profit—sits atop the engine of capitalism and largely steers it, albeit sometimes in the wrong direction. You can debate the morality of viewing profits as the top priority in business, but you can’t argue that it doesn’t work.

Except you can, of course, and many people have and do at great length. In fact, there's this quote from another cartoon industry veteran in a very similar position to Scott that I keep coming back to:

It was the late nineties and I had just deposited the biggest check of my life, thanks largely to a multibook publishing deal. I had the precise job I had wanted since childhood. I was officially rich. I was as famous as I wanted to be. And I was suddenly and profoundly sad...

They then talk about how their goal, one of status, wealth, and external validation, wasn't doing anything for them once they'd achieved it.

The way I climbed out of my funk was by realizing that my newly acquired resources could help me change the world in some small but positive ways.... Unhappiness that is caused by too much success is a high-class problem. That’s the sort of unhappiness people work all of their lives to get. If you find yourself there, and I hope you do, you'll find your attention naturally turning outward. You'll seek happiness through service to others. I promise it will feel wonderful."

And that last bit is a strongly optimistic idea: you'll find yourself naturally turning outwards to help others once your needs and goals are met, and it will feel better than meeting your self-driven goals did, as well as be more sustainable.

Except, of course, that's not some other cartoonist.^[12.2] That's Scott, in Fail, the same book in which he says that capitalism, because of profit (which does not cause happiness), aligns itself with what people want, which is happiness.

Adams is somehow capable of saying that "profit is the best driver of positive change we have and capitalism is excellent and largely positively directed", and also that "capitalism and intentionally malicious corporations are the source of the majority of things that make life and our future bad", and then saying "helping others, something notably divorced from actual profits and success, is the best direction to align yourself in", and never working to reconcile these ideas in his own head.

He has also blundered, obliviously and often, into a particularly gross kind of value-maximiser territory.

For example, Scott once floated the idea that people who had just been involved in tragedies like a mass shooting could sign up to a specific service and, either for free or a fee, let people directly access their perspective and account of their experience: a win–win that bypasses the corrupt and predatory news media!

The audience gets to gawk at the spectacle and insider perspective, and the people involved get their truth to the public, and maybe even cash out and take time away from work to recover from their trauma.

Except, of course, everyone thought this was fucking ghoulish, because it is. It's a rent-seeking, heavily abstracted value-maximiser approach devoid of any consideration of people's internal lives and motivations. In other words, it's exactly Scott's style.

Oh, and of course, because he wasn't rich or influential enough, he wanted people to do this on his own platform.

Classically, during the blowback, he dismissed criticism by saying everyone that was mad at him was just "living in a 2-D world."

"As you know, I don’t live in the 2-D world... In the 2-D world, things are exactly like they look on the surface. If you live in the 2-D world, there is a horrible tragedy, and somebody offers something, a commercial product, in the midst of it, [they are] evil, bad, we must attack him.”

Which is not a exactly a refutation of... anything, really.

At a certain point, you have to work out which path he actually believes by looking at how he lives his life, and... I mean, there's hasn't been a lot of 'helping others' on the rhetoric on display in his day-to-day public life, has there?

Cake or Death?

Despite all this grimness, Scotty Adamseses life advice, when he's not being bitter, boils down to this: luck is the main driving factor behind the way pretty much everyone's life turns out. You're going to fail a lot. It's a good idea to spread your options as wide as possible, do your best, and hope that one of your shots pays off.

That's pretty inoffensive. In fact, if you ignore how much of his failure he covers up because he finds it embarrassing, he does a pretty good job of pointing out that 'success is 95% failure'.

However, Fail and small sections of Future where he says "yeah, I got a lot of work basically because I either knew the right people or got lucky" stand in bleak contrast to all the times he's turned around said that capitalism allocates value based on merit.

And also, more importantly, all those times he's griped at the single solitary time a manager (allegedly) denied him a promotion, (allegedly) despite Adams being the ideal candidate, (allegedly) because he was a white dude, and (allegedly, according to Scott a decade-plus later and verified by nobody) management had instead decided they needed to promote someone more "diverse".

This became such a foundational part of his rhetoric that it has expanded over time into multiple events where he was (allegedly) discriminated against in his career. This manufactured grievance is also likely a serious contributing factor in what led him to eventually simmer on his race-based hang-ups enough to eventually accuse all black people writ large of being a hate group. Which he did. It lost him syndication of Dilbert, remember?

