Scott Adams has died

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rs_JrOIo3SE

by ekianjo • 6 months ago

1069 1412 6 months ago

youtube.com

toomuchtodo• 6 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams

kenrose• 6 months ago

At 10:25am ET, HN is more up-to-date than Wikipedia (article hasn't been updated yet to reflect his passing).

vidarh• 6 months ago

Which is at it should be. Wikipedia isn't a news source, and especially for something like this should be careful about allowing edits to stand until they can cite sources.

throwawaysleep• 6 months ago

Wikipedia is waiting for news sources to confirm things.

sabellito• 6 months ago

After a 2022 mass shooting, Adams opined that society leaves parents of troubled teenage boys with only two options: to either watch people die or murder their own son.

That's something.

thinkingtoilet3• 6 months ago

Both things can be true. Dilbert was a great comic strip and Scott Adams was a piece of shit.

wnevets• 6 months ago

Later (incorrect) predictions repeatedly featured in Politico magazine's annual lists of "Worst Predictions", including that one of Trump, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden would die from COVID-19 by the end of 2020,[98] that "Republicans will be hunted" if Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election
In a 2006 blog post, Adams asked if official figures of the number of deaths in the Holocaust were based on methodologically sound research.

Jesus christ.

JBiserkov• 6 months ago

Republicans will be hunted" if Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election

I don't know how he got there from Biden's literal pitch to donors that "nothing will fundamentally change".

agrippanux• 6 months ago

There was a time when his insight was relevant and spoke to a lot of people. I hope he finds peace in whatever is next.

enderforth• 6 months ago

I didn't always agree with Scott Adams on everything he did and said, but "The Dilbert Principle" taught me more about living in a corporation and management than any other book on business and his dilbert comics were a source of endless wisdom and amusement, which I use often today.

Farewell Scott, you are now God's debris.

prawn• 6 months ago

Prostate cancer. 68yo.

From Wikipedia:

"In November 2025, he said his health was suddenly declining rapidly again, and took to social media to ask President Trump for help to get access to the cancer drug Pluvicto. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. replied saying "How do I reach you? The President wants to help." The following month he said he was paralyzed below the waist and had been undergoing radiation therapy."

"On January 1, 2026, Adams said on his podcast that he had talked with his radiologist and that it was "all bad news." He said there was no chance he would get feeling back in his legs and that he also had ongoing heart failure. He told viewers they should prepare themselves "that January will probably be a month of transition, one way or another." On January 12, Adams' first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, told TMZ that Adams was in hospice at his home in Northern California."

6stringmerc• 6 months ago

Wow that is really fast, in my view, and I wonder how many more of his cohort will similarly crash out.

I don’t have an estate to get in order, so to speak. Then again, I also won’t pass along a house full of a lifetime of “collections” or “mementos” with little to no monetary value. The oncoming secondary market is about to be awash in Boomer junk. Nobody wants to send their precious collections to the dump or recycling.

One of my biggest mental hiccups to work through of late is the changing nature of collective memories, fame, and idols. Scott is a great example who was “big in the 90s” and 30 years later his method (print cartoons and books) is basically dead and can’t be folllowed. Gen Z will be spared Scott, and probably Elvis and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, ABBA, and Garth Brooks comparatively speaking.

This is a meandering way to note how fast we can be poof gone and life will move on with a pace quite breakneck.

rootusrootus• 6 months ago

The oncoming secondary market is about to be awash in Boomer junk. Nobody wants to send their precious collections to the dump or recycling.

Maybe, maybe not. My mother died a couple years ago, and while she was too old to be a boomer, she still had plenty of accumulated possessions in her estate. We sold as much as we could, kept the few things we wanted and had space for, and the rest went to recycling or the dump. I'd guess 90% went to the dump.

The owner of that stuff may not want to send it to the dump. My mom would be mortified to hear some of the things she treasured held no value for anyone else, but when you're dead, you aren't making those decisions. The next generation probably isn't that sentimental about it.

jmclnx• 6 months ago

Sad to hear, RIP

masfoobar• 6 months ago

Very sad news.

sebmellen• 6 months ago

Regardless of his political views, Dilbert was truly brilliant.

ghaff6• 6 months ago

Dilbert definitely captured a 90s era corporate zeitgeist. But, after he departed PacBell, although there was the occasional strip that really nailed it, Dilbert never really moved on to modern SV/startup/open floor plan tech and it mostly felt like been there, done that. That said, Dilbert in its prime was easily in the top comics I enjoyed.

detourdog• 6 months ago

I discovered Dilbert because Omega Instruments distributed collections of his comics on individual cards.

shermantanktop• 6 months ago

That’s exactly it. I got into the industry right at that transition, at a startup that sold software into telcos. At the startups we found out what happens when Wally becomes the CEO…

jgrahamc• 6 months ago

Sadly, Scott Adams' political opinions came to overshadow Dilbert, but I shall choose to remember him as Dilbert's creator and how Dilbert captured a moment in time and work so aptly.

Back when Dilbert was massive my company ran the following ad in cinemas in Silicon Valley: https://imgur.com/a/ZPVJau8 Everyone seeing that ad knew what we were referring to.

siliconc0w• 6 months ago

I read every Scott Adams book as a kid - insightful and approachable.

VikingCoder• 6 months ago

Fuck cancer.

guywithahat• 6 months ago

Well put

chrisco255• 6 months ago

Really love Scott for creating Dilbert one of the best all-time comic strips, teaching the psychology of persuasion, and for writing How to Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big. It taught me to focus on systems and habits as a preference over goals (goals are still useful, but can be unrealistic and less adaptable). Plus God's Debris was an interesting thought experiment about the origin of the universe. Really great thinker and humorist. RIP Scott.

dsjoerg• 6 months ago

Came here to say this, I really appreciated "How to Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big".

I'm not here to judge the man or everything he did, I'm here to say thanks for the stuff I loved.

ohyoutravel2• 6 months ago

I always enjoyed Dilbert, one of the few of my friends who did as it was a bit of a specific sense of humor. But Scott Adam’s really, really fell off a cliff into some very odious takes in his recent years. Feels like he should have stuck to Dilbert, but he lived long enough to see himself become the villain instead.

DharmaPolice• 6 months ago

He always had dubious takes (he was anti-evolution for as long as I can remember) but that doesn't make Dilbert any less good.

ohyoutravel2• 6 months ago

Very true, loved Dilbert. I guess I was unaware of his dubious takes early on because my only interaction was seeing the comics. Later on the interactions became Dilbert + Reddit post on how Scott Adams is an antivaxxer.

jquery4• 6 months ago

Worth the read: “The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh” https://a.co/d/7b7Jnt6

I couldn’t read Dilbert the same after that. Adams avoids, with surgical precision, things like unionization, while the author simultaneously supports downsizing despite seeming to mock it in his strips.

Anyway, shame he’s dead, but to me he died a long time ago. I only feel sad when thinking about how I used to enjoy Dilbert.

bluGill• 6 months ago

He fell off the cliff when he left his day job to write the comic full time. At least that is my opinion. Falling down the cliff took a while, at first he was still close enough to corporate reality to still be realistic in his exaggerations and thus funny, but the longer he was a way the less his jokes were grounded in reality and so they became not funny because they felt a little too far out.

Of course writing a comic takes a lot of time. I don't begrudge him for wanting to quit, and others have made the transition to full time humorist well - but he wasn't the first to fail to make that switch. He should have retired when he was a head....

Let the above be a warning to you. I don't know how (or if) it will apply, but think on it.

ghaff6• 6 months ago

The story I read long ago was that he had a long-standing agreement with his manager that if his cartooning ever became an issue for his day job, he would leave. Then a new manager came in who basically said "OK."

No idea how true it is of course.

jazzypants• 6 months ago

It's a sad moment for me. I got into Dilbert at the tender age of eight years old. I don't know why I liked it so much when half the jokes went over my head, but I loved computers and comics, and I plowed through every book at my local library. It was my real introduction to software engineering, and it definitely influenced me in many ways that certainly shaped the man that I am today.

I never agreed with him politically, and I honestly think he said some pretty awful stuff. However, none of that changes the positive impact that his comics had on my life. Rest in peace.

malux85• 6 months ago

“Engineers, Scientists and other odd people” chapter in the book “The Dilbert Principle” is one of the funniest things I have ever read

einsteinx22• 6 months ago

I got into Dilbert at the tender age of eight years old. I don't know why I liked it so much when half the jokes went over my head, but I loved computers and comics

Same! Or at least I got into them as a young kid I don’t remember the exact age, it was probably a few years older but definitely tweens max.

I’m also not sure why I liked them so much, other than that I loved computers and always knew I’d end up working in the industry, so maybe it was like a window into that world that I liked. I also loved the movie Office Space, so maybe I just had a thing for office satire.

wombat-man2• 6 months ago

very interesting to find other folks who jibed with this comic at a young age. My mom and aunt had cubicle jobs and the entire idea seemed very fun to me. I recall looking at my 4th grade classroom and thinking we could really benefit from some cubicles.

Sadly I'm doomed to work in an open floorplan.

