Dilbert - C or D?

specifically, scott adams'

otm. i really liked dilbert too when i was a kid mordy -- in retrospect, and even at the time, kinda weird, altho not rly cuz the strip's always had way more going for it as absurdity than as satire (btw i laughed at dilbert just yesterday, the sunday strip w wally's "2%" sophistry :/) -- but even then his prose writing, most notably the very weird artifact "god's debris" (but also "the dilbert principle" etc) seemed full of dull contempt. i quoted it years upthread (in a pre-trump idyll) but there's a sentence in god's debris that goes "when an idiot and a genius disagree, generally the idiot will think the genius is wrong" and i without exaggeration remember the moment i read this, the room i was sitting in, etc., because it was one of the first times i got the real sense that sometimes the words in a book told you more about the person writing them than about anything else.

was thinking the other day about the B-grade newspaper strips i devoured and bought collections of pre-high-school and felt a warm sense of almost-certainty that bill amend, whom i haven't checked in on in over a decade, did not turn out a trumpist.

has Jim Davis made public his views on Trump? I don't think that I could take Davis being a Trump booster.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/128474925371/how-to-spot-a-wizard

Here's an even more blatant example, he's so obviously writing about himself

Dilbert was huge for me when I was a kid too...I spent a lot of my paper route money on his books. And the strip is still pretty funny, at least for a newspaper comic. But yeah the books were so strange sometimes. I remember the "aspiration" chapter in The Dilbert Future really doing my head in because I could not tell if he was trolling or if he honestly believed in what was just about the strangest pseudo-science I had ever heard in my life. I mean he wrote like a hundred pages on how dumb people will believe anything, then he launches into this. What really turned me off him was this story he told about being on a plane sitting next to two people reading The Dilbert Principle who were convulsing in laughter, unaware that they were sitting next to the author - I remember getting this sinking feeling because I wanted to believe it but it just sounded so made up.

The wizards, in this context, have learned the rules of hypnosis and persuasion.

my friends and i were obsessed w/ hypnosis and persuasion in 9th grade. we read books on the topic and tried to hypnotize one other and then grew out of it within the year alongside our star wars rpg campaign and trying to summon dybuks in benji's basement with lit candles. i'm not entirely hostile to the idea that there are actors who exert a higher level of influence on society (thru money, of course, but 'thought leaders' too even tho gag that idiom but like there are ppl who i think have a larger memetic share culturally than the rest of us - sure) but it's so childish to think that what is happening is adult men and women are using secret arts of persuasion to hypnotize ppl into carrying out their will. it is literally the thinking of the 9th grader.

why can't we have the universe where scott adams just becomes an obsessive kanye fan

(don't answer that)

So you look at Dilbert, for example. You’ll notice that — well, you wouldn’t notice until I told you — you’ll notice that I’m using a hypnosis-inspired technique. Which is, Dilbert doesn’t have a last name. His first name is one you’ve almost never heard. Very few people have that. He doesn’t live in any town that’s specified. The company name is never mentioned, it’s a workplace. You don’t know how old he is. You don’t know his boss’s first or last name, or any of that. And that’s a hypnosis technique, where you stay general, and you let people fill in what they want to fill in. And I did that so people would say, “Hey, that’s my job.” Because I haven’t given them reasons to exclude it.

I love how he talks about this incredibly common trope as though he is the first guy to come up with it. Same as how he's going on all these TV shows to talk about how Trump is using these masterful persuasion techniques, yet all Scott's really doing is explaining what confirmation bias is and suggesting that maybe, just maybe...he's saying outrageous things to get media coverage. Like...thanks dude, I think we all figured that out already. This isn't 4-D Chess, it's Marketing 101.

Dilbert can be kind of funny in its use of comic strip shorthand to document absurdity. Unfortunately, that's not Scott Adams using skills as a cartoonist in creating dialogue. That's his actual total world view, which is not reducible to short sentences in cartoon panels, but actually is short sentences in cartoon panels. It's why his weird rant actually looked like a legit Dilbert strip when inserted as dialogue.

MRA Dilbert funnier than Dilbert ever was

I love how he talks about this incredibly common trope as though he is the first guy to come up with it. Same as how he's going on all these TV shows to talk about how Trump is using these masterful persuasion techniques, yet all Scott's really doing is explaining what confirmation bias is and suggesting that maybe, just maybe...he's saying outrageous things to get media coverage. Like...thanks dude, I think we all figured that out already. This isn't 4-D Chess, it's Marketing 101.

