Scott Adams

Scott Adams (1957–) is a trained hypnotist[3] and cartoonist known for Dilbert, a long-running satirical comic strip about a white-collar office worker in America. His blog, which is currently a fascinating study of a man going insane,[4] attracted some major media attention during the 2016 election. Long before that, he advanced a number of crank positions, including questioning evolution, and the validity of the fossil record. He has appeared on InfoWars, further cementing his genius IQ.[5]

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“”As far as Adams' ego goes … he has a certified genius I.Q., and that's hard to hide.
—plannedchaos Scott Adams[1]
“”If experience is necessary for being president, name a political topic I can't master in one hour under the tutelage of top experts.
—Scott Adams[2]

Adams has Bachelor of Economics from Hartwick College, and a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of California, Berkeley.[6][7] Prior to his Dilbert career, he worked in telecommunications as a damager manager, Scott has embarked on a whole new life as a social engineer. He currently lives in a house shaped like Dilbert and has a matrix of microwaves for making large quantities of burrito and popcorn at once,[No, not The Onion] while writing about how neocon interventionism is just a persuasive tactic.[8][9]

Views on science and history

Adams knows The Secret

In his 1997 book The Dilbert Future, Adams professed his belief in the bit of woo known as the law of attraction (a concept popularized by the 2006 book The Secret), claiming that he has achieved multiple life goals through the power of positive thinking alone:[10]

The idea behind writing affirmations is that you simply write down your goals 15 times a day and somehow, as if by magic, coincidences start to build until you achieve your objective against all odds. Prior to my Dilbert success, I used affirmations on a string of hugely unlikely goals that all materialized in ways that seemed miraculous. Some of the successes you can explain away by assuming I'm hugely talented and incredibly sexy, and therefore it is no surprise that I accomplished my goals despite seemingly long odds. But some of my goals involved neither hard work nor skill of any kind. I succeeded with those too, against all odds.

Borderline Holocaust denialism

In a 2006 blog post[11] (which has since been deleted), Adams flirted with Holocaust denialism, questioning whether estimates of the number of people killed during the Holocaust are reliable:

I'd also like to know how the Holocaust death total of 6 million was determined. Is it the sort of number that is so well documented with actual names and perhaps a Nazi paper trail that no historian could doubt its accuracy, give or take ten thousand? Or is it like every other LRN (large round number) that someone pulled out of his ass and it became true by repetition? Does the figure include resistance fighters and civilians who died in the normal course of war, or just the Jews rounded up and killed systematically? No reasonable person doubts that the Holocaust happened, but wouldn't you like to know how the exact number was calculated, just for context? Without that context, I don't know if I should lump the people who think the Holocaust might have been exaggerated for political purposes with the Holocaust deniers. If they are equally nuts, I’d like to know that. I want context.[12]

If he actually wanted to know where the figures come from, he could have used his genius IQ looked on Wikipedia[13] or used his Internet skills to Google it[14] or even asked an expert as he once recommended,[2] but posting in a blog is an odd way to find an authoritative source for any fact, and smacks of JAQing off.

Struggling to understand evolution

In March 2007, Adams posted a piece on his blog seemingly questioning evolution, in which he stated that the fossil record doesn't pass his baloney detector:

I've been trying for years to reconcile my usually-excellent bullshit filter with the idea that evolution is considered a scientific fact. Why does a well-established scientific fact set off my usually-excellent bullshit filter like a five-alarm fire? It's the fossil record that has been bugging me the most. It looks like bullshit. Smells like bullshit. Tastes like bullshit. Why isn't it bullshit? All those scientists can't be wrong.[15]

His explanation for why he deems fossils "bullshit" seems to be the product of an extremely garbled understanding of paleontology and evolutionary biology:

Yesterday I read this article in Newsweek about how DNA testing is being used to show that, well, fossils are bullshit.

The bottom line is that DNA tests (which do not set off my bullshit detector) have shown that you can't really tell what set of bones begat other sets of bones just by looking at how they differed and how old they are. Apparently evolution is more complex than imagined, and there were lots of ape-people varieties wandering around at the same time. Some had modern features that they weren’t supposed to have. The so-called modern features apparently popped up and disappeared more than once, and in more than one species.