Aside from that... fixation... he has correctly pointed out that overseas outsourcing and downwards pressure on wages (unspokenly, in wealthy countries) is caused by ruthless profit-seeking and global inequalities. He says that lots of jobs suck and are pointless. Nobody wants to work them, they generate no value to society. Companies are constantly pulling unethical tricks to take your money. Advertising is evil. Venture capitalists and the stock market are deeply unethical parasites.

Eventually, Scott says, the downtrodden will get sick of this bullshit and directly redistribute the capital of the wealthy, by force, and it will be justified. The entire economy is a bullshit engine and you are the fuel — quit your job and be free.

Yes, he says all of this. Not even half-jokingly! In the same book where he. Uh. Also says this:

"The core of [the USA's economic and political] system—giving the shaft to lazy and stupid people who have no land (or 'capital')—remained intact, forming the basis of our capitalist system. It has worked very well so far. The beauty of our current system of capitalism is that it legally discriminates against the two groups who are least likely to complain: stupid people, AKA Induhviduals, because they don't realize they're getting screwed; and lazy people, because protesting is like work."

On a first read, especially out of context, it's so easy to read this joke as a critique of the system, or at least a critique of the conditions that keep the layperson unaware of how hard they're "getting screwed" by the system.

It's not! He likes the system. He has repeatedly said he likes being on top of it. He thinks the people below him, or people experiencing basically any difficulty, are often just struggling because they're stupid and not trying hard enough (doubly so for difficulties he's never experienced and are thus obviously a choice).

Hell, he even correctly identifies that the law is a byzantine structure, lots of crime has systemic causes, and everyone you meet has likely technically broken enough laws to get in serious legal trouble if a cop wanted to punish them arbitrarily.

Then, just a few years later, he said "we should keep repeat criminals in jail for life, because it stops them being out in society, doing crimes". He then made fun of everyone who took issue with the idea.

Who Would Dilbert Vote For?

In The Dilbert Future, Scottyboy says "When it comes to voting, I'm just barely smart enough to know that I'm a total idiot". He then spends the rest of the book, and the next few decades, having very strong opinions about politics, while also constantly insisting that he stays out of politics because he's 'smart enough to know he doesn't know enough to have opinions on politics'.

Nonetheless, he almost says something insightful really early on in his chapter about politics. He proposes a thought experiment: find the hundred smartest people on the planet and ask them to vote on a political issue that the general public is about evenly split on.

He then says the two potential results are both disheartening. Either all the smart people agree on one of the options, which means "democracy erases the impact of intelligent people", or, just like the public, smart people are evenly split, fifty–fifty, which is bad because it indicates "intelligence is irrelevant to democracy".

Of course, he repeatedly misses something obvious: often, splits in opinion arise from differences in values and priorities, not intelligence. People want different things and have different attachments.

Early career Scott, being highly invested in 'rationalist' thinking, often boiled most of life down to 'smart or stupid'. It's good to be smart, bad to be stupid. If you're more smart, you make more correct decisions. That's what matters.

Most of Scaddamy's commentary from 2014 onwards goes in entirely the other direction, without nuance, and boils most of life (and specifically politics) down to "people universally believe things based almost entirely on persuasion, not facts".

The idea that values exist, or indeed any kind of subjectivity that is not 'being persuaded by others regardless of facts', just doesn't seem to be considered.

He's a political nihilist, almost, and neither of his extremes facilitated a worldview that let him do a lot of productive thinking on the internal lives of other people.

And like, political nihilism has an appeal, right? In a world where cruel, authoritarian blowhards seem a popular leadership choice, maybe it's a comfort, in some way, to weight your analysis of "why people believe things" towards 'persuasion' rather than any other factor, like misinformation or intelligence or personal values or access to information?

Noted populist Steven Colbert isn't one to mince words about this phenomena of persuasion-driven beliefs in politics.

"Our old understanding of reality is rapidly dissolving. Fake news and conspiracy theories have become the building blocks of what we mistakenly believe to be the world we live in. Any two of us can look at the same evidence and have entirely different interpretations of what it all means. Politicians, businesses, and even scientists routinely mislead us. Not always, and not necessarily intentionally, but often enough that we generally can’t be sure what is true and what is not.
Recently I saw a debate on television about the cost of single-payer health insurance in the United States. One side said it would cost $32 trillion over ten years. The other side said it would actually save money. That’s at least a $32 trillion difference in how the two sides are seeing reality. For reference, $32 trillion is approximately three times the GDP of China. You can’t get much further apart than that in terms of agreeing on reality.

