Scott Adams does it again
Mar. 28th, 2011 12:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenAdmission: I quite enjoy Dilbert. (Quoted it the other day on this very blog, indeed.) Granted, it's a bit of a soft target and Scott Adams has been mining the same vein for two decades now, but he does it pretty well. There are still days when I look at Dilbert and mutter "yeah, just like that". The problem comes when Adams puts down the stylus and approaches a keyboard, labouring under the illusion that being good at this one thing makes him an all-round Schmot Guy.
My first encounter with this was in 'The Dilbert Future', a book which offered Scott Adams' predictions for the future. One of these was:
At that time he wasn't arguing creationism*. Rather, his position was along the lines of "it'll turn out to be meaningless because our perception of the universe isn't what's really going on", dragged out to about a chapter. Basically, he seemed to be under the impression that he was the first guy ever to come up with the Allegory of the Cave.**
As an illustration of this, he offered another 'challenging' theory: what if the theory of gravity, the idea that objects attract one another, is wrong? What it it's really that everything in the universe is constantly expanding, creating the illusion that objects are attracting one another?
The problem with this alternate theory is that it's WRONG, and any first-year physics student - or a reasonably bright high-schooler - should be able to think of several different ways to debunk it, e.g.:
- Under the conventional theory of gravity, attraction depends on MASS: a solid 1-meter steel ball will exert more attraction than a hollow one. If it was all about expansion, they'd behave exactly the same.
- Under the conventional theory, attraction falls off with distance: very-distant objects have a negligible force on one another. But if 'gravity' is due to things expanding, the 'attraction' we observe would actually INCREASE with distance: when objects double in size, apparent distances are halved, so the rock that was 2 meters away is now 1 meter away, and the star that was 1 light-year away is now 0.5 light-years away.
If I was going to publish my Deep Thoughts to the world, I'd probably run them by a few knowledgeable people first to see if they have any GREAT BIG HOLES in them, or have already been invented and studied by thousands of people. Not for Scott!
TDF also had a section on the wonderful power of affirmations: apparently Dilbert owed its success to Adams' affirmations. (I seem to recall that some time later, when the Dilbert cartoon was axed, SA announced that he'd be using affirmations to revive it. I guess it's just taking its time...)
Since then, most of his Deep Thoughts get published on his blog, which is populated with a lot of uncritical fans who enthusiastically fuel his delusions of thinkyness. Every so often, something egregiously stupid attracts wider attention (like his endorsement of Intelligent Design) and he responds to the ensuing smackdown with variants of these:
"I don't really BELIEVE that, I was just trying to stir up debate, and I succeeded!"
"I don't really BELIEVE that, I made sure to express my opinions in a deniable way so I could weasel out of them if needed!"
"Your response proved my deeper point is absolutely right!"
"Your response is wrong because we can't ever know anything for sure!"
[post bahleeted because people outside the Dilbert Blog are too stupid to understand his wisdom]
His recent post about women's/men's rights went through many of these...
The original post was deleted, so I'm quoting from the copy here. Quoting the whole thing because it desperately needs all the sporking it can get:
BTW, every time Scott tries to deflect responsibility for the arguments he offers in his own posts on his own blog to somebody else - e.g. "readers", "others will argue that...", you have to take a drink.
FWIW, about 50% of all comments I saw on the Age's International Women's Day articles were about men's rights, mostly lamenting the complete lack of coverage of men's-rights issues. Funnily enough, using the search function on the Age's site pulled up dozens of articles about men's rights, and none of them seemed to have been hijacked for discussion of women's rights.
I'm just going to count this as reiteration of the first sentence, so you don't have to drink just yet...
But that counts. Drink.
My experience with both door-holding and restaurant service is pretty much 50/50. Doors depend mostly on who gets there first, which way it opens, and who's carrying heavy stuff. Restaurants depend on who ordered what dish. But maybe it's different where Scott lives, and maybe he has no comprehension of a world outside his own experience... actually, I think we've pretty much established that part.
Yep. This is why so few men have ever become President of the USA or Prime Minister of Australia - and why the ones who do are perpetually harassed about whether they can REALLY commit to the nation while distracted by partners and children. (Or, if they don't have children, about whether this means there's something wrong with them.***)
Meanwhile, spare a thought for those men whose careers are destroyed forever by the slightest hint of sexual impropriety. I am sure Mark McInnes' fate will stand as a warning to all.