My bullshit filter accepts this new information. I was having a hard time with the idea that some goober in tan pants would dig up a bone fragment in Africa and know it was his own (great X 1,000) grandmother. It just didn't feel right. And now we know, assuming the DNA evidence is solid, that the guy in the tan pants was full of shit. All that the fossils show is that there used to be ape-people who are not us.[15]

Advocating Pascal's Wager

In his post about fossils, Adams stated that he does not believe in "Intelligent Design or creationism or invisible friends of any sort."[15] However, in a 2007 blog post, he appeared to express the view that atheism (defined here solely as claiming there's no God) is essentially a form of dogmatism, and he used a version of Pascal's Wager to defend belief in an invisible friend God:

This brings me to atheists. In order to be certain that God doesn't exist, you have to possess a godlike mental capacity – the ability to be 100% certain. A human can't be 100% certain about anything. Our brains aren't that reliable. Therefore, to be a true atheist, you have to believe you are the very thing that you argue doesn’t exist: God.

Perhaps you will argue that being 99.999999% certain God doesn’t exist is just as good as being 100% sure. That strikes me as bad math. As other philosotainers have famously noted, a small chance of spending eternity in Hell has to be taken seriously. Eternity is a long time.

Let me put this in perspective. You might be willing to accept a 10% risk of going skiing and getting hurt, but you wouldn’t accept a 10% risk of a nuclear war. The larger the potential problem, the less risk you are willing to tolerate.

An eternity in Hell is the largest penalty there could ever be. So while you might not worry about a .00000000001% chance of ending up in Hell, you can’t deny the math. .00000000001% of eternity is a lot longer than your entire mortal life. Infinitely longer.[16]

Amusingly, Adams blurs percent certainty with percent probability; these are not the same. In addition, probability cannot be calculated for events that have zero historical data or evidence backing the event up. Adams' purported chance of ending up in Hell, 0.00000000001%, is completely arbitrary and could have easily been 0.00000000002% or even a Schlafly Statistic. Plus, his larger point that a fraction of infinity is still infinity is true but come on! Applying pseudo-risk management to religious decisions? Of course, additionally most atheists are not claiming they know God doesn't exist, especially not with perfect certainty, apparently an unknown fact to Adams (though easy to find out), so he attacks a strawman from the beginning.

"Science kicked me in the balls!"

In a 2015 blog post, Adams blamed science for the tendency of the media to misrepresent science, accusing science of "being silent when bad science morphed into popular misconceptions."[17] He went on to offer the following muddled understanding of the scientific process:

I think science has earned its lack of credibility with the public. If you kick me in the balls for 20-years, how do you expect me to close my eyes and trust you?

If a person doesn’t believe climate change is real, despite all the evidence to the contrary, is that a case of a dumb human or a science that has not earned credibility? We humans operate on pattern recognition. The pattern science serves up, thanks to its winged monkeys in the media, is something like this:

Step One: We are totally sure the answer is X.

Step Two: Oops. X is wrong. But Y is totally right. Trust us this time.

Science isn't about being right every time, or even most of the time. It is about being more right over time and fixing what it got wrong. So how is a common citizen supposed to know when science is "done" and when it is halfway to done which is the same as being wrong?[17]

Global warming
Climate change denial in Dilbert

Though Adams says he doesn't reject the consensus, he makes up "reasoning" for why science isn't convincing the "skeptics".[18] As with other points, he appears to be more JAQing off rather than offering valid suggestions to convince the deniers. He calls the climate scientists "alarmists" and gives poor "reasoning" for why the "skeptics" aren't convinced, mainly because things look "fishy". He demonstrates a poor, simplistic understanding of climate change; for instance, he tried comparing prediction models for global warming to financial models and concluded that, since financial models cannot predict the future, neither can models made from very predictable long-term phenomena. He also asks for accurate economic models to show how it affects states of affairs, something well out of economic expertise. And then, he says economic models are worthless.