I wasn't exactly a daily reader at the time, but I was sad to hear when dilbert was pulled, and why. I tried to send him some fan mail when I heard he had fallen ill, but the email of his that I found had been deleted.

maxfurman• 6 months ago

Same! My dad worked in corporate HR and loved Dilbert (I guess it spoke to him), so we usually had a few of his books and/or a strip-a-day desk calendar around the house that I would read. I never considered it before, but maybe I'm the cynical software engineer I am today because of Scott Adams. The world is a funny place sometimes.

ghaff6• 6 months ago

I have a Catbert doll in my kitchen. I think an HR person I knew gave it to me at a going away party at a long-ago job.

networked• 6 months ago

Dilbert's Desktop Games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert%27s_Desktop_Games) was part of my childhood. As a slightly older kid in Ukraine, while I hadn't heard of Dilbert, I could understand the setting with my knowledge of English and some idea of how tech companies worked. (I already wanted to be a programmer.) I thought Techno Raiders was a pretty cool game, but also, this game collection was an introduction to the idea that the world of office work was kind of ridiculous and people were kind of incompetent.

rvz• 6 months ago

Very sad news, RIP Scott.

mmastrac• 6 months ago

Dilbert was pretty influential for me in the 90s and early 2000s. I enjoyed those comics a bunch while I was kid. He seemed to struggle a bit with his fame, and apparently his divorce caused him a pretty big psychic trauma, which was unfortunate.

His later personality was.. not my style.. and I dumped all of his books into little free libraries a few years back. The only things I really found interesting from his later work was focusing on systems rather than process.

Can't deny the early influence, though. The pointy-haired boss will live on forever.

jpadkins12• 6 months ago

Thanks for sharing all of his books with the next generation of readers via the free library. His influence will live on!

shrubble• 6 months ago

He was on a livestream either yesterday or the day before, and was still interacting with people.

He was generous with his time to the end.

tonymet4• 6 months ago

this moved me, too

TYPE_FASTER• 6 months ago

There was a super weird alignment at a previous job where the appearances, personalities, and seniority/rank of some of my co-workers matched characters in Dilbert to the T. It was really funny and almost eerie, like Scott Adams was hiding in a cube taking notes.

kristianbrigman• 6 months ago

IIRC he did get a lot of ideas from fans talking about their own workplaces …

collinvandyck76• 6 months ago

There were a number of Motorola-inspired ideas that made their way to Dilbert while I was working there in the late 90s.

ghaff6• 6 months ago

The VP who "raises issues" reminded me perfectly of someone at a prior workplace.

alecco2• 6 months ago

Once, for a whole week, every Dilbert cartoon matched something that happened in our office of ~50 people the day before. People started getting freaked out like we were in the Matrix or someone was feeding it to Adams.

magicmicah85• 6 months ago

Always gave a sensible chuckle to his comics. One of my favorite scenes from the show was about "The Knack". My dad originally shared this with me, reminding me that I'm "cursed" for inheriting the knack from him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8vHhgh6oM0

ryandvm• 6 months ago

The entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale.

To go from a brilliant satirist to becoming terminally online and just completely falling off the far right cliffs of insanity is incredibly sad. And unfortunately, this is plight is not uncommon. It is incredibly dangerous to make politics part of your identity and then just absolutely bathe yourself in a political media echo chamber.

mossTechnician• 6 months ago

I read the Dilbert Principle when I was young, but still old enough to appreciate a lot of its humor. Later, when I discovered Scott was online and had a blog, I couldn't believe it was the same person. To me, the Scott Adams of comic strip fame had already died many years ago.

Cuuugi2• 6 months ago

The online world breeds extremism. It wasn't too long ago criticizing someone on their obituary was considered classless. This is the world we have made.

greenavocado• 6 months ago

Unwillingness to engage with others breeds extremism. There are many who are silenced if they do not fit into the social dogma. Those people eventually lose it if they can't find a productive outlet.

andrewmutz• 6 months ago

Completely agree. If you're motivated enough about a topic to post about it online, you're probably emotional about it and unable to see it in a clear-headed manner.

The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online. The people who have developed unhealthy and biased obsessions are the ones who post constantly.

officeplant• 6 months ago

It wasn't too long ago criticizing someone on their obituary was considered classless.

It's very easy to avoid getting criticized in your obituary, don't be an asshole.

If you devote your life to being an asshole, the civilized response gloves will come off and maybe more people should learn this lesson.

dralley• 6 months ago

See also: JK Rowling.

Pre-2018: Inclusion! Weirdos are people too! The marginalized need a voice!

Post-2019: Transsexuals are a blight on society! They cause cancer in puppies!

duxup3• 6 months ago

Sadly I suspect many people aren’t really driven by ideology as much as they wave around ideology when they think it gets them something they want.

Outside that… ideology is out the window.

qarl7• 6 months ago

It's a long list. Sadly, Dawkins is also on there. And I'd argue Elon fits the bill, too.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 6 months ago

This progressive movement is absolutely totalitarian.

As long as you adhere to all mainstream tenets, you're good and virtuous, like pre-2018 JK Rowling. Gay Dumbledore, yay!

But if the mainstream tenets change, and some previously loyal followers disagree with some of them, they should be ostracised, cancelled and vilified, like post-2019 JK Rowling.

The funny thing is that this is what real fascists and communists did to a T, yet, progressive people view themselves as anti-fascists.

mrguyorama2• 6 months ago

It's so weird.

She's still convinced that woman boxer is secretly trans.

Or how the primary concern TERFs like her have is that men will dress up as women to rape them in the women's room, instead of what they do now, which is rape women including in places that are women's rooms.

It's fascinating (in a horrid way) what they consider important.

It's also fascinating how the person who wrote "Fight Fascists as a teenager" thinks is really important we eliminate a tiny subset of people from the population.

gibletsh3• 6 months ago

Actually she's been very consistent in standing up for women's rights, which is what drives her to be critical of gender identity beliefs.

tharmas• 6 months ago

He "mainlined" Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. That is pure poison for the soul.

EnergyAmy• 6 months ago

Part of his arc was posting about himself on Reddit using sockpuppets, calling himself a genius:

https://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpupp...

syncsynchalt• 6 months ago

Don't forget his claim that master hypnotists are using camgirls to give him super-orgasms to steal his money. He was a nutter in more ways than just his politics.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201108112121/https://www.scott...

In other news, for several years I have been tracking a Master Wizard that I believe lives in Southern California. It seems he has trained a small army of attractive women in his method. The women create a specialized style of porn video clips that literally hypnotize the viewer to magnify the orgasm experience beyond anything you probably imagine is possible. Hypnosis has a super-strong impact on about 20% of people. And a lesser-but-strong impact on most of the rest.
Once a customer is hooked, the girls use powerful (and real) hypnosis tools to connect the viewer’s enjoyable experience (a super-orgasm, or several) to the viewer’s act of giving them money, either directly or by buying more clips. Eventually the regular viewers are reprogrammed to get their sexual thrill by the act of donating money to the girls in the videos. There are lots of variations tied to each type of sexual kink, but that’s the general idea.
My best guess is that 10% of the traffic that flows through their business model literally cannot leave until they have no money left. The Master Wizard is that good. The women are well-coached in his methods.

PaulHoule• 6 months ago

When I was a lot younger I thought the comic strip was funny but I read a review of it circa 2005 which pointed out it was dangerously cynical and that Dilbert is to blame for his shit life because he goes along with it all. That is, if you care about doing good work, finding meaning in your work, you would reject everything he stands for.

It's tragedy instead comedy and it doesn't matter if you see it through the lens of Karl Marx ("he doesn't challenge the power structure") or through the lens of Tom Peters or James Collins ("search for excellence in the current system")

I mean, there is this social contagion aspect of comedy, you might think it is funny because it it is in a frame where it is supposed to be funny or because other people are laughing. But the wider context is that 4-koma [1] have been dead in the US since at least the 1980s, our culture is not at all competitive or meritocratic and as long we still have Peanuts and Family Circle we are never going to have a Bocchi the Rock. Young people are turning to Japanese pop culture because in Japan quirky individuals can write a light novel or low-budget video game that can become a multi-billion dollar franchise and the doors are just not open for that here, at all.

Thus, Scott Adams, who won the lottery with his comic that rejects the idea of excellence doesn't have any moral basis to talk about corporate DEI and how it fails us all. I think he did have some insights into the spell that Trump casts over people, and it's a hard thing to talk about in a way that people will accept. What people would laugh at when it was framed as fiction didn't seem funny at all when it was presented as fact.

[1] 4-panel comics

Andrew_nenakhov2• 6 months ago

Many, many commenters here are themselves bathed in a political media echo chamber, just a different one. Ironic, isn't it?