Sorry, sorry. Mixed up my notes again. And, by that, I mean deliberately misled you about the source of a quote. Again.

That's not Colbert. Once again, that's Scott Adams himself, in Loserthink, right after he's finished glugging on about how it's not reasonable to think it's even possible to have a meaningful consensus on anything (because people are bad at thinking), clearly pointing out that a key issue of fact-finding is that many parties are motivated to lie to you, distorting the playing field.

Immediately after that, of course, he actively discards the idea that one side in a debate might be deliberately and knowingly trying to undermine the other with lies. The real issue, clearly, is that there are differences in how both sides of the mainstream USA political divide are "seeing reality".

Scott also generally blames "the news media" for this breakdown in worldviews.

Twenty years ago, if the media said something dangerous and scary was heading our way, you had to treat that seriously. Today, the news provides one fright after another...

However, twenty years ago, Scott himself was actually saying (in The Dilbert Future, no less) that the news media has always lied and gotten things wrong, but that people only notice when it's a topic they're well-versed in.

He's had a career of complaining about the news for so long that he's contradicting himself about an imagined heyday of the news. Reading Loserthink is a very incoherent experience.

Scott Adams's blatant inability to remember his own opinions should, frankly, have humiliated him into public radio silence decades ago. The fact that he has committed to having one of the last things he will ever do be to host a final episode of his YouTube talk show where he complains about Democrats is a testament to his total inability to self-analyse. Spend time with your fucking family, man. Jesus christ.

The man has never stopped being like this. With one paragraph, he can say something like this:

The world is not a fair place, and there is a good chance the people you are dealing with did not get to where they are because of their intelligence, hard work, and character.

And then in the same book, with no irony, follow that up with this:

My take on the DeSantis [making racist-seeming gaffes] situation is that it is hard to imagine a person who is smart enough to be a major-party candidate for governor (and since this writing has become governor) but also so dumb that he thinks acting like a gigantic racist before the election would work in his favour in the modern world.

A fantastic argument: Although a great deal of success is luck, a racist could never be successful in public office, because nobody stupid enough to be openly racist would be smart enough to hold office. After all, the USA is notably not racist at all!

Given how DeSantis has acted since 2019 (very racistly), when Scoot Roll here said that? Yeah. I think we can call this one a swing and a miss.

Scott has never actually understood politics, because he doesn't understand people. He has some understanding of the outward rhetoric of 'persuasion', but nothing of the internal lives of people who are or are not persuaded.

While he has displayed a fairly reasonable understanding of how populist candidates use grand promises, catchy slogans, and simplistic ideas to succeed, he has largely failed to make distinctions between different types of populist, lumping them largely into the buckets of 'I like them' and 'I don't like them', rather than distinguishing between their actual political motivations and goals.

Unfortunately, this lack of historical context means that while many of Scott's predictions were generic to the point of incoherence, he was also totally incapable of seeing alarming and current political events and trends as anything other than "unique" — with no real ability to draw links between right-wing populism of decades past and present. And therefore he fell for it. Repeatedly.

He's frequently described Trump as 'unique', and felt drawn to him because he ticked the right grievances, but never drawn substantial connections between him and politicians like Rob Ford, Canadian disaster that he was, or even the really obvious mirrors of Nixon and Regan, let alone examples from further back in history or further out in the world, beyond the anglosphere. Not a thing. It's all unprecedented, according to Scott.

In fact, he has regularly accused people who draw accurate comparisons to history of being stupid and relying on cliches, rather than thinking for themselves.

Arrogance will take you far, I suppose. Mostly, however, insecurity has informed Scott's politics. He still worries about race, about gender, about being bullied, despite being a wealthy white dude with above-average social influence who claims he has excised all of his irrational anxieties and sense of shame.

I really thought his politics would be a deeper pool... but it's a crappy little puddle. He's not even a good shock jockey. He just kind of sucks.

Even at the end, petering out quietly after having (apparently) tried to treat his cancer with anti-parasitic immunostimulant drugs because of a right-wing fringe conspiracy, he's still trying to hitch his wagon to political commentary, still trying to score points.

"My enemies — in other words, people who are Democrats, mostly — are going to come after me pretty hard [now that my cancer diagnosis is public], so I have to put up with that[...] But I'm ready for that."