Stop telling me the "models" (plural) are good. If you told me one specific model was good, that might sound convincing. But if climate scientists have multiple models, and they all point in the same general direction, something sounds fishy. If climate science is relatively "settled," wouldn't we all use the same models and assumptions?

And why can't science tell me which one of the different models is the good one, so we can ignore the less-good ones? What’s up with that? If you can't tell me which model is better than the others, why would I believe anything about them?

He thinks that since there are several models that point in one direction, scientists are manipulating data. On the other hand, according to science, many models predicting the same outcome make it more robust at prediction. The suggestion he makes, which is "using the same models and assumptions" — plural, still! — means he clearly contradicts himself. To have a sheen of credibility, he should have gone with: "model and assumptions".

He also saw an article (without specifying it or referencing it) that said that humans are responsible for more than 100% of warming because otherwise, Earth would be cooling. He thought this was silly and therefore, climate science is dubious. Since the beaches he saw look "normal" and he saw Google results that "debunk" the rise in sea levels, climate science is fishy and can't be trusted. He doesn't like it when the climate change "alarmists" resort to a version of Pascal's Wager because "[t]he world is full of risks that might happen. We don't treat all of them as real." He makes arguments that are typical of denialist talking points, including "Earth went through natural cycles before" and "why is there a decrease in Arctic ice and an increase in Antarctic ice" (with no regard to nuance, such as ice specified), stating that there are record cold AND record heat times or periods, with disregard for the big picture.

If these are questions the climate change deniers want to pose to climate scientists, it only shows how ignorant they are, not that they want results that don't resemble a financial scam.

Views on women and sexuality

Women's work, brains, and opinions

In March 2011, Adams posted a piece on his blog in which he appeared to use some standard MRA talking points, stating that wage disparity between men and women is the result of men "get[ting] better results" than women because "on average, men negotiate pay differently and approach risk differently than women," and also apparently attributing the lower number of women in high managerial positions to an unwillingness to sacrifice "family time" in exchange for career advancement.[19] However, he seemingly advised MRAs that it is pointless trying to fight "the widespread suppression of men's rights," on the apparent grounds that women are simple-minded and we're supposed to be nice to simple-minded people:[19]

The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.

In response to the backlash he received, Adams deleted the post from his blog, apparently forgetting that it's impossible to make something disappear once it hits the Internet.[20] He left a comment on the blog Feministe, stating that objectors to the post were failing to understand it because their "reading comprehension" was compromised by "emotion", unlike regular readers of his blog, who he claimed have "an unusually high reading comprehension level" and "are pretty far along the bell curve toward rational thought, and relatively immune to emotional distortion."[20][21]

In the introduction to Your New Job Title is "Accomplice", a compilation of Dilbert comic strips released in 2013, Adams claimed to have suffered "reverse discrimination" in the 1990s, alleging that his bosses at the time told him he was "unqualified for any sort of promotion because [he] had boring DNA and a scrotum."[22] This contradicts an interview he gave in Inc. magazine in 1996, in which he stated he "told all of [his] bosses [he] would resign if they ever felt [his] costs exceeded [his] benefits," and then voluntarily complied when he was eventually asked to resign due to "budget constraints".[23]

Adams published a piece on his blog in March 2012 seemingly defending Rush Limbaugh's calling Sandra Fluke a "slut" for her advocacy of mandatory inclusion of contraception in employer insurance plans.[24] In the piece, he stated, "My interpretation of events is that Limbaugh saw Fluke as a capable adult, and a public figure, tough enough to handle some harsh language."[24] In 2015, he revisited the subject of women's opinions, writing that men talking over women in meetings is inevitable, as women are more likely to be interrupted because they are "more verbal than men," and "anyone who talks too long without adding enough value" is fair game.[25]

In June 2011, Adams posted a piece on his blog that "society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable," with men's "natural instincts" apparently representing a desire to "act like unrestrained horny animals."[26]

In November 2015, Adams published a similar piece on his site, lamenting how sex was not a guaranteed reward for being nice to women and that "access to sex" requires consent:[25][27]

When I go to dinner, I expect the server to take my date’s order first. I expect the server to deliver her meal first. I expect to pay the check. I expect to be the designated driver, or at least manage the transportation for the evening. And on the way out, I will hold the door for her, then open the door to the car.

