Scott Adams
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Scott Adams (born 1957) is an American cartoonist, best known for creating Dilbert, a long-running satirical comic strip about a white-collar office worker. He has seemingly advanced a number of crank positions, including questioning evolution and the validity of the fossil record.
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[edit] Affirmations
In his 1997 book The Dilbert Future Adams professed his belief in the bit of woo that is the law of attraction, claiming that he achieved multiple life goals through the power of positive thinking without actually working toward them.
| 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. |
[edit] 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.[1] |
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.[1] |
[edit] Pascal's Wager, Adams-style
In his post about fossils, Adams stated that he does not believe in "Intelligent Design or Creationism or invisible friends of any sort."[1] However, in a 2007 blog post, he appeared to express the view that atheism is essentially a form of dogmatism and used a version of Pascal's Wager to defend belief in 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.[2] |
[edit] Plain ol' sexism
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.[3] 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:[3]
| 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.[4] 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."[4][5]
[edit] Sexist douchebaggery
In June 2011, Adams posted another 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."[6]
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.[7] 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."[7]
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."[8] 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."[9]
[edit] 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.[10] 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?"[10] 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."[11]
[edit] Science kicked me in the balls
In a 2015 blog post,[12] Adams blamed science for the tendency of the media to misrepresent science. In the post, he opens with a rebuttal of his own argument – "one could argue that the media and the government are to blame for allowing so much non-science to taint the field of real science" – then charges ahead, blaming science for "being silent when bad science morphed into popular misconceptions".
He continues, "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?"[13]
"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."
He then reverses course: "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." Thus: what the winged monkeys are reporting is not science... and it's all science's fault!
"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?"
[edit] References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Scott Adams, "Fossils are Bullshit", Dilbert Blog
- ↑ Scott Adams, "The Atheist Who Thought He Was God", Dilbert Blog
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Archived copy of the Adams' piece on the Internet Archive.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Laura Hudson, "'Dilbert' Creator Scott Adams Compares Women Asking for Equal Pay to Children Demanding Candy", Comics Alliance
- ↑ 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
- ↑ Scott Adams, "Pegs and Holes", Scott Adams Blog
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Scott Adams, "The Limbaugh Fluke", Scott Adams Blog
- ↑ Zeno, "Scott Adams changes his tune?", Halfway There blog
- ↑ George Gendron, "Dilbert Fired! Starts New Biz", Inc.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Mary Elizabeth Williams, "Dilbert creator’s ever-worsening P.R. crisis", Salon
- ↑ Scott Adams, "Planned Chaos", Scott Adams Blog
- ↑ Scott Adams, "Science's Biggest Fail, Scott Adams Blog
- ↑ Dumb human.