As plenty of others have already pointed out, the situation WAS reversed for, oh, several hundred years, and it actually wasn't treated as quite as much of an emergency as Scott might think.
I'll admit that I haven't seen numbers, but I'd hazard a guess that if you break that college attendance down into "degrees likely to get you a high-paying job" vs "degrees likely to leave you selling burgers/starving in academia", male enrolment comes out looking pretty good.
Drink. Oh, and every time you take a drink, you have to think of a weasel. This shouldn't be difficult.
Which is unjust when it leads to men being charged more for car insurance, but when it comes to women being underpaid that's just nature taking its course.
(Hint: the pay gap is more than enough to cover the insurance gap.)
Drink.
A couple of observations here:
- This would be more of an argument if the sacrifices required were equal, but they're not. A man who chooses to put long hours into his work is indeed making sacrifices - a social life, a family, or quality time with the family he has, and those ARE big sacrifices.
A woman who makes that same choice experiences all the sacrifices the man does, but in addition she is stigmatised for it - if she has children she's a bad mother, if she doesn't she has her priorities wrong. How did Bill Heffernan put it? "Deliberately barren".
- A lot of women aren't even given this choice; their priorities are simply assumed, and they're excluded from leadership on that basis.
"If I want to call you weak, the first thing that leaps to my mind is to compare you with part of the female anatomy."
Expect to see Scott claiming he's been "misinterpreted" in the very near future...
"Women are unrealistic and immature."
"Women are irrational."
"Expecting to receive equal pay for equal work is on a par with punching somebody or wanting to eat candy for dinner."
"Men are at fault here because they haven't figured out that when a woman wants something, it's better just to ignore her rather than try to argue with her. Reasoning with a woman is a waste of time."
Hello. According to my trouser equipment, I am a man. I actually feel that behaving like a civilised human being is NOT really a major imposition, and I don't expect to get a pat on the head every time I manage to restrain myself from clubbing a woman and dragging her back to my cave...
...although I'm beginning to see why Scott might see that as a major achievement. Also, if you ever end up playing chess with him, you may want to wipe the pieces down first, because ewww.
Female emergency responders, please note and respect Scott's beliefs here.
Here it comes...
"You have to just accept that many women REALLY BELIEVE they're being paid less than men for the same work, and that somehow this is a bad thing. This is about emotional reality, so there's no point in trying to reason them out of this."
*He seems to have espoused ID-creationism in more recent years, but I can't get the link to work just now.
**Just to be clear, I think the Allegory of the Cave is well worth exploring as a point of philosophy - especially when you're willing to acknowledge that other people came up with this idea about two thousand years ago and see what they're doing with it.
But if you start treating it as a get-out-of-jail-free card for all other discussions - "well your idea is wrong because we can never know anything for sure" - that doesn't make you a deep thinker, it just makes you a tosser.
***Sarcasm aside, I do remember John Hewson attacking Bob Carr for being childless and hence "not a red-blooded male" - but this backfired badly in public opinion and was not repeated, AFAIK.
My first encounter with this was in 'The Dilbert Future', a book which offered Scott Adams' predictions for the future. One of these was:
The theory of evolution will be disproved within our lifetimes.
At that time he wasn't arguing creationism*. Rather, his position was along the lines of "it'll turn out to be meaningless because our perception of the universe isn't what's really going on", dragged out to about a chapter. Basically, he seemed to be under the impression that he was the first guy ever to come up with the Allegory of the Cave.**
As an illustration of this, he offered another 'challenging' theory: what if the theory of gravity, the idea that objects attract one another, is wrong? What it it's really that everything in the universe is constantly expanding, creating the illusion that objects are attracting one another?
The problem with this alternate theory is that it's WRONG, and any first-year physics student - or a reasonably bright high-schooler - should be able to think of several different ways to debunk it, e.g.:
- Under the conventional theory of gravity, attraction depends on MASS: a solid 1-meter steel ball will exert more attraction than a hollow one. If it was all about expansion, they'd behave exactly the same.
- Under the conventional theory, attraction falls off with distance: very-distant objects have a negligible force on one another. But if 'gravity' is due to things expanding, the 'attraction' we observe would actually INCREASE with distance: when objects double in size, apparent distances are halved, so the rock that was 2 meters away is now 1 meter away, and the star that was 1 light-year away is now 0.5 light-years away.
If I was going to publish my Deep Thoughts to the world, I'd probably run them by a few knowledgeable people first to see if they have any GREAT BIG HOLES in them, or have already been invented and studied by thousands of people. Not for Scott!