When we get home, access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman. If the woman has additional preferences in terms of temperature, beverages, and whatnot, the man generally complies. If I fall in love and want to propose, I am expected to do so on my knees, to set the tone for the rest of the marriage.

Adams further argued in the piece that males have such an uncontrollable need for sex that being denied it inevitably leads them to suicide and violence:[25][27]

While I'm being politically incorrect, let me describe to you the mind of a teenage boy. Our frontal lobes aren't complete. We don't imagine the future. Our bodies want sex more than we want to stay alive. Literally. Lonely boys tend to be suicidal when the odds of future female companionship are low.

So if you are wondering how men become cold-blooded killers, it isn't religion that is doing it. If you put me in that situation, I can say with confidence I would sign up for suicide bomb duty. And I'm not even a believer. Men like hugging better than they like killing. But if you take away my access to hugging, I will probably start killing, just to feel something. I'm designed that way. I'm a normal boy. And I make no apology for it. — Elliot Rodger Scott Adams

He also contended that the United States is a "female-dominated country" and a "matriarchy," in contrast to "DAESH-held territory" in the indisputably male-dominated Islamic Middle East, where he claimed "top-ranked men have multiple wives and the low-ranked men either have no access to women, or they have sex with captured slaves."[25][27] He suggested that the way to stop DAESH is to tell potential recruits that, while "killing infidels" will net them "virgins in heaven," killing the leaders "holding the leash on [their] balls" will grant them instant access to actual human women.[25][27]

Hillary kicked men in the balls

In June 2016, Adams posted a piece on the 2016 U.S. presidential race on his blog, writing that the "biggest unreported story" of the election cycle was the "humiliation of the American male". As evidence of this rampant misandry, he cited a dishwasher detergent ad featuring the stereotypical bumbling, housework-inept husband, who just so happened to be wearing a V-neck sweater. According to Adams, V-neck sweaters are "the uniform of a man who is owned by a woman," and he has thrown out about twenty-five such sweaters given to him as gifts by women trying to turn him into a beta cuck. Apparently, Adams saw the scourge of cleaning product ads and V-neck sweaters as portending the "largest male turnout of any presidential election in American history," and thus the election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.[28]

Adams followed this up in July 2016 with piece arguing that the Democratic National Convention represented a "celebration that [men's] role in society is permanently diminished." As he explained, the convention, featuring the first female presidential candidate for a major party, was held in an "impressive venue that was, in all likelihood, designed and built mostly by men," and that "men [got] to watch it all at home, in homes designed and built mostly by men, thanks to the technology that was designed and built mostly by men."[29]

This affront to men was so severe that Adams suggested, quite seriously, that watching the DNC had tanked men's testosterone and made them miserable:[29]

I watched singer Alicia Keys perform her song Superwoman at the convention and experienced a sinking feeling. I'm fairly certain my testosterone levels dropped as I watched, and that's not even a little bit of an exaggeration. Science says men's testosterone levels rise when they experience victory, and drop when they experience the opposite. I watched Keys tell the world that women are the answer to our problems. True or not, men were probably not feeling successful and victorious during her act.

Let me say this again, so you know I'm not kidding. Based on what I know about the human body, and the way our thoughts regulate our hormones, the Democratic National Convention is probably lowering testosterone levels all over the country. Literally, not figuratively. And since testosterone is a feel-good chemical for men, I think the Democratic convention is making men feel less happy. They might not know why they feel less happy, but they will start to associate the low feeling with whatever they are looking at when it happens, i.e. Clinton.