― frogbs, Tuesday, August 16, 2016 8:55 AM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was typing my own response to that dumb Adams quote but it was pretty much just this, so frogbs otm (and also otm about Adams as moron's idea of what a smart person sounds like). This fucking guy.

xxp Yeah it's pretty clear that Dilbert is the guy he used to be and Dogbert is the person he sees himself as now. All of Dilbert's girlfriends are Scott Adams' view of how women really are - vapid and one-dimensional, they break up with him because he's too smart, too logical, too willing to "tell it like it is". Even the whole "what if the smartest man in the universe was a garbageman?" thing is clearly his own personal fantasy, just replace garbageman with "newspaper cartoonist".

harsh noise wally a much better comic

http://pied.nu/banned/the_Dilbert_Hole/tn/03.gif.html

Also he's got to be the only cartoonist on the planet who wears his inability to draw like a fucking badge of honor, as though learning how to draw would shatter this whole illusion of Scott Adams as guy who succeeded in a field he shouldn't have due to being so damn brilliant. Even the XKCD guy cares about visual presentation. With Adams it's all about the subtext of "can you believe how much money I made from this?"

still guiltily quote the dilbert hole with friends. there was a period of time when we realized it was misogynistic, homophobic trash, but these days it's still less so than scott adams

"i'm spurtin here!" is more classic than any one line in dilbert

btw I sincerely believe that this whole thing is just a desperate ploy to be known as something other than The Dilbert Guy. he used to write on a bunch of different topics (always in the form "what if X was actually Y? just asking questions"), now it's all Trump all the time

maybe you missed the 90s when office people and youth who found the comic strips entertaining were tricked into buying "funny" books of scott adams platitudes

tbf "the dilbert principle" holds up about as well as anything malcolm gladwell has published

yeah. I had 3 or 4 of those books and I remember them well...but they were basically Dilbert books with more words in them. I mean they even had like 100 strips apiece throughout.

Adams is like the embodiment of the 'better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt' thing. People would likely hold him in higher esteem if his public persona was more like Watterson's. I certainly never thought he was stupid until I became aware of his voice beyond the strip.

I also liked Dilbert a lot as a kid, and actually spent a lot of time drawing my own Dilbert comic strips. (I think one of the reasons I like it was because as a child who loved making comic strips but didn't have much artistic talent it was encouraging that Scott Adams was a worse draughtsman than I was) (though I think the visual style works in the context of the strip, and it's not like Dilbert would be any funnier if it looked like Little Nemo in Slumberland or whatever)

http://assets.amuniversal.com/c40ba290a0a4012f2fe600163e41dd5b

I distinctly remember reading this strip when I was about 12: I found the "pompous airbag" uncomfortably familiar and felt somewhat chastened, at that age I probably did unreflectively consider myself more intelligent than my peers on account of my ability to reel of facts/names/dates that they mostly couldn't, even though I didn't have any kind of deep understanding. In retrospect though it seems like some proto-Trumpian contempt for learning and expertise - if you are an ubermensch who can master any subject with three hours cramming then so-called experts *are* just ostentatious windbags, I guess.

I still think that "you combine arrogance with trivia and try to pass it off as intelligence" is a fairly pithy skewering of a certain type of awful, overbearing person who is not as smart as they think they are, it's just that Adams is also a (different) type of awful, overbearing person who is not as smart as they think they are. Sad!

memory is for sure an element of intelligence but i agree that just having an impressive memory and not having a quick grasp of complex topics or the ability to think novelly makes that particular skill somewhat superficial. but still like if you've ever seen prodigious feats of memory* i think you'd have to be pretty arrogant yourself to discount it entirely. * there's something in the orthodox yeshiva world called the pin test. that's when you take a pin and stick it through a volume of talmud and then recite from memory every word, page by page, that the pin pierced. i've only seen this done once in my life but it's extremely impressive imho.

in adams defense he's never tried to trick anyone into thinking he was less smug or awful than his comic voice, or stuck a pin through his books.

i'm not sure that constitutes a defense

defense insofar that anyone feels betrayed for liking his comics

Ratbert: I'm debating on the internet! Ha ha! I'm winning every argument by saying the same thing!
Dilbert: What's that?
Ratbert: "How would you like it if Hitler killed you?"

biggest revelation of this thread for me is that dilbert wears different clothes now

Adams is like the embodiment of the 'better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt' thing. People would likely hold him in higher esteem if his public persona was more like Watterson's. I certainly never thought he was stupid until I became aware of his voice beyond the strip.