If you treat your political opponents as 'insane' instead of trying to understand what moves them, it says more about you than about people you consider insane.

elektrontamer• 6 months ago

May he rest in peace. His characters were quite charming and funny.

gcbirzan2• 6 months ago

He, on the other hand, was an absolute piece of shit.

mindcrime• 6 months ago

Sad news. Dilbert was a big part of my life for a long time, and brought much laughter and enjoyment to my life. But on the other hand, later in his life Scott said a lot of things I found frankly repugnant, and Dilbert more or less disappeared, all of which made me sad. But he was still an amazing writer of comedy at his best, and I hate to know that he has passed. Plus, every death is at tragedy for somebody - friends, family, loved-ones of all sorts - whether we specifically like someone or not.

All of that said... RIP, Mr. Adams.

TomMasz• 6 months ago

Never has so much goodwill been squandered so completely.

bell-cot2• 6 months ago

Sadly, there are a great many contenders for that crown. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Cosby

ableal• 6 months ago

Thank you for the several decades of smiles over human foibles.

HardCodedBias• 6 months ago

He was a brilliant observer and reporter on the behaviors of humanity.

He will be missed.

bigstrat20032• 6 months ago

Thanks for the laughs, Mr. Adams. May you rest in peace.

pie_flavor• 6 months ago

For those who do not know, Adams was still putting up daily Dilbert strips, just for paid subs on Twitter instead of in a newspaper. I think it's impressive he didn't stop until the end, even though AIUI he was in serious pain for a while. (He did stop doing the art himself in Nov.)

indianmouse• 6 months ago

Rest in Peace Scott. Thanks for everything!

Irrespective of any political views, or whatsoever be it as a human, a brilliant creator has gone from the face of the Earth!

I have always enjoyed Dilbert! Thanks for that!

Fuck cancer...

Fuck any disease that takes away human lives...

rdl• 6 months ago

I hate cancer.

What a long and unpredictable path his life took. Too bad he isn't still with us.

I really loved Dilbert (the Gen X defining comic), and especially his first couple books.

deflator• 6 months ago

I think that a lot of us on here can give credit to Scott Adams for helping develop their cynicism, for better or worse.

He was a role model to me for helping me to make sense of the corporate world and its denizens. This might not sound like a compliment, but it is. He was my Mr. Miyagi for mental resilience by providing good arguments for most people not being evil, despite how it might seem.

rmnwski• 6 months ago

"The Day You Became A Better Writer" is still my favorite piece on writing. Short, simple, useful. Worth saving: https://archive.ph/yomrs

sph2• 6 months ago

It's taken me years to learn some of this advice.

docdeek• 6 months ago

Sad news. Rest in peace.

JimmaDaRustla• 6 months ago

This guy was always interesting...because he understood satire so well, he understood nuance and made comedy from it...then he became chronically online and went down insane alt-right rabbit holes.

Even those of a logical mind may not have the fortitude to protect themselves from propaganda that exploit their victimhood.

jacquesm5• 6 months ago

Unfortunately, examples abound.

parrellel2• 6 months ago

Loved Dilbert as a kid, even into college, but fell off it eventually. Even if he turned to right wing trolling, I'll always remember those big comic compilations fondly.

Cancers a terrible way to go.

TheAceOfHearts• 6 months ago

I disagreed with him politically, especially during the last few years, but I'm very appreciative of Dilbert and in particular the Dilbert cartoon. The Knack is one of those clips that I keep coming back to and sharing with friends whenever someone shows signs.

kristianp3• 6 months ago

https://youtube.com/watch?v=g8vHhgh6oM0

Waterluvian• 6 months ago

I got to interact with Scott just once on Twitter. I shared one of his strips in response to a tweet he made. My intent was tongue-in-cheek and very inline with the themes of his work, but he reacted very aggressively and then blocked me.

It was a bit of a crushing moment because inside my head I was thinking, "I know and love this guy's work. Surely if I just engage him at his level without being a jackass, we can add some levity to the comments section." My instinct was that maybe he really was just a jackass and I should label him as such in my brain and move on.

But then my cat got sick last year and went from being a cuddly little guy to an absolute viscious bastard right up to the day he died. It was crushing. One day I realized it felt similar to my experience with Scott. I wondered if maybe Scott was just suffering really badly, too. I have no idea what the truth of the matter is, and I don't think that people who suffer have a free pass for their behaviour. But I think I want to hold on to this optimism.

munksbeer• 6 months ago

Confession:

Quite frankly, this is a worry for me. I have noticed that I've become shorter with people and less tolerant as I've got older. I've started to feel some resentment in certain situations where I felt I was being unfairly treated.

I recognise these feelings and things, which I am grateful for. So I work hard to correct this, and I hope I succeed, but I seriously worry about my brain changing and becoming someone quite unpleasant. You look at people from the outside, and it is so easy to judge, but we're all just a big bag of chemicals and physics. Personality change does happen, it could happen to any of us.

jacquesm5• 6 months ago

As you get older time is more precious so you want to waste less of it. This is a factor, how much of a factor it is differs from person to person.

alextingle• 6 months ago

As I grew older I changed from being a person who never got angry, to having very distressing bouts of rage.

I gave up caffeine, and the rages completely vanished.

Worth a try?

Dilettante_4• 6 months ago

Do you maybe have too little slack in your life? If you have too little emotional energy 'in your tank', compassion and empathy and such naturally go down as there are less 'resources' to spend on empathizing with others.

windowpains2• 6 months ago

Always give the benefit of doubt. Perhaps him acting aggressively and blocking you was a misunderstood attempt at humor. A lot of comments I make online are tongue in cheek but people take everything very seriously. Adding emojis doesn’t solve that problem and can even make it worse. It’s really impossible to know for certain. Online communication is totally different from the real world where feedback is instantaneous. Better to assume good intent, even when there’s a very high likelihood of being wrong. If nothing else it’s better for you to err towards rose colored glasses.

firefax2• 6 months ago

Perhaps him acting aggressively and blocking you was a misunderstood attempt at humor.

People who are being hyperbolic for humor tend to follow you back not block you

scioto• 6 months ago

As John Scalzi once said, "The failure mode of clever is asshole." [1]

That has prevented me from posting what I thought was a clever or cheeky response in case it didn't come across the way I wanted.

---

[1] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-...

aeonfox• 6 months ago

The irony is that Scott Adam's himself wouldn't have been in favour of policing one's own thoughts. /tongue-firmly-in-cheek

macbem• 6 months ago

thanks for sharing, I think I needed to read this

aidenn07• 6 months ago

That's a great quote; over the years I've internalized something similar which is why I try to be less clever on the internet than in person.

mproud• 6 months ago

I love that guy. Never having been an avid reader, I’m trying to read more, and my mission now is to read through most of his books.

violetthrift• 6 months ago

For what it's worth, banter on social media with someone you're not familiar with is almost always playing with fire. It's really easy for something to come across wrong or just be kind of exhausting, and this effect is magnified the more of a spotlight that person has. You're just one of thousands of interactions they've had that day/week/month, and so unless you know they enjoy that kind of playfulness, I find it's worth assuming they don't. This is, ironically, especially true with people who publicly post in that tone, because they get it coming back at them all the more frequently.

codezero• 6 months ago

It really doesn't have to. I thought I was being clever when in a thread I likened something Michael Godwin said to being Nazi, because I thought it was a funny self-reference, and he just gave me the Twitter equivalent of an eye roll and moved on.

antisthenes2• 6 months ago

The only lesson here is not to idolize people that create content you like.

Don't overcomplicate it.

But then my cat got sick last year and went from being a cuddly little guy to an absolute viscious bastard right up to the day he died. It was crushing.

Chronic diseases (of which aging is one) can do nasty things to people and animals. The lesson here (which I think you picked up on) is to try and be kinder. It may not always work.

theturtlemoves• 6 months ago

I've seen this before where physical illness can deeply affect a person to the point their personality seems to do a 180. There's no difference between physical and mental health, it's all interconnected.

jtrn• 6 months ago

There is much to learn about human psychology from animal indeed.

legitster• 6 months ago

I loved Dilbert back in the day, and even the books were witty and poignant.

I would like to point out that the quality of his satire really feel of as time went on. He came from an office life in the late 90s and had a lot of insight into it's dysfunctions. But after decades of being out of that world, he had clearly lost touch. The comics often do little to speak to the current corporate world, outside of squeezed in references.

As I see it, decline in quality and the political radicalization go hand in hand. You cannot be a good satirist and be so long removed from the world you are satirizing.

rideontime• 6 months ago

The political radicalization and the divorces. The strips he created after being fired by his syndicate are a bleak insight into his mindset in his final years. https://x.com/WyattDuncan/status/2011102679934910726

relaxing• 6 months ago

Oh wow. First time I’ve seen that shit.

Taking his anodyne setup-punchline-sarcastic quip formula and applying it to aggressively unfunny shock material is actually low key brilliant, albeit unintentionally so.