It is, to say the least, weird and pathetic.

A Little Bit of the Old Ultraviolence, Lads?

There is one last part of Scott's behaviour that most unpleasantly provides a grim contrast with everything positive and empathetic he says in How to Fail.

I'm going to skip back to the early bits in The Dilbert Future and re-quote Adams talking about the little bonuses of becoming augmented with technology.

"I'd love to see crosshairs appear in my viewfinder every time I looked at someone. It would make me feel menacing, and I'd like that. It would also be great to have my computer built into my skull. That way I could surf the Net during useless periods of life, such as when people talk to me."

This clearly a joke; the standard misanthropy we're familiar with by now.

However, about fifteen years after putting this to print, speaking simultaneously about his anti-social stepson dying of a drug overdose and a different young man shooting a gun into a crowd of people, Adams basically said that some young men 'go bad' and the best we can hope for is that they die without hurting anyone else — his stepson included.

There is no fixing or helping them, apparently. He continued by saying that maybe it would be better if the families of these young men (who he does not seem to fully see as people, but Problems or Things that parents must Own and Control) were able to "put them down", instead of waiting for them to do harm to others and then die.

He then said the only other possible systemic solution he could envision would be separating these people from society entirely, because, as mentioned, he apparently saw no realistic way to help these dangerous young men become less dangerous.

This is fascist and eugenicist rhetoric. I do not use these words lightly. Scott is saying that there is a group of people, defined by their gender and behaviour, that are so dangerous to everyone around them that they must not be allowed to remain in or contribute to society. They must be removed, be that through total isolation or death.

As is typical of people who spout such rhetoric, Scott's own behaviours and values are remarkably similar to those of the bogeymen he has cooked up to fearmonger about.

Younger Scott says he'd like crosshairs to appear in his vision because he resents people at large. Older Scott says he thinks young men can be uniquely, unsolvably dangerous to society because, in part, of their resentments to people at large.

Scott first relates a feeling that everyone around him is stupid and deserves his condescension (at best). He feels that interacting with them is pointless and boring because they're all selfish, make demands on his time and energy, and make decisions that annoy him. He frames this as normal and inevitable for smart men (like himself).

Then, he describes in himself an entitlement to sex and affection; specifically, he feels threatened and worried by the potential loss of it, and frames this as normal and inevitable for smart men (like himself).

Thirdly, he then says that he likes to feel menacing. Him being around people he finds irritating, or having people deny him the entitlements he is 'biologically' driven towards, is made more bearable by his feelings of hostility and menace towards them. He frames this as normal and inevitable for all men.

These are not feelings he identifies as problematic impulses arising from conflict that he has to manage. These are the poultices and salves he reaches for when he is inconvenienced or slighted.

However hyperbolic the jokes may be, these ideas form a core theme he reiterates throughout his work, particularly when talking about his early life, but also over his entire career: alienation, resentment, and then feeling reassured and empowered through spite or thoughts of disproportionate retribution.

I'm being very careful, here, to not ascribe any of the specifics to a genuine violent risk he poses. This is not about "he joked about crosshairs, which is inflammatory language, so he must be a shooter-in-waiting".

The man is in his sixties and dying of prostate cancer. I think we're long past whatever 'danger window' there might have been. Nonetheless, I have left this stuff until the very end to ensure as much context as possible.

This is about Scott's pattern of, jokingly and sincerely, justifying the way he reaches for self-superior hostility and violent imagery as a soothing mechanism when met with mundane, human friction and power dynamics he's not comfortable with, then refusing to see how this attitude could be corrosive, and also being unable to see how the same attitudes he holds could be the same attitudes that drive damaging or violent behaviour in others.

Once upon a time, Scott said this:

"There are people like me . . . and then there are people who can beat the crap out of people like me. The latter have always been bullies. As children, it was their responsibility to administer the wedgies and noogies to all of the other children. They learned to control their power. Those of us who were on the receiving end of the wedgies and noogies never learned to control our power, because we didn't have any."

About a decade later, he also said this:

"If we made it legal for kids to kill their bullies, a lot of problems would go away. We'd create new problems, sure. But how could those new problems be worse?"

Shockingly, Scott does not seem to be able to see that his proposed solution is just... the exact problem he is attempting to 'address'. Angry kids striking out against people they perceive as aggressors is the problem.