Exactly - it's so strange because he turns out to be exactly the kind of person that Dilbert seems to regularly mock. I mean part of me thinks this is all some dumb Nathan Fielder-type publicity stunt but then I remember that this is the same guy who created his own sockpuppet to defend himself against people who called him out on his MRA bullshit.

lol the metafilter incident

You're talking about Scott Adams. He's not talking about you. Advantage: Adams.

bwahahaha

dilbert/catbert is just as jerky as adams though?

another fun thing, if you look at the negative reviews of his latest book, he basically comments on all of them some variation of "you read it wrong". at least he's doing it under his own name.

http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=07312008

Later on, horse dogg maniac

the disses were not the best when Ray went at Dilbert, but they were accurate

his runs at Cathy and Garfield were classic

omg i forgot about the last panel of the cathy one

what do you think the odds are of this guy posting an angry article about Gawker being bought in the next couple days

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays 1h1 hour ago
#Univision disgraces its employees and shareholders by buying #Gawker. Worst CEO decision of the past 100 years.

the guy really loves the number 100

can't believe it's been 5 years since this masterpiece of a blogpost

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102881545031/pegs-and-holes

wow, that's something alright

how can someone this stupid have convinced themselves that they're a deep thinker?

I also asked the Swiss man what kind of problems they have in Switzerland. He laughed again. The answer is “none.” Literally.

Good economy.

Plenty of jobs.

No racial strife.

Low crime rate.

Highest standard of living.

No real pollution.

No litter.

No homeless that I could see.

He also told me that it is illegal to build a mosque in Switzerland because they don’t want to change their national character, which is 95% Christian he estimated.

[Correction: Switzerland only bans minarets, presumably for architectural reasons. Mosques are allowed.]

He said (and I did not fact-check) that the Swiss allow no immigration at all unless the person has special skills or marries a citizen.

And the gun ownership in Switzerland is 100% for adult males. That’s their militia. Yet crime is low.

[Correction: The government issues guns to males between the age of 18-34. Ammo is strictly controlled.]

Make of that what you will. It’s simplistic to think that a total ban on immigration plus a high level of male gun-ownership helps Switzerland have no real problems. But you can’t rule it out, either.

Trump is trying to make America a bit more like Switzerland. Clinton is trying to make America less like Switzerland. Spend a day in Switzerland and tell me who has the better plan. This country is amazing.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/151599421561/quick-debate-reactions-from-switzerland

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2XTuc6i1Uo

Clinton’s body language was defensive. Trump is physically larger and prowled the stage. He won the optics.

well this would be the moment i finally passed into guilt at paying attention to this guy for lols, feel free to call it late

He seems exceptionally unintelligent but really he's just emblematic of his demographic - this is how [apparently, if the polls are to be trusted] most white men think. Trump was stalking her like a giant gorilla - he won on the optics of looking like he could murder her and feast on her bones which is #1 consideration for American voting public.

He can't even prowl well! He humped a chair and looked like Peter Boyle's idiot brother.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/151288850856/presidential-temperament

I’ll wrap this up by summarizing the alleged risks of each candidate so you can see how they compare on the “scariness” dimension.

Alleged Clinton Risks

Dementia risk (because of age)
Low energy (maybe can’t perform the job)
Temperament (alleged to yell and throw things)
Might allow more terrorists into country via immigration
Influenced by lobbyists to start wars (Eisenhower warned of this)
Drinks alcohol (We don’t know how much or how often)
General brain health is questionable lately
Adversaries won’t know who she serves or how she will react.
Alleged Trump Risks

Dementia risk (because of age)
Trump is “literally Hitler” (This risk is cognitive dissonance, not real)
Con man (Sure, but we’ll be watching him closely)
Temperament (responds proportionately every time)
Race riots (Clinton’s side created this risk by framing Trump as a racist)
Inexperience (But Trump routinely succeeds where he has no experience)
If you think Trump is risky because of his “temperament” or because he is “literally Hitler” you are experiencing cognitive dissonance caused by Clinton’s persuasion game. I mean that literally. And remember that I’m a trained hypnotist. That doesn’t mean I’m always right, but it does mean I’m trained to spot cognitive dissonance and you probably aren’t.

I don’t think any of us is smart enough to evaluate the relative risk of either candidate. And that’s my point. If you think Trump is the dangerous one, that isn’t supported by his history, his patterns, or the facts. It is literally an illusion created by his opponents.