It’s like if Norm MacDonald didn’t posses a moral compass.

mjmsmith• 6 months ago

Famously hard-hitting People magazine goes with "Scott Adams, Disgraced Dilbert Creator, Dies at 68".

windowpains2• 6 months ago

He was from a kinder more tolerant time, when people thought being non-anonymous online was safe. Sort of the same problem that others from his generation, Julian Assange, many others had. But I wonder if time won’t prove these people right. If you do put yourself out there you make enemies and open yourself to the hatred on many psycho basement dwellers. But if you don’t the world never knows you. All if that is too many words to say there’s a price to be paid for fame. Anyway, Dilbert was an important part of our cultural landscape and made a lot of people feel good despite the pains of cubicle life. To make people smile and feel better, that’s a pretty great achievement after all. Rip Scott, hopefully you’ll be making many folks smile in the afterlife too.

jimt1234• 6 months ago

An old, Dilbert-related comment of mine seems relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44034220

RIP Scott Adams.

ChrisArchitect• 6 months ago

NYT obituary:

Scott Adams, Audacious Creator of the ‘Dilbert’ Comic Strip, Dies at 68

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/arts/scott-adams-dead.htm...

non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/arts/scott-adams-dead.htm...

nunobrito5• 6 months ago

Why is this post being shadowbanned?

This topic has over 200 points, +180 replies and was published one hour ago.

Admins: don't play around and be fair.

Scott deserves respect and proper condolences.

542458• 6 months ago

Youtube links always have gotten downweighting. Enough votes can overcome it, but there are a few domains that HN penalizes.

b40d-48b2-979e2• 6 months ago

    Scott deserves respect

I think you'll find a large amount of disagreement there for such a controversial person.

nunobrito5• 6 months ago

And here we find a far larger amount of people agreeing that he should be respected.

jacquesm5• 6 months ago

Respect has to be earned.

Jtsummers3• 6 months ago

Why is this post being shadowbanned?

If it were shadowbanned we wouldn't be able to comment on it. People have flagged it, it triggered the flamewar detector, or both. That's why it got downranked.

If you think the topic of his death has been "shadowbanned" (for some non-standard definition of shadowbanned), check the front page. There's another discussion there about it.

nunobrito5• 6 months ago

Shadowban is not the same as a traditional ban. It is a selective ban.

This topic is not on the front page for me, yet it was on the front page for you.

That is shadowban.

vga42• 6 months ago

I was vacationing in New York, and we went to some pretty standard-looking mall bookshop somewhere near Poughkeepsie some time in mid 90s. And I bought an interesting looking comic book, something I had never seen before.

I liked Dilbert for a long time, but Adams's Trump Dementia became so bad in the last decade that it completely tainted his legacy for me. His role in enabling Donald Trump to rise to power is undeniable, and his death makes me wish I had reserved a bottle of sparkling wine for the occasion.

I yearn for the time when it was possible to never meet your idols.

alehlopeh• 6 months ago

Prostate cancer loves to metastasize into bones. Same thing happened to my father.

wincy• 6 months ago

And my uncle as well. He died at 65, mentally he was still sharp as a tack, it was so sad to see him gone so soon.

pfdietz2• 6 months ago

I wonder if he had a BRCA mutation. That manifests in men as a much higher chance of prostate cancer, and of aggressive prostate cancer.

commandlinefan2• 6 months ago

Take this as your reminder to get it checked. Takes a morning, lasts for 10 years.

trashface• 6 months ago

If you already had a relative with it (like a father) you need to check PSA more than every 10 years, and I personally think its not wise for any middle-aged man to wait that long between tests, considering PSA is just a blood test.

My Dad had PC at 65. My older brother got a PSA test at age 41, was a bit over 1.0. Waited 10 years before getting another PSA (his doc was telling him to get one but he didn't), then it was 14. Had surgery, but its now metastatic.

There are also forms of PC that don't raise PSA, though they mostly affect non-caucasians. A Urologist can do a physical test for it. Primary docs can do that test too, but since they do it it less often they can miss it.

hyperhello• 6 months ago

He drew Dilbert for decades. He had a lot of comics and books in him.

In his later life he was clearly trolling and dabbling in stirring up social media for fun, and it was hard to tell where the lines between that and his personal identity were.

Goodbye born entertainer and funny dork.

Bluescreenbuddy• 6 months ago

That was him. The past 10 years have only emboldened certain people into taking their masks off.

driverdan• 6 months ago

Promoting racism, bigotry, and hate is not trolling and should not be treated as lightly as you imply.

observationist• 6 months ago

Do the Thumper thing. If you can't find something nice to say, then don't say anything at all.

SilasX• 6 months ago

Not that your exactly guilty, but that comes close to the cringeworthy attitude of "haha, what a great troll! Those poor fools can't tell when he's being serious, so brilliant! Wait, wait, you touched my sacred cow? Well, now you're obviously toxic and I've discovered empathy."

vincenzothgreat2• 6 months ago

What did he say that was racist?

tyre• 6 months ago

He was not trolling. Please don’t persist the lie that people spouting racism are “only joking.” It’s harmful, disrespectful, and either purposefully in bad faith or embarrassingly naïve.

nathan_compton• 6 months ago

You must be one of the people he hypnotized to have the strongest possible orgasm.

https://www.tumblr.com/manlethotline/616428804059086848/hey-...

dkarl2• 6 months ago

I don't think it's possible to want to troll about those things without at least somewhat believing them. To troll about them at the expense of your career and reputation takes a deeper belief that goes beyond trolling.

lanfeust6• 6 months ago

I'm sympathetic to the idea there was some trolling, but it certainly wasn't all, so this becomes a moot point to hinge on.

mrweasel• 6 months ago

I loved Dilbert, having worked for more than one Dilbert-like company the humor frequently resonated with me.

How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced, e.g. a stroke or something. It was incredibly sad to see him throw away his life's work and go down a path most of us at least hadn't foreseen and die having alienated his fans.

d1sxeyes• 6 months ago

This is a kind and generous take. I couldn’t agree more.

johnnyanmac2• 6 months ago

I'll just say that I didn't know until now that he was under cancer treatment and I wouldn't wish Cancer on 99.9999999% of the population. I have my opinions on home but he does not not meet that prestigious landmark.

quietbritishjim2• 6 months ago

How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand.

It started at roughly the time of his divorce, so it's hard to imagine there's not a connection. But, of course, you're right that we'll never know.

dkarl2• 6 months ago

I suspect that having a family and knowing that blowback from your behavior will affect them is a moderating factor for a lot of people.

oliwarner• 6 months ago

His 18yo son overdosed on fentanyl in 2018.

I don't want to excuse his opinions but that's the sort of event that can change a person.

He did online chats, and did one immediately after. It's a tough watch. https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1046764270128484352

saalweachter• 6 months ago

I don't think Adams represents a particularly uncommon archetype in the engineering world.

Barrin92• 6 months ago

I'm an engineer and I don't exactly know a lot of engineers who think you can manifest alternative realities into existence with the power of quantum physics, on account of most of us having passed a physics class or two

He always seemed like the archetypal "Californian creative who fried his brain with psychedelics and new age woo-woo in the 70s" type

dragonwriter6• 6 months ago

How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed,

They weren't surpressed; he was very open about them from very early on in his career as a comic artist; they were central to his “origin story” and were woven directly into the comics. Its just, for a while, other aspects of his still-recent experience in corporate America gave him other relatable things to say that were mixed in with them, which made it easier to overlook them.

cptskippy• 6 months ago

Has anyone take the time to prove that out? I was a fan of the comic for years and don't recall there being a lot of casual racism strewn in.

the_af5• 6 months ago

Were there early signs? I don't know of them, but to be honest, I mostly "knew" him through Dilbert. When he turned out to be a bigot it was a disappointing surprise to me.

syntheticnature• 6 months ago

While he definitely went off the rails, I first caught a hint, back in the 90s, when his fanclub/e-list was named "Dogbert's New Ruling Class"... and he seemed to take it a bit too seriously.

LiquidSky3• 6 months ago

How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand.

The key is that it seemed like he was Dilbert when he actually always thought of himself as Dogbert.

optionalsquid2• 6 months ago

My impression of Adams, based on his writings on science and more, is that he turned out to be more of a Pointy-Haired Boss

rsynnott4• 6 months ago

I read one of his books once, written in the 90s or so. It included the idea that affirmations could literally change reality ("law of attraction"), and an _alternative theory of gravity_. At the time, I thought that these were probably attempts at jokes that didn't land very well, but... Once you believe one thing which is totally outside the pale, it is often very easy to start believing others.

EvanAnderson• 6 months ago

After reading that book I found it a lot less easy to be amused by Dilbert. That experience contributed to my actively trying not to learn things about artists I enjoy. It's that "don't meet your heroes" cliche, I guess.

seanhunter• 6 months ago

Yeah likewise. The book I read had a completely wrong “explanation” of Bell’s inequalities that said that FTL transmission of information was going to be happening in the future as soon as we’d got some of the technical details around entanglement ironed out. It wasn’t a joke it was pseudo—scientific magical thinking. I knew then that he had either always been, or had turned into, a crank.

ilamont3• 6 months ago

"Theory of positive affirmations" and related ideas have been floating around for a long time. There is some scientific research around this (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-age-of-overindul...) but there are also some culty groups that use it for indoctrination or as sales tools.

gs173• 6 months ago

and an _alternative theory of gravity_

For people who haven't read The Dilbert Future: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/32627/has-anyone...