TDF also had a section on the wonderful power of affirmations: apparently Dilbert owed its success to Adams' affirmations. (I seem to recall that some time later, when the Dilbert cartoon was axed, SA announced that he'd be using affirmations to revive it. I guess it's just taking its time...)
Since then, most of his Deep Thoughts get published on his blog, which is populated with a lot of uncritical fans who enthusiastically fuel his delusions of thinkyness. Every so often, something egregiously stupid attracts wider attention (like his endorsement of Intelligent Design) and he responds to the ensuing smackdown with variants of these:
"I don't really BELIEVE that, I was just trying to stir up debate, and I succeeded!"
"I don't really BELIEVE that, I made sure to express my opinions in a deniable way so I could weasel out of them if needed!"
"Your response proved my deeper point is absolutely right!"
"Your response is wrong because we can't ever know anything for sure!"
[post bahleeted because people outside the Dilbert Blog are too stupid to understand his wisdom]
His recent post about women's/men's rights went through many of these...
The original post was deleted, so I'm quoting from the copy here. Quoting the whole thing because it desperately needs all the sporking it can get:
The topic my readers most want me to address
BTW, every time Scott tries to deflect responsibility for the arguments he offers in his own posts on his own blog to somebody else - e.g. "readers", "others will argue that...", you have to take a drink.
is something called men’s rights. (See previous post.) This is a surprisingly good topic. It’s dangerous. It’s relevant. It isn’t overdone.
FWIW, about 50% of all comments I saw on the Age's International Women's Day articles were about men's rights, mostly lamenting the complete lack of coverage of men's-rights issues. Funnily enough, using the search function on the Age's site pulled up dozens of articles about men's rights, and none of them seemed to have been hijacked for discussion of women's rights.
And apparently you care.
I'm just going to count this as reiteration of the first sentence, so you don't have to drink just yet...
Let’s start with the laundry list.
According to my readers,
But that counts. Drink.
examples of unfair treatment of men include many elements of the legal system, the military draft in some cases, the lower life expectancies of men, the higher suicide rates for men, circumcision, and the growing number of government agencies that are primarily for women.
You might add to this list the entire area of manners. We take for granted that men should hold doors for women, and women should be served first in restaurants. Can you even imagine that situation in reverse?
My experience with both door-holding and restaurant service is pretty much 50/50. Doors depend mostly on who gets there first, which way it opens, and who's carrying heavy stuff. Restaurants depend on who ordered what dish. But maybe it's different where Scott lives, and maybe he has no comprehension of a world outside his own experience... actually, I think we've pretty much established that part.
Generally speaking, society discourages male behavior whereas female behavior is celebrated. Exceptions are the fields of sports, humor, and war. Men are allowed to do what they want in those areas.
Yep. This is why so few men have ever become President of the USA or Prime Minister of Australia - and why the ones who do are perpetually harassed about whether they can REALLY commit to the nation while distracted by partners and children. (Or, if they don't have children, about whether this means there's something wrong with them.***)
Meanwhile, spare a thought for those men whose careers are destroyed forever by the slightest hint of sexual impropriety. I am sure Mark McInnes' fate will stand as a warning to all.
Add to our list of inequities the fact that women have overtaken men in college attendance. If the situation were reversed it would be considered a national emergency.
As plenty of others have already pointed out, the situation WAS reversed for, oh, several hundred years, and it actually wasn't treated as quite as much of an emergency as Scott might think.
I'll admit that I haven't seen numbers, but I'd hazard a guess that if you break that college attendance down into "degrees likely to get you a high-paying job" vs "degrees likely to leave you selling burgers/starving in academia", male enrolment comes out looking pretty good.
How about the higher rates for car insurance that young men pay compared to young women? Statistics support this inequity, but I don’t think anyone believes the situation would be legal if women were charged more for car insurance, no matter what the statistics said.
Women will counter with their own list of wrongs, starting with the well-known statistic that women earn only 80 cents on the dollar, on average, compared to what men earn for the same jobs. My readers
Drink. Oh, and every time you take a drink, you have to think of a weasel. This shouldn't be difficult.
will argue that if any two groups of people act differently, on average, one group is likely to get better results. On average, men negotiate pay differently and approach risk differently than women.
Which is unjust when it leads to men being charged more for car insurance, but when it comes to women being underpaid that's just nature taking its course.
(Hint: the pay gap is more than enough to cover the insurance gap.)
