Scott A. on Scott A. on Scott A.
Scott Alexander has put up one of his greatest posts ever, a 10,000-word eulogy to Dilbert creator Scott Adams, of which I would’ve been happy to read 40,000 words more. In it, Alexander trains a microscope on Adams’ tragic flaws as a thinker and human being, but he adds:
In case it’s not obvious, I loved Scott Adams.
Partly this is because we’re too similar for me to hate him without hating myself.
And:
Adams was my teacher in a more literal way too. He published several annotated collections, books where he would present comics along with an explanation of exactly what he was doing in each place, why some things were funny and others weren’t, and how you could one day be as funny as him. Ten year old Scott devoured these … objectively my joke posts get the most likes and retweets of anything I write, and I owe much of my skill in the genre to cramming Adams’ advice into a malleable immature brain.
When I first heard the news that Scott Adams had succumbed to cancer, I posted something infinitely more trivial on my Facebook. I simply said:
Scott Adams (who reigned for decades as the #1 Scott A. of the Internet, with Alexander as #2 and me as at most #3) was a hateful asshole, a nihilist, and a crank. And yet, even when reading the obituaries that explain what an asshole, nihilist, and crank he was, I laugh whenever they quote him.
Inspired by Scott Alexander, I’d like now to try again, to say something more substantial. As Scott Alexander points out, Scott Adams’ most fundamental belief—the through-line that runs not only through Dilbert but through all his books and blog posts and podcasts—was that the world is ruled by idiots. The pointy-haired boss always wins, spouting about synergy and the true essence of leadership, and the nerdy Dilberts always lose. Trying to change minds by rational argument is a fools’ errand, as “master persuaders” and skilled hypnotists will forever run rings around you. He, Scott Adams, is cleverer than everyone else, among other things because he realizes all this—but even he is powerless to change it.
Or as Adams put it in The Dilbert Principle:
It’s useless to expect rational behavior from the people you work with, or anybody else for that matter. If you can come to peace with the fact that you’re surrounded by idiots, you’ll realize that resistance is futile, your tension will dissipate, and you can sit back and have a good laugh at the expense of others.
The thing is, if your life philosophy is that the world is ruled by idiots, and that confident charlatans will always beat earnest nerds, you’re … often going to be vindicated by events. Adams was famously vindicated back in 2015, when he predicted Trump’s victory in the 2016 election (since Trump, you see, was a “master persuader”), before any other mainstream commentator thought that Trump even had a serious chance of winning the Republican nomination.
But if you adopt this worldview, you’re also often going to be wrong—as countless of Adams’ other confident predictions were (see Scott Alexander’s post for examples), to say nothing of his scientific or moral views.
My first hint that the creator of Dilbert was not a reliable thinker, was when I learned of his smugly dismissive view of science. One of the earliest Shtetl-Optimized posts, way back in 2006, was entitled Scott A., disbeliever in Darwinism. At that time, Adams’ crypto-creationism struck me as just some bizarre, inexplicable deviation. I’m no longer confused about it: on the one hand, Scott Alexander’s eulogy shows just how much deeper the crankishness went, how Adams also gobbled medical misinformation, placed his own cockamamie ideas about gravity on par with general relativity, etc. etc. But Alexander succeeds in reconciling all this with Adams’ achievements: it’s all just consequences from the starting axiom that the world is ruled by morons, and that he, Scott Adams, is the only one clever enough to see through it all.
Is my epistemology any different? Do I not also look out on the world, and see idiots and con-men and pointy-haired bosses in every direction? Well, not everywhere. At any rate, I see far fewer of them in the hard sciences.
This seems like a good time to say something that’s been a subtext of Shtetl-Optimized for 20 years, but that Scott Alexander has inspired me to make text.
My whole worldview starts from the observation that science works. Not perfectly, of course—working in academic science for nearly 30 years, I’ve had a close-up view of the flaws—but the motor runs. On a planet full of pointy-haired bosses and imposters and frauds, science nevertheless took us in a few centuries from wretchedness and superstition to walking on the moon and knowing the age of the universe and the code of life.
This is the point where people always say: that’s all well and good, but you can’t derive ought from is, and science, for all its undoubted successes, tells us nothing about what to value or how to live our lives.
To which I reply: that’s true in a narrow sense, but it dramatically understates how far you can get from the “science works” observation.
As one example, you can infer that the people worth listening to are the people who speak and write clearly, who carefully distinguish what they know from what they don’t, who sometimes change their minds when presented with opposing views and at any rate give counterarguments—i.e., who exemplify the values that make science work. The political systems worth following are the ones that test their ideas against experience, that have built-in error-correction mechanisms, that promote people based on ability rather than loyalty—the same things that make scientific institutions work, insofar as they do work. And of course, if the scientists who study X are nearly unanimous in saying that a certain policy toward X would be terrible, then we’d better have a damned good reason to pursue the policy anyway. This still leaves a wide range of moral and political views on the table, but it rules out virtually every kind of populism, authoritarianism, and fundamentalism.
Incidentally, this principle—that one’s whole moral and philosophical worldview should grow out of the seed of science working—is why, from an early age, I’ve reacted to every kind of postmodernism as I would to venomous snakes. Whenever someone tells me that science is just another narrative, a cultural construct, a facade for elite power-seeking, etc., to me they might as well be O’Brien from 1984, in the climactic scene where he tortures Winston Smith into agreeing that 2+2=5, and that the stars are just tiny dots a few miles away if the Party says they are. Once you can believe absurdities, you can justify atrocities.
Scott Adams’ life is interesting to me in that shows exactly how far it’s possible to get without internalizing this. Yes, you can notice that the pointy-haired boss is full of crap. You can make fun of the boss. If you’re unusually good at making fun of him, you might even become a rich, famous, celebrated cartoonist. But you’re never going to figure out any ways of doing things that are systematically better than the pointy-haired boss’s ways, or even recognize the ways that others have found. You’ll be in error far more often than in doubt. You might even die of prostate cancer earlier than necessary, because you listen to medical crackpots and rely on ivermectin, turning to radiation and other established treatments only after having lost crucial time.
Scott Adams was hardly the first great artist to have tragic moral flaws, or to cause millions of his fans to ask whether they could separate the artist from the art. But I think he provides one of the cleanest examples where the greatness and the flaws sprang from the same source: namely, overgeneralization from the correct observation that “the world is full of idiots,” in a way that leaves basically no room even for Darwin or Einstein, and so inevitably curdles over time into crankishness, bitterness, and arrogance. May we laugh at Scott Adams’ cartoons and may we learn from his errors, both of which are now permanent parts of the world’s heritage.