Nonetheless, Adams made a point of stating that he was endorsing Clinton "for [his] personal safety," as he was convinced "[his] safety [was] at risk if I [was] seen as supportive of Trump."[30] Trump supporters, on the other hand, did not represent a threat in Adams' estimation, since they apparently "don't have any bad feelings about patriotic Americans such as [himself]."[30] Adams predicted (correctly) that Trump would win.[30] He stated that he didn't plan on voting, as his "views don't align with either candidate," and he wanted to "protect [his] objectivity."[29]

It was all a lie though. Following Trump's election, Adams showed that he has a raging hard-on for Trump.[31]

Views on Race

In a 28 June 2020 Tweet, Adams made the following comment in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement:

"I lost my TV show for being white when UPN decided it would focus on an African-American audience. That was the third job I lost for being white. The other two in corporate America. (They told me directly.)"

To which Brianna Wu replied: "Maybe that’s more on you than them for creating such an overwhelmingly white cast of characters."

However, in a 2006 interview, he explained the show's cancellation this way:

It was on UPN, a network few people watch. And because of some management screw-ups between the first and second seasons the time slot kept changing and we lost our viewers. We were also scheduled to follow the worst show ever made, Shasta McNasty. On TV, your viewership is 75% determined by how many people watch the show before yours. That killed us."[32]

Adams later engaged in a Twitter argument with comic book artist Bill Sienkiewicz, during which Sienkiewicz suggested they have a drawing challenge for charity. Birds of Prey writer Gail Simone suggested the challenge benefit Black Lives Matter. In a now deleted Tweet, Adams stated; "I wouldn't give to a violent, racist group like BLM, but more importantly not the least in interacting with you."

Seinkiewicz later posted on Facebook:

So... the draw-off with Scott 'Dilbert' Adams apparently isn’t happening. He made it pretty clear on Twitter this AM. He got no interest. Racist’s gotta racist, Irredeemable bag of shit’s gotta Irredeemable bag of shit. I shouldn’t be surprised. To everyone who said ITYS, duly noted. Me and my silly 'olivey-branchy, bridgey-buildy, let’s have a dialog & transcend this divide' nonsense. Of course, I will probably try to do it again sometime. Because I’m the winning trifecta of both stubborn AND stupid. Also, Polish.[33]

Online sockpuppetry

In 2011, Adams admitted that he had used a sockpuppet account called "plannedchaos" to defend himself in a MetaFilter discussion criticizing a piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal.[34] As "plannedchaos," Adams wrote "he [Adams] has a certified genius I.Q., and that's hard to hide," and asked detractors "Is it Adams' enormous success at self-promotion that makes you jealous and angry?"[34] On his blog, Adams defended this act of self-aggrandizement, stating, "Conflict of interest is like a prison that locks in both the truth and the lies. One workaround for that problem is to change the messenger. That's where an alias comes in handy. When you remove the appearance of conflict of interest, it allows others to listen to the evidence without judging."[35] It must not have occurred to him that engaging in sockpuppetry is, almost by definition, adding real conflict of interest to the discussion.

Views on SJWs
See the main article on this topic: Social justice warrior

Profiting from tragedy

Just 3 hours after the 2019 Gilroy Garlic festival mass shooting, Adams attempted to profit off of it by trying to sign up witnesses for a cryptocurrency-based app that he co-founded called Whenhub.[36][37][38]

Predictions from a stable genius

It goes without saying that a stable genius with a very high IQ, who believes that his thoughts can magically influence the universe, also loves to predict things. In June 2020, Adams announced to his readers that: "If Biden is elected, there's a good chance you will be dead within the year." He added that "Republicans will be hunted". [39]

Adams' Rebuttal of His RationalWiki Page

When directed to his Rationalwiki page on Twitter, Adams handwaved away his well-documented asshattery by claiming it was all taken out of context.

External websites
gollark: I assumed that the only entry not doing that (or calling out to external stuff which did ???) was mine, which did an equally inefficient algorithm in a weird recursive way.
gollark: Really? Interesting.
gollark: Naive matrix multiplication.
gollark: Slightly wrongly, but oh well.
gollark: As you can see, my grasp of perl is excellent enough that I can merely LOOK at a small bit of mildly obfuscated code and guess what it does.