Women will point out that few females are in top management jobs. Men will argue
Drink.
that if you ask a sample group of young men and young women if they would be willing to take the personal sacrifices needed to someday achieve such power, men are far more likely to say yes. In my personal non-scientific polling, men are about ten times more likely than women to trade family time for the highest level of career success.
A couple of observations here:
- This would be more of an argument if the sacrifices required were equal, but they're not. A man who chooses to put long hours into his work is indeed making sacrifices - a social life, a family, or quality time with the family he has, and those ARE big sacrifices.
A woman who makes that same choice experiences all the sacrifices the man does, but in addition she is stigmatised for it - if she has children she's a bad mother, if she doesn't she has her priorities wrong. How did Bill Heffernan put it? "Deliberately barren".
- A lot of women aren't even given this choice; their priorities are simply assumed, and they're excluded from leadership on that basis.
Now I would like to speak directly to my male readers who feel unjustly treated by the widespread suppression of men’s rights:
Get over it, you bunch of pussies.
"If I want to call you weak, the first thing that leaps to my mind is to compare you with part of the female anatomy."
The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently.
Expect to see Scott claiming he's been "misinterpreted" in the very near future...
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.
"Women are unrealistic and immature."
You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first.
"Women are irrational."
And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar.
"Expecting to receive equal pay for equal work is on a par with punching somebody or wanting to eat candy for dinner."
It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.
"Men are at fault here because they haven't figured out that when a woman wants something, it's better just to ignore her rather than try to argue with her. Reasoning with a woman is a waste of time."
How many times do we men suppress our natural instincts for sex and aggression
Hello. According to my trouser equipment, I am a man. I actually feel that behaving like a civilised human being is NOT really a major imposition, and I don't expect to get a pat on the head every time I manage to restrain myself from clubbing a woman and dragging her back to my cave...
just to get something better in the long run? It’s called a strategy. Sometimes you sacrifice a pawn to nail the queen. If you’re still crying about your pawn when you’re having your way with the queen,
...although I'm beginning to see why Scott might see that as a major achievement. Also, if you ever end up playing chess with him, you may want to wipe the pieces down first, because ewww.
there’s something wrong with you and it isn’t men’s rights.
Fairness is an illusion. It’s unobtainable in the real world. I’m happy that I can open jars with my bare hands. I like being able to lift heavy objects. And I don’t mind that women get served first in restaurants because I don’t like staring at food that I can’t yet eat.
If you’re feeling unfairly treated because women outlive men, try visiting an Assisted Living facility and see how delighted the old ladies are about the extra ten years of pushing the walker around. It makes dying look like a bargain.
I don’t like the fact that the legal system treats men more harshly than women. But part of being male is the automatic feeling of team. If someone on the team screws up, we all take the hit. Don’t kid yourself that men haven’t earned some harsh treatment from the legal system. On the plus side, if I’m trapped in a burning car someday, a man will be the one pulling me out. That’s the team I want to be on.
Female emergency responders, please note and respect Scott's beliefs here.
I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group.
Here it comes...
So I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group. I’m saying that a man’s best strategy for dealing with each group is disturbingly similar. If he’s smart, he takes the path of least resistance most of the time, which involves considering the emotional realities of other people.
"You have to just accept that many women REALLY BELIEVE they're being paid less than men for the same work, and that somehow this is a bad thing. This is about emotional reality, so there's no point in trying to reason them out of this."
A man only digs in for a good fight on the few issues that matter to him, and for which he has some chance of winning. This is a strategy that men are uniquely suited for because, on average, we genuinely don’t care about 90% of what is happening around us
*He seems to have espoused ID-creationism in more recent years, but I can't get the link to work just now.
**Just to be clear, I think the Allegory of the Cave is well worth exploring as a point of philosophy - especially when you're willing to acknowledge that other people came up with this idea about two thousand years ago and see what they're doing with it.
But if you start treating it as a get-out-of-jail-free card for all other discussions - "well your idea is wrong because we can never know anything for sure" - that doesn't make you a deep thinker, it just makes you a tosser.
***Sarcasm aside, I do remember John Hewson attacking Bob Carr for being childless and hence "not a red-blooded male" - but this backfired badly in public opinion and was not repeated, AFAIK.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-28 03:41 am (UTC)Fail fail fail. Fail. Fail fail. Now I would like to speak directly to my male readers who feel unjustly treated by the widespread suppression of men’s rights: Get over it, (well at least there's a shred of...) fail. (Nevermind.) ...