It's a weird book and not in a great way. He presents a bunch of very strange "theories" in a way where he kind of says "haha just a silly lil thought... unless it's true", which I remember seeing in some of his early Trump stuff too.

chasd00• 6 months ago

I remember those, i think they were in the appendix of The Dilbert Principal. I thought the gravity one was particularly strange. I bet he had one of those perfect storm personalities that just go completely crazy when hooked into a sufficiently large social media network.

btw, affirmations is a pretty common thing in a lot of religions and other superstitions. Every single Catholic mass is pretty much just the same affirmations/mantra/rituals over and over with a bible story at the end. They even publish the schedule on an annual basis iirc. (my wife briefly converted to Catholicism when we were getting married)

Intralexical2• 6 months ago

My youth experiences left me with zero desire to ever work anywhere near a tech company. But when I was still in grade school, I once flipped through a Scott Adams book that my father had borrowed from the local library. There's one line that I remember particularly clearly, directed at any woman who felt uncomfortable or ignored in the workplace:

  "WE'RE THINKING ABOUT HAVING SEX WITH YOU!"

Google tells me this is from "The Dilbert Future", 1997, pg. 146 under "Prediction 38". It's presented as the explanation for when a woman speaks in a meeting, and male coworkers don't listen to, quote, "the woman who is generating all that noise".

Adams more or less tells female readers to just deal with it, while also telling male readers that they're broken/lying if they're not engaged in a constant sexual fantasy about their female coworkers.

To be honest, this did real damage to how I felt about sexuality and gender. Not a huge amount on its own, but it's just such a distorted take from a respected author, whose books my father kept checking out, that I read at a young age.

Scott Adams clearly lived an atypical life. Most people don't quit their jobs to write comics about corporate culture. If I had to guess why he took such a hard turn later on, I think, maybe it's something that happens when a humorist can't compartmentalize their penchant for absurdity and need for attention from real life, they can tell jokes that resonate with a lot of people, but at the same time their serious views also end up becoming ungrounded...

plorkyeran• 6 months ago

His theory of gravity (everything in the universe is exponentially growing in size at a continuous rate, shrinking the gaps between things) was a fascinating thought experiment for me as a kid and I enjoyed thinking through how it could work and why it wouldn't work. Finding out later that he at least at one point took it seriously as a potential explanation for how the universe works was very surprising to me.

rchaud7• 6 months ago

Affirmations and law of attraction stuff are just repackaged version of prayers for the "not religious, but spiritual" crowd.

S_Bear• 6 months ago

That book killed Dilbert for me. I enjoyed every Dilbert book up until that one, then it just faded away for me.

georgeburdell• 6 months ago

Adams had a normal range of beliefs. Postulating that they arose from some extrinsic and extra-personal source is a condemnation of your own limited views. People get older and begin to care less about conformity, including keeping controversial thoughts to themselves, as society loosens its reins as your needs are met (to make money, to find a partner, to have a family, etc.)

loki49152• 6 months ago

A lot of the people who comment here are techie provincials who literally have no understanding that the things they believe, or at least the things they recite as their beliefs, are ideas that might be analyzed and judged against reality.

gopher_space• 6 months ago

What’s normal about bigotry? It’s brain damage.

nemomarx4• 6 months ago

The law of attraction / master persuader/ I can hypnotize large audiences stuff isn't that normal, I think?

If you want an explanation for why he would try ivermectin for cancer treatment he had a lot of beliefs in that vein for a long time. I consider that tragic for him.

ActorNightly2• 6 months ago

Adams had a normal range of beliefs.

Manifesting things into reality through writing them often enough is FAR from a normal belief. Dude was a bit looney from the get go

mr_toad3• 6 months ago

Adams had a normal range of beliefs.

You’re probably thinking of politics. You may not have read some of his more philosophical and metaphysical works, which were downright kooky. For example he thought that the universe was the dust of a god that had killed itself.

jakevoytko3• 6 months ago

I followed his blog back when he started this descent, and I have a theory that it was hill climbing.

He used to blog about pretty innocent stuff; his wife making fun of him for wearing pajama pants in public, behind the scenes on drawing comics, funny business interactions he'd had. But then he started getting taken out of context by various online-only publications, and he'd get a burst of traffic and a bunch of hate mail and then it'd go away. And then he'd get quoted out of context again. I'm not sure if it bothered him, but he started adding preambles to his post, like "hey suchandsuch publication, if you want to take this post out of context, jump to this part right here and skip the rest."

I stopped reading around this point. But later when he came out with his "trump is a persuasion god, just like me, and he is playing 4d chess and will be elected president" schtick, it seemed like the natural conclusion of hill climbing controversy. He couldn't be held accountable for the prediction. After all, he's just a comedian with a background in finance, not a politics guy. But it was a hot take on a hot topic that was trying to press buttons.

I'm sure he figured out before most people that being a newspaper cartoonist was a downward-trending gig, and that he'd never fully transition to online. But I'm sad that this was how he decided to make the jump to his next act.

afandian• 6 months ago

Can you define “hill climbing”? Is it a metaphor?

mpweiher2• 6 months ago

...will be elected president

But Trump was elected president. Twice. So maybe Adams was right? Or what did you mean with "hill climbing controversy"?

mixmastamyk2• 6 months ago

Most of us have experienced a family member who got caught up in a corporate (or worse) news addiction.

It’s so common that we barely remark on it any longer. So I don’t think it’s really a mystery, it can happen to anyone who’s not getting outside enough.

My first clue something was wrong was when he didn’t understand the criticism around the Iraq war of the early 2000s. Which even most conservatives have come around now to acknowledge as a disaster.

riazrizvi3• 6 months ago

Did he go off the rails? My understanding is that the zeitgeist is taking people’s opposing views online and distorting them, removing context, to outrage our own audience and align it to our cause.

Almost everyone is reasonable, it’s the contexts that our reasons are relevant to, which are different.

NitpickLawyer• 6 months ago

the zeitgeist is taking people’s opposing views online and distorting them, removing context, to outrage our own audience and align it to our cause.

This is 100% the case, with very infamous baddies, but people don't want to acknowledge it. It's a sad reality of this always on media we ingest. No idea what can be done, other than slowly ignoring more and more algorithmic stuff, and choose your own adventures based on content providers you have known for a long time, and still have their backbone intact.

overgard2• 6 months ago

I haven't followed everything Scott Adams has done recently (largely because most of his stuff ended up paywalled), but in the past I'd note that he'd have an interesting take on something, possibly hard to defend but not intrinsically "bad", but then he'd get lumped in as having a "bad" opinion by people that just wanted to create headlines. One example was his assertion that Donald Trump was a "master persuader", and much more skilled in his speech then people were giving him credit for. I remember, at the time at least, that he always prefaced it by saying it wasn't in support/antagonism of Trump, just an observation of his skill, but it quickly got turned into "Scott Adams is a MAGA guy." (Since then, I don't know if Adams ever became a MAGA guy or not, but it's an example of how at the time his statements got oversimplified and distorted). Anyway, I saw a lot of examples of that -- he'd have a relatively nuanced take probably expressed too boldly, but people wanted to just lump him in to some narrative they already had going.

I think Scott Adams' biggest problem in life (although partially what also made him entertaining), is that he'd kind of pick fights that had little upside for him and a lot of downside.

dangus14• 6 months ago

“The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people“ -Scott Adams

Does that sound reasonable to you?

pelorat• 6 months ago

I mean he tried treating his cancer with Ivermectin instead of seeking treatment from medical professionals.

sys32768• 6 months ago

How many of his Coffee with Scott Adams broadcasts did you watch before forming the "off the rails" opinion?

ilamont3• 6 months ago

Concluding he would need an M.B.A if he wanted to climb the corporate ladder, Adams got into UC Berkeley, with the bank footing the bill. As he closed in on his master’s degree, he learned that an assistant vice president position was opening up but figured he wouldn’t get it because the bank was leaning toward hiring a minority, he said.

Adams jumped to Pacific Bell and completed his degree, thinking he was on the fast track to upper management. But in his book, Adams wrote that as was the case at Crocker National, his new employer was also coming under fire for a lack of diversity in its executive ranks.

Instead of getting mad, Adams got to drawing. Believing all this was a sign for him to revive his dream of cartooning, he purchased a primer on how to submit a comic strip and went about creating Dilbert.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/scott-ad...

jnwatson2• 6 months ago

My working hypothesis is that some jobs are inherently isolating and that gradually leads to mental deviance. CEOs and cartoonists are similar in this way.

He didn't have peers to challenge him on anything, and after a couple decades of that, he was just high on his own supply. Elon Musk and Kanye West have the same issue.

CrimsonCape• 6 months ago

If I understand you correctly, you are considering Adams to be "off the rails" crazy and therefore you are condemning him, for having opinions?

PlanksVariable7• 6 months ago

No, no. It’s more nuanced than that. They were opinions that were different from my own.

rubenflamshep• 6 months ago

Behind the bastards did an interesting episode on him. He was always kind of kooky: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6ZlIuEIgLRNxfJWxiv4asn?si=w...