Scott has perpetually imagined himself as a bullying victim, no matter the actual dynamic, for his whole life. Maybe he really was bullied heavily as a kid — he doesn't go into lots of detail about that in public.

This perpetual persecution complex is exactly the same sentiment that has driven the vast majority of 'violent young men' who Scott thinks are mysterious, unpredictable, and unsolvable.

Justifying disproportionate retribution against a constructed 'threat' is how mass shootings happen. It's how lynchings happen. It's how domestic violence happens.

Scott, who always imagines himself as someone without power, actually has power vastly beyond the average person — yet he still views "people not giving him what he wants as part of an exchange he has reductively assumed is happening" as a power dynamic skewed against him. He always acts like he is the underdog, at a disadvantage. That retribution, of some kind, would be... justified.

Worse yet, he has never understood this contradiction between viewing "self-justified violence towards society" as unsolvable, and simultaneously holding a perpetual bitter grudge against society that he soothes with thoughts of violence and menace. He cannot extrapolate from this. He is incapable of joining the dots.

I don't encourage you to read the manifestos of shooters, but... if you do, there is a recurring theme. They feel outcast, belittled, shamed... regardless of whether those feelings are reasonable. They carry resentment and powerlessness in themselves against an overwhelming "other", and are justifying their violence by saying "they all struck first at me, some just by existing, and brought this on themselves". Also, often they're radicalised by some form of unexamined bigotry.

Can you see not only the blatant hypocrisy from Scott here, but the parallels between how he has viewed the world and how violent young men justify their actions?

There are increasingly uncomfortable layers to this, particularly because (much like violent young men who view asking society and its institutions for help as hopeless) Scott thinks there is no assistance to be provided.

He cannot imagine a world where even trained professionals could help, at any stage — no early intervention, no crisis intervention, nothing. In fact, he thinks of all of psychiatry as bunk, and (as established) of many mental health and neurological challenges, like ADHD, as not real or not helped by intervention!

You could show Scott Adams a contributing cause to youth alienation and crime, like ADHD, and he would tell you that it's bullshit, that "medicating it is a con", that doing anything but ironing it out with social pressure is worthless.

Then he'd turn around and say that social pressure and bullies are bad and we should kill them, maybe, and also youth alienation is a terrible horrible and tragically unsolvable problem.

I'm not saying Scooty is a generationally-displaced mass shooter. I'm not saying his body of work, his spiteful humour, has radicalised anyone. Being exposed to his humour doesn't magically imprint his worldview on the reader. After all, I read his work and it helped turn me into a bleeding-heart socialist who believes therapy is good and thinks everyone I meet knows more about lots of things than I do. We couldn't be more different.

I'm saying that it's really bleak how Scott Adams has carried the exact same bitter solipsism within himself as dangerous and violent people do, and he can't see that.

He would agree that selfish entitlement and misdirected anger is at the root of a lot of societal ills and dangers — and yet, not only is he completely unable to recognise this alienation in himself while it ruins his life? He views it as ultimately unsolvable, shuns systematic fixes, but still thinks the system that fosters it is excellent.

So he makes jokes about how he's smarter than everyone else, and how humanity is awful, and... just lives his life as if that's mostly true. I don't know about you, but if I thought most people around me could barely think coherently? I think that would fuck up my life.

I think I would develop a pretty myopic and shallow, self-serving value system. I think I'd be insufferable, particularly if I "won" capitalism, the system I so whole-heartedly endorsed, only to find that I was still gnawingly unhappy in a way I could not properly identify nor solve.

In large part, I think this is caused by his perpetual insistence that life is 95% luck, that truth isn't just hard but nearly impossible to agree on, that experts are just hacks. If you keep on expanding the reasonable observation that "a minority of experts and successful people are selfish idiot liars who got lucky and won't admit it" to all notable people, and eventually the entire rest of the population, how can you not ruin your worldview?

The worst of it all is that the less you think of other people, the easier it becomes to treat them badly. You can see this all over Scott's life: an escalating trend of him growing to disdain others.

First his co-workers, then people at large, then specific groups of people in the very industries he works in and alongside, and then (repeatedly) people who are close to him, and eventually just... whoever right-wing pundits start telling him to dislike and distrust.

There's a low-tier argument to be made that he didn't believe a lot of what he said, but that argument is largely undercut by how hard he has beefed the final twenty years of his life, and his entire reputation, by chasing these ideas, exchanging millions of eyes on his comic and any hope of publishing his upcoming books for a few thousand views on his YouTube streams.