See also

References
  1. Scott Adams posting via sockpuppet, comments section to "How to Get a Real Education", The Wall Street Journal
  2. Adams, If experience is necessary for being president, name a political topic I can't master in one hour under the tutelage of top experts. by Scott Adams (7:08 AM - 28 Jul 2016) Twitter (archived from April 29, 2019).
  3. "Hypnosis", Dilbert Blog 7.7.07.
  4. Gettys, Travis, "'Dilbert' cartoonist Scott Adams thinks he'll be assassinated if he doesn't endorse Clinton", Raw Story (6/6/16 at 11:43 ET).
  5. https://www.infowars.com/scott-adams-kanye-west-and-dennis-rodman-remind-us-how-freedom-of-speech-empowers-everybody/
  6. Scott Adams, MBA 86 Berkeley Haas School of Business (archived from October 19, 2017).
  7. About Scott Adams Says.
  8. Cavna, Michael, "Donald Trump will win in a landslide: The mind behind 'Dilbert' explains why.", Washington Post 3.21.16.
  9. Destroying the Syrian Air Force is a 360-degree persuasion play. Regime change would be another matter. by Scott Adams (7:21 PM - 6 Apr 2017) Twitter (archived from May 24, 2019).
  10. The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Business Stupidity in the 21st Century by Scott Adams (1998) HarperBusiness. ISBN 0887309100.
  11. archived copy
  12. Scott Adams, "Sunday Blogging!", The Dilbert Blog (archived on the Internet Archive)
  13. See the Wikipedia article on The Holocaust § Death toll.
  14. Documenting numbers of victims, US Holocaust Memorial Museum
  15. Scott Adams, "Fossils are Bullshit", Dilbert Blog
  16. Scott Adams, "The Atheist Who Thought He Was God", Dilbert Blog
  17. Scott Adams, "Science's Biggest Fail", Scott Adams Blog
  18. Adams, S. (March 8, 2017). How to Convince Skeptics that Climate Change is a Problem. Scott Adams' blog. Retrieved March 23, 2017.
  19. Archived copy of the Adams' piece on the Internet Archive.
  20. Laura Hudson, "'Dilbert' Creator Scott Adams Compares Women Asking for Equal Pay to Children Demanding Candy", Comics Alliance
  21. Comment signed as "Scott Adams" to David Futrelle's post Scott Adams to Men’s Rights Activists: Don't bother arguing with women; they’re like children. on Feministe
  22. Zeno, "Scott Adams changes his tune?", Halfway There blog
  23. George Gendron, "Dilbert Fired! Starts New Biz", Inc.
  24. Scott Adams, "The Limbaugh Fluke", Scott Adams Blog
  25. Scott Adams, "Global Gender War", Scott Adams Blog
  26. Scott Adams, "Pegs and Holes", Scott Adams Blog
  27. "Scott Adams: We live in a matriarchy because men have to get permission for sex", We Hunted the Mammoth
  28. Scott Adams, "The Humiliation of the American Male in 2016", Scott Adams Blog
  29. Scott Adams, "Selling Past the Close", Scott Adams Blog
  30. Scott Adams, "My Endorsement for President of the United States," Scott Adams Blog
  31. Today I had the honor of meeting your favorite president. I already feel sorry for whoever runs against him in 2020. @POTUS @realDonaldTrump by Scott Adams (3:41 PM - 2 Aug 2018) Twitter (archived from August 7, 2018).
  32. CBR.com: "Twitter Drags Scott Adams' Claim Dilbert Cancellation Was Reverse-Racism"
  33. CBR.com: "Dilbert Creator Declines Bill Sienkiewicz's Challenge, Declares BLM Racist"
  34. Mary Elizabeth Williams, "Dilbert creator's ever-worsening P.R. crisis", Salon
  35. Scott Adams, "Planned Chaos", Scott Adams Blog
  36. If you were a witness to the #GilroyGarlicFestivalshooting please sign on to Interface by WhenHub (free app) and you can set your price to take calls. Use keyword Gilroy. by Scott Adams (8:21 PM · Jul 28, 2019) Twitter (archived from July 29, 2019).
  37. See the Wikipedia article on Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting.
  38. Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Uses Gilroy Mass Shooting to Promote His App by Tom McKay (July 29, 2019) Gizmodo.
  39. https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1278309835453284357
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