Rastonbury• 6 months ago

Looking the timeline of controversies, I reckon he was radicalized by Conservative ragebait twitter, repeating just what was hype then. I'm only aware of these things because I know some people who brought out similar 'hot takes' and 'you need to care about these issues' irl at similar times

mannanj3• 6 months ago

I think it was that there was a cancel culture censorship type of intensity that occurred while he was able to express before, it particularly latched onto targeting people like him (we all know about and have heard of the intensifying censorship in the last half decade COVID-era) and one of the things I've recently learned is censorship, a form of criticism, has that affect of creating and triggering insecurities which digs us deep into extreme positions.

Think of it this way: if you were cancelled and repressed and censored in your own home and unable to express yourself, your efforts to communicate to remain authentic would intensify not die down. Or you die and let yourself morph to the average new censor-ship approved world.

Scott wouldn't do that and neither would I. All this to say I think its normal to intensify your opinions and even take on and be pushed to more extremes when you live in a controversial time of "you're either on my side or the other side and theres no acceptable middle gray area.

CGMthrowaway3• 6 months ago

How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand

He explains it himself, if you are open to primary source material.

rsynnott4• 6 months ago

A crazy person's account of how they went crazy should not generally be considered reliable.

dennis_jeeves28• 6 months ago

How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced.

No surprises for me. By my standards he was never radicalized just an objective thinker with a flair for humor.

mattmanser• 6 months ago

Have you read anything of his from that era like Win Bigly?

I was expecting something insightful, an insider's view of why the right had coalesced around Trump.

Instead it was some of the most awful drivel I have ever read.

jbm• 6 months ago

I always thought it was the same as a solid part of his specific cohort and generation; excessive entertainment-style news consumption through the normal rabble rousers. For a group of people who were obsessed with telling me that wrestling was fake, they sure were a group of marks when a guy with a gravelly voice told them what to think.

I didn't know about his comments about Black people until today. It's more than a bit pathetic that he devolved into colour-based absurdities so late in life. For someone who could pattern match the reality of life at a large company so effectively, it's unfortunate he couldn't realize he was being played by 4chan trolls and fellow travelers in the media.

Tycho2• 6 months ago

“deeply off the rails”

How sheltered are you people? Scott Adams was a pretty standard non-woke boomer. Do you think that just because you don’t hear certain opinions in the workplace or the faculty or the Atlantic podcast, that they aren’t widely held by members of the public? Do you think everyone’s into DEI, BLM, trans-rights, multi-culturalism etc?

AlexeyBelov3• 6 months ago

You don't have to be into this, just not against.

Windchaser• 6 months ago

Calling black people a "hate group" is not really standard boomer stuff, I think

sanity19• 6 months ago

How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand. Was this opinions he'd always had, but suppressed, did he somehow become radicalized or was it perhaps medically induced, e.g. a stroke or something. It was incredibly sad to see him throw away his life's work and go down a path most of us at least hadn't foreseen and die having alienated his fans.

He has plenty of fans right up to the end, it's amazing how people think someone went "off the rails" just because he has a different political opinion.

suzzer99• 6 months ago

Saying Republicans were going to be hunted down in the street if Biden won is a little more than just having a different political opinion.

Mashimo2• 6 months ago

What is having fans and going of the rails have to do with each other?

TeeMassive• 6 months ago

How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails

Why? People all say that but it is never stated how or what he said.

rchaud7• 6 months ago

Sometimes people just get to retirement age, realize they don't have much longer to go and choose to stop hiding who they are. Morrissey of The Smiths is another guy who's alienated his audience. Moe Tucker, drummer in the legendary NYC '60s counterculture band The Velvet Underground was picketing at a Tea Party rally in 2009 and saying "Obama is destroying America from the inside".

yodsanklai• 6 months ago

Sometimes people just get to retirement age, realize they don't have much longer to go and choose to stop hiding who they are

Personality changes over time, it's not necessarily about hiding.

throwaway5752• 6 months ago

Aging is lonelier and more stressful than ever. The aging brain is already less flexible and there is a net loss of synapses and brain mass.

The internet has become a more unkind and manipulative place that ever. It is making people into the worst version of themselves, to serve the ends of groups that benefit from division.

I mourn many things with this news today. RIP Scott Adams.

anigbrowl• 6 months ago

I had similar feelings of perplexity until one day it dawned on me that Adams' self-insert wasn't Dilbert, but Dogbert.

apexalpha2• 6 months ago

Since there are many fans here, perhaps people can share some of their favourite comics for the others.

jchallis• 6 months ago

Scott Adams died today. I want to acknowledge something complicated.

He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.

His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.

You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.

For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.

Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.

dstroot• 6 months ago

I will probably be downvoted for posting something that “doesn’t add value” but I have to say that is a beautiful post about a difficult topic. I could never put into words my feelings as well as you just did. I loved his art. I did not love the man.

embedding-shape6• 6 months ago

I could never put into words my feelings as well as you just did. I loved his art. I did not love the man.

There is a lot of this in the modern era, and probably will only get "worse". People need to sooner than later be able to reconcile this whole idea of "not liking the person yet can't help but like their art". Back in the day it was easy to ignore, and probably most of the bad stuff was easily hidden, not so much these days.

rbanffy4• 6 months ago

I find it really sad that I lost respect for him because of his political views. When someone you admire dies, it happens once. When you lose respect for someone, that person you admired dies over and over again, on every new disappointment.

To me, he died many times in the past few years. Dilbert of the 1990s is dear to me and I really enjoyed the animated series. My sons tell me it prepared them for corporate life. I'm sad he left us this way. I wish I could admire him again.

bentcorner• 6 months ago

Love the art, not the artist.

I loved reading the Belgariad as a young teen and was shocked upon learning more about the author as an adult.

basseq• 6 months ago

This reads like a Speaker for the Dead moment (from Ender’s Game): neither eulogy nor denunciation, but an honest accounting. Acknowledging the real impact without excusing the real harm.

throw4436y54• 6 months ago

This comment reminds me of when I talked to a few Chinese friends about their thoughts on Mao. They all acknowledged the failed policies which led to famine, yet they also admired that he basically gave Chinese people their pride back.

They related him to an uncle figure who became a mean drunk.

scyzoryk_xyz• 6 months ago

I'm just glad Dilbert's creator is in the same thread as Chairman Mao

k__3• 6 months ago

Pride made it worth it?!

lambdasquirrel• 6 months ago

Well that’s the kicker right? Mao gave way for later leaders who lifted China out of poverty. The normalization of all this craziness is what led the USA to where it is today. Two quite different trajectories.

gcanyon3• 6 months ago

I used to say the same thing about Ronald Reagan -- a president who did many questionable/bad things, but he lifted the U.S. out of the doldrums we experienced in the late '70s.

Over time I've learned context about how those doldrums occurred, and more about what Reagan actually did, and the trade seems much less worthwhile. :-/

Zigurd• 6 months ago

Sounds like what some American will say in two or three years, except for the excuse about being drunk.

nonethewiser4• 6 months ago

More like a sober uncle who killed other family members.

hinkley6• 6 months ago

I’ve met too many (mostly martial) artists who have stories of their lineage having to hide their art during Mao or a similar dark period in other parts of East Asia to see these people as an uncle. More like the kid in high school you found out is serving two consecutive life sentences and saying, yeah that tracks.

mikkupikku2• 6 months ago

The famine stuff I could write off as honest mistakes by a misguided but well meaning leader. Mao's role in kicking off the Cultural Revolution as part of his internal power struggle with the CCP can hardly be excused the same way, it was profoundly evil. The CCP today can recognize some of the faults with Mao, and even acknowledge that the Cultural Revolution was a disaster, but shy away from acknowledging Mao's causal role in that.

benjiro3• 6 months ago

This comment reminds me of when I talked to a few Chinese friends about their thoughts on Mao.

There has been a push under Xi's leadership to whitewash a lot of the past, especially involving Mao. As Xi has been positioning himself as a somewhat father figure of the nation. This has resulted in a revival of Mao policies, like the little red book.

So do not be surprised about uncle figure statement...

bigDinosaur• 6 months ago

That's because they've been indoctrinated - Mao was a complete disaster in every way but admitting that is a step too far for the CCP. The cultural revolution was the worst thing to ever happen to Chinese cultural history and connection to the past (since destroying that was the entire aim of it). Sun Yat-Sen is a far better example of someone worth venerating as a moderniser who didn't want to destroy everything from the past.

embedding-shape6• 6 months ago

You don’t choose family

Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not? I think most people could actually "choose family" (or not, if it's better for you as individual). Why stick with people if they're mostly negative and have a negative impact on you? Just because you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human on the planet?

Not to take away from the rest of what you say, it's a highly personal experience, and I thank you for sharing that heartfelt message to give people more perspectives, something usually missing when "divisive" (maybe not the right word) people end up in the news. Thank you for being honest, and thank you for sharing it here.

deadbabe• 6 months ago

You can choose family and still choose wrong, you can have family assigned at birth and it could be the best. You get what you get in life and eventually it ends anyway.