In the end, if the entirety of Scott Adams's work with Dilbert, and his blogging, and many of his non-fiction works, the whole cynical abrasive façade, has just been an exercise in him slowly pandering more and more to different subsets of cynical, juvenile readers for profit? If Fail was his attempt at communicating his honest, kind beliefs, and the rest has been insincere grifting? Then he grifted consistently enough it became indistinguishable from his sincere beliefs.

A person who is willing perpetually lie for profit well past the point of ensuring financial stability for the remainder of his and his children's lives is equally reprehensible as someone who genuinely believes in this stuff.

Regardless of whether my assumptions about his sincerity, childhood, and neurotype are right, regardless of the origin of his neuroses, Scott still, to the bitter end, is insecure, desperately needs to be right all the time, and craves the unending attention of others.

He ends up here: a man who lives his life through bigoted grievances aired on social media. And the saddest thing of all is that he's just not very special or interesting, when you get to the bottom of it. He's a dollar-store bigot.

People like him are a dime a dozen. Andrew Tate, Richard Dawkins, Graham Lineham, Scott Adams, Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopoulos, all of these people are the exact goddamn same.

Driven by insecurities and a fear of being weak, becoming invested in upholding the same social and economic systems that make them so afraid, with nobody to critique them or push them to honestly self-reflect and self-refine.

It's not that the system is bad, they decide, it's that they're not the one at the top. And once they are, it's your fault that they're still not happy or secure.

This is the closing minutes for Scott. He has the choice between quiet, comfortable, uncontroversial irrelevance... or a few final months of video-streaming inane comments on political pop news for the fawning adulation of a few remaining grievance-driven fanatics backing him against the heckling he is deliberately provoking.

You can see for yourself which option he's choosing.

Wherefore Art Thou, Scott?

Ultimately, if there's a single actionable insight we can take from everything Scott has done and become, it's that advocating for kind, optimistic sincerity whenever it's easy won't save you from also acting ghoulishly at other times, even as you think you're just as kind and lovely a person as ever.

Being absolutely right and being spectacularly wrong feel exactly the same.
— Scott Adams in Loserthink

You have to do the work and build a life, a system, that actually engages with what it means to actually be morally fair and consistent, even when it's hard. Occasionally advocating for the idea of 'being nice' isn't politics. It isn't ethics, morals, or values. It isn't even kind. And it sure isn't enough.

You can't persistently be a devil's advocate and then be surprised when people start to think you might genuinely be cashing his checks.

Further, at no point is ticking boxes in the rubric of niceness a defence against having done or advocated for harm. You can't write a nice book, then suggest a large segment of the population is better off dead because you can't imagine a way to "help" them, and still be 'nice'.

Ultimately, you will lose the right to be exclusively or even primarily defined by your episodes of niceness. Scott wanted his legacy to be his writings on religion, or perhaps just Dilbert. Instead, it will be his stupid, idiotic, uninformed, arrogant bigotry.

We have to wake up every day and try to choose to, very deliberately, do all that difficult emotional legwork needed to overcome our kneejerk reactions and biases and resentments.

That's how we end up able to actually act kindly and empathetically and helpfully and honestly, consistently and with as much informed context as feasible, to as many people as we can. That never changes, even if we do something big and grand that genuinely helps many, many people!

You do that thing, and then the next day you get up again and the only way to keep being a kind and helpful person is to keep doing all that legwork. To keep on unlearning and relearning, self-calibrating, re-assessing. Your resentments and frustrations are not moral indicators.

Doing the "right thing" is not a single moment. It's not a big, dramatic effort. It's about sustained and sometimes tedious consistency. You have to have a system, because the goal of "being good" isn't just a temporary thing, in this case: it doesn't exist at all. Like happiness, it is not a state of being, but something that emerges in the present moment from your actions.

You are not obligated to complete the work; neither are you permitted to set it down.

If I have done anything with this prehumous eulogy for a cartoonist I've never actually met (of whom my idea of is not just dead but never actually existed), I hope that I have pried something unintended from the muck and used it as part of something that carries my values onwards and outwards.

If failure is a chance to learn and grow, then we should act like it, no matter how embarrassing it is. I hope none of us turn out like Scott has. I hope we can all come to understand ourselves, and the things we love, and the things we detest. I hope we can all make better, kinder things from what we're given.

Don't give up.
— Mal Peet, on a sunny afternoon in May, 2012