Firehawke2• 6 months ago

I'm getting off-topic with this, but a quick aside:

In my teens I began to learn that most of the people on my father's side of the family were horrifically broken people with severe issues. There's at least one town in New Mexico where I wouldn't want to use my last name because an uncle of mine has run it deeply through the mud and 20' underground so to speak.

I've actively cut those people out of my life. I've decided that blood isn't the only thing that makes family, and that I can choose who I want to treat as family.

The infighting bastards who happen to share my last name are not my family.

coffeemug• 6 months ago

My experience has been that "chosen family" is a thing that works when you're young, but almost always falls apart when you get older. This has happened to countless people I know. Life throws all kinds of curveballs, incentives change, conflicts arise, sometimes very intense conflicts. Empirically, chosen family is a structure that works in a particular place and time, then disintegrates when conditions change. Real family isn't like that; there is a very strong anthropological connection wired into us that doesn't go away when the situation changes.

Of course it's different for everyone, some families are so tragic they may not be worth preserving, etc. But that's an outlier-- the modal experience is that the power of family is precisely in the fact that you don't get to choose it.

gcanyon3• 6 months ago

Richard Bach in his book Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah: “The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.”

I first read those words many years ago. They were a comfort and a revelation then, and they still resonate today, when I have very much chosen my own family.

foobarian2• 6 months ago

I think most people could actually "choose family"

It's all fun and games until grandma passes with a $10M net worth without a will, and the 5 children and 20 grandchildren start a real life session of battle royale

gwbas1c2• 6 months ago

> You don’t choose family
Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not?

I'm sorry you had that experience.

There are very good reasons to leave / avoid family. I have an extended family and I've seen it all: One cousin recently had to kick her husband out for being an alcoholic; a different cousin was kicked out for being an alcoholic and met his 2nd wife in AA. Fortunately, my ultra-conservative aunt and uncle tolerate their transgender grandchild, but it creates a lot of friction between them and my cousin (transgender child's parent).

For most of us, our families are a positive experience. As we get older, we also learn that families are an exercise in learning to accept people as they are, and not as we wish they would be. We just can't go through life changing our people whenever they don't live up to what we want them to be.

As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.

yellowapple3• 6 months ago

My interpretation is that there are two different senses of “family” at play here:

- The people with whom we share close bonds, stronger than ordinary friendship; we absolutely can (and should) choose them, and choose them wisely.

- The people who've disproportionately shaped our development into who we are as persons today; barring sci-fi technologies like time machines or false memory implantation, that's pretty hard to change.

GP's comment seems to be more about the latter, and of Scott Adams being in that category. I agree with that in my case, too; both the Dilbert comics and The Dilbert Principle were formative for me both personally and professionally — which amplified the pain I felt when Adams started to “go off the deep end” and reveal himself to be less of a Dilbert and more of a PHB.

usednoise4sale• 6 months ago

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I would point out that "happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human" is probably not the best mental model of how to quantify this sort of relationship. Due to combinatorial explosion, these numbers are kind of misleading. It is similar to saying that it is trivial to crack a 1 million bits of entropy password because we already know 99% of the bits. This leaves out that you still have 2^(10000) possible passwords.

Your immediately family shares hundreds of thousands more variable sites in your genome than a 'random' individual. Which is to say there would need to be something like a 2^(100000) population of humans before someone 'random' would be as close to you in terms of variable sites.

I guess my point being "you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA" is just not trivial or a small coincidence that can be waved away with "we are more similar to each other than not". Whether any genetic similarity means that one's biological family deserves one's attention, I have no comment.

sgt2• 6 months ago

I want to like your message but I can't help think you generated this using AI and I can't upvote AI slop.

antonvs• 6 months ago

the clarity of thought

I have difficulty reconciling this with the other side of the picture. It seems to me like true clarity of thought wouldn't have ended up in the places he did.

leoc• 6 months ago

Having clear insight in some areas and big blind spots (or worse) in others isn't just typical, it's basically all but universal (if we leave aside people who have no particular insight into anything).

MBCook• 6 months ago

I know what you mean. I really liked Dilbert, but I don’t think I read any of his other books.

At some point I stopped reading because the RSS feed kept getting broken and it was just too hard for me to follow.

I didn’t hear about Adams again until maybe 7-8 years ago when I found out about the sock puppet thing and he had seemingly gone off the deep end.

From the meager amount I know, it only got worse from there.

It makes things very odd. Given who he was/became I don’t miss him. But I did enjoy his work long long ago.

aaroninsf• 6 months ago

You don't choose family.
That also felt like family [emphasis added]

See the problem?

"Chosen family" is chosen. You weren't recruited.

pembrook• 6 months ago

As someone who actively avoided cancel culture hysteria in the 2010s, can we have some context here?

What did the guy say that has everyone stumbling over themselves to vaguely allude to it?

yzydserd• 6 months ago

It’s linked to in the first sentence of the OP.

reducesuffering2• 6 months ago

Adams: "I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off. I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying. I'm not saying start a war or do anything bad. Nothing like that. I'm just saying get away. Just get away."

stetrain16• 6 months ago

"So I realized, as you know I've been identifying as Black for a while, years now, because I like to be on the winning team"

"But as of today I'm going to re-identify as White, because I don't want to be a member of a hate group, I'd accidentally joined a hate group."

"The best advice I would give to White people is to get away hell away from Black people, just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there's no fixing this, this can't be fixed, you just have to escape. So that's what I did, I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6TnAn7qV1s

RIMR4• 6 months ago

It takes a lot of privilege to ignore a person's overt racism and only remember a person's more agreeable qualities. Whitewashing a person's legacy in this way is a disservice to all of the people that person directed hatred at, as if it didn't really happen.

He was a racist person, and the people he was racist towards would prefer that people not forget that, even in death, because the problems that Scott Adams embodied at the end of his life did not die with him.

wasmainiac• 6 months ago

Can you clue me in? I only knew about Dilbert, and “drilbert”

stetrain16• 6 months ago

I'm not sure the comment is saying to ignore the racism.

"...you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous."

coderc• 6 months ago

I'm black, and I can ignore Adams' "overt racism", because I understood the context of his words, and I can empathize with him. Please don't speak for an entire group of people.

pohl• 6 months ago

Interesting that you literally chose him as family (albeit parasocially) when he's not actually family, and then somehow justify it by saying that one cannot choose their family. Pick a lane.

RIMR4• 6 months ago

My thoughts exactly! The "You can pick your friends, but you cannot pick your family" mantra is a good one, but this guy is talking about a cartoonist he likes. Scott Adams isn't your friend or a family member; he just draws Dilbert comics!

kritiko4• 6 months ago

“De gustibus non disputandum est” - no arguing taste. Art is like family.

TheBigSalad• 6 months ago

I think he means that it was like family in the sense that he was there. You didn't choose him, Dilbert was just everywhere. And back in the day everyone loved Scott Adams, but then thing started to go bad over time and we all realized what was happening. It's similar to what a lot of families face - you love someone when you're younger but realize how messed up things are later. Or the person changes in negative ways. I don't see this as justifying anything.

isodev• 6 months ago

His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.

I’m sorry, are you also racist or do you mean a different family?

Scott Adams undoubtedly “won at life” but also somehow remained angry at the world. More of an example of things we shouldn’t do and things we should try to eradicate.

LordDragonfang2• 6 months ago

Many people have belligerent, racist older family members who only became more belligerent and racist over time. They're practically a stock character in jokes about Thanksgiving and Christmas.

yokoprime• 6 months ago

The persona he presented in social media was very angry and smug. I always liked reading dilbert growing up, but it’s difficult for me to read Scott Adams comics now without the echo of his angry rants in the back of my mind.

tartoran• 6 months ago

He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.

Same to me when it comes his comics. There is an ugly part I did not like about Scott Adams but, that doesn't mean I will like his work (Dilbert) less. I have to admit it felt disappointing to find out about his vitriol online. Best wishes to his family and rest in peace for Scott. alway

Aurornis• 6 months ago

Learning to appreciate someone's art while disagreeing with their politics is a rite of passage in the age of the internet.

There are a few artists whose output I can't even enjoy any more because their vitriol became so out of control that I couldn't see their work without thinking of their awfulness, though. (Note: I'm not talking about Scott Adams. I'm honestly not that familiar with his later life social media)

Intralexical2• 6 months ago

IMO Dilbert was always at its best when it focused more on absurdity, and less on rage, cynicism, or ego. I still occasionally think about Dogbert's airliners that can't handle direct sunlight, the RNG troll that kept repeating "Nine", Wally's minty-fresh toothpaste-saturated shirt, and Asok's misadventures.

I do think there was another formula he gravitated towards, though. Maybe one in every four strips, it seemed to me like he would have a canonically "stupid" character present a popular belief or a common behavior, and then have his author self-insert character dunk on them... And that was it, that was the entire comic. Those strips weren't very witty or funny to me, they just felt like contrived fantasies about putting down an opponent.

Once I noticed that, it became harder to enjoy the rest of his comics. And easier to imagine how he might have fallen down the grievance politics rabbit hole.

kenjackson8• 6 months ago

After hearing his vitriol over the years I do see his comics and writing very differently now. As someone else said, he views everyone as idiots or below him, and needs an out group to target. Dilbert read in that light just seems hateful more than insightful or relatable. I never plan on reading any Scott Adams material for the rest of my life or introducing anyone else to it.

nonethewiser4• 6 months ago

You don’t choose family

Right. But he's not actually your family member.

I dont disagree with your general sentiment but you are literally trying to pick your family.

SauntSolaire• 6 months ago

The op didn't get to decide that Scott's work would be so important for him, or have as much influence on him as it did. There are a lot of things you don't choose, family being one of them.

gexla2• 6 months ago

At my age, he was about as close to family as you can get without being physically there. I grew up reading his comics in our newspaper while eating family breakfast. His work was a part of our family morning ritual. His work was part of pre-internet America when our channels were limited. Our thought and worldview were to some degree shaped by these limited channels.

stetrain16• 6 months ago

I think it’s interesting how many responses to this comment seem to have interpreted it fairly differently to my own reading.

There are many responding about “ignoring racism,” “whitewashing,” or the importance of calling out bigotry.

I’m not sure how that follows from a comment that literally calls out the racism and describes it as “unambiguous.”

Striving to “avoid the ugliness” in your own life does not mean ignoring it or refusing to call it out.

estimator72922• 6 months ago

You're ignoring the family metaphor. GP is painting Adams as the old racist uncle everyone tolerates at family dinners. It's excusing Adams' racist behavior, in the same way you excuse your racist uncle to a partner the first time they come to dinner.

It's not okay, and it's not okay to pretend it's okay.

singingbard• 6 months ago

This took me a long time to work through:

1. People’s beliefs are strongly shaped by upbringing and social environment.

2. A belief feeling “natural” or common does not make it correct or benign.

3. What’s most commendable is the effort to examine and revise inherited beliefs, especially when they cause harm.

4. This framework lets me understand how any individual arrived at their views without endorsing those views.

I think this is why responses often split: some treat explanation as endorsement, others don’t. Both reactions are understandable, but the tension disappears once you treat explanation and moral evaluation as separate and compatible steps.

michaelt• 6 months ago

Generally the idiom "like family" implies very close and durable bonds of friendship and loyalty. That you'd drive several hours to help them bury a body, if they asked.

The idiomatic use is a much higher standard than literal family - members of the same family can hate each other.

As jchallis used the idiomatic term in the latter, more literal sense, I can understand people getting confused.

_carbyau_7• 6 months ago

Ironically, a whole bunch of people have spent their formative years in a cancel-culture world and this now shapes their actions.

But at an art gallery, Picasso is near worshipped despite his torrid misogyny and abuse in his personal life which was terrible even by the standards of his day. The views on his art were formed at a time before cancel-culture was a thing.

Realising:

- everyone has performed good and bad actions

- having performed a good action doesn't "make up for or cancel out" a bad action. You can save thousands of people, but murdering someone still should mean a life sentence.

- you can be appreciated for your good actions while your bad actions still stand.

: all these take some life experience and perhaps significant thought on the concepts.

raxxorraxor5• 6 months ago

the importance of calling out bigotry.

There is a thin line here. People need people like Adams to be a racist to justify themselves. If you look for flaws in everyone overstepping conventional dogmata, you would rate higher on a scale that approximates authoritarian personalities. My case here is exactly such a case as well. It is only an approximation, but it would be a delusion to ignore these tendencies in online or media discussions.

Perhaps he was racist, I didn't know him personally. He certainly was controversial and he wanted to provoke. That comes with a price. But statements with inverted skin colors are simply treated differently.

hatmanstack• 6 months ago

I've always been a Dilbert fan, didn't get to any of his books until later. I think Scott was someone unafraid to share his thoughts, unfiltered.

They were valuable to me because it gave me perspective on a way of thinking I would never have considered. I disagreed with the majority, but some had the subtle beginnings of truth that helped to expand my world view.

I'm grateful he was part of the world, and will miss his comedy.

jacquesm5• 6 months ago

You don't choose the family that you are born into but you definitely choose which ones of them you keep around for the longer term.

gexla2• 6 months ago

Do you though? I guess it depends on how you define family. There's family that you rarely see and you call them family because of the social (even if weak) ties. And then there's family you grew up knowing. The impact of family early in you, never goes away. Your family early in life shapes us in ways we probably can't comprehend. Reading Scott's work was a family ritual at the breakfast table. I'm sure his work had some part in shaping me in a way that I can't delete.

MarcelOlsz• 6 months ago

Nice to read such a graceful comment, I saved it.

lisper2• 6 months ago

The racism and the provocations were always there

Were they? Can you cite an example? Because I also grew up with Dilbert, and I was never aware of it.

cosmicgadget9• 6 months ago

Dilbert May 2, 2022 is provocative.

rchaud7• 6 months ago

It's in Chapter 1 of his autobiography. He used to work at a bank in the 80s, and was turned down for a managerial or executive position (can't remember) which went to an Asian candidate. He was certain it was due to DEI (in the 80s!) and quit the corporate world to become a cartoonist.

The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white".

Mashimo2• 6 months ago

If you want to dig down deeper into his past, you can listen to a 2 part episode of "Behind the Bastards" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nyEkHqP65c

estimator72922• 6 months ago

You don’t choose family

Hard disagree. Blood is not thicker than water, though the original proverb is correct.

You can choose to remove shitty racist people from your family. "Pineapple belongs on pizza" is an opinion we can all debate around the dinner table. "Brown people don't deserve human rights" is not. Nor should it be accepted and overlooked.

Opinions like "white people are the only good people" are not acceptable. Saying and thinking that makes you a bad person. Accepting those views also makes you a bad person.

Non-white people's rights are not a matter of opinion, nor is it up for debate.

Put very plainly, you either believe that all people deserve the same rights and respect by default, or you're a racist and a bad person. There's no gray area, no "maybe both sides". All humans deserve the same basic rights. You either agree, or you're a bad person who does not deserve to participate in polite society.

newsclues• 6 months ago

Life and people are complicated and messy. It’s not easy to reduce people to good or bad.

Celebrate the good in life, it’s too short to focus and well on the negative.

paulryanrogers2• 6 months ago

Dwelling on the negative is one thing. Acknowledging the bad with the good is often the point of obituaries and threads like this one.

We don't need to whitewash the world to enjoy the good parts.

juleiie• 6 months ago

Why do you need to prompt chatgpt into writing an Eulogy? Are you just a bot or a real person?

I don't think a machine can care about someone's death

bawolff2• 6 months ago

Humans have a lot of trouble with realizing people aren't binary. People hate the idea that bad people can do good things.

paulryanrogers2• 6 months ago

Is that really true? Young children perhaps. IME most folks learn that people are complicated at least by adolescence once they realize their parents are imperfect.

Of course there is the ever present temptation to resort to tribalism, which is pretty binary: in or out.

not_a_bot_4sho• 6 months ago

My favorite (or perhaps most regrettable) example of this is Albert Einstein.

Obviously brilliant, but a real piece of shit when it came to women and fatherhood.

Still, I can appreciate his scientific work nonetheless.

tombert2• 6 months ago

I feel similar.

Dilbert came out a bit before I was born, so from my perspective it always existed. Even before I had ever had any kind of office job, I was reading the Dilbert comics and watching the cartoon series, and had even read The Dilbert Principle.

It was upsetting that he ended up with such horrible viewpoints later in his life, and they aren’t really forgivable, but as you stated it’s sort of like a relative you grew up with dying.

I really hate my grandmother, because she has repeatedly said very racist stuff to my wife, so I haven’t talked to her in since 2018, and the only communication that I have had with her was a series of increasingly nasty emails we exchanged after she called my mother a “terrible parent” because my sister is gay, where I eventually told her that she “will die sad and alone with her only friend being Fox News”.

It is likely that I will never say anything to her ever again; she is in her 90s now, and not in the greatest health from my understanding. When she kicks the bucket in a few years, I think I am going to have similar conflicts.

Despite me hating her now, it’s not like all my memories with her were bad. There are plenty of happy memories too, and I am glad to have those, but it doesn’t automatically forgive the horrible shit she has said to my wife and mother and sister.

I have thought about reaching out, but I cannot apologize for anything I said because I am not sorry for anything I said, and I do not apologize for things unless I actually regret them.

Dunno, relationships and psychology are complex and I can’t pretend to say I understand a damn thing about how my brain works.

kgarten2• 6 months ago

“His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier.”

Maybe I’m getting cynical, yet every time I see an mdash and rules of 3, it triggers the feeling of “This sounds like AI” …

Here’s another example:

“ I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.”

Dilettante_4• 6 months ago

LLM writing is bleeding back into normal peoples' styles. I've been having to catch myself from starting comments with some variation of "great point, let's drill down into that".

kylecazar2• 6 months ago

I've been a heavy emdash user for decades. I have never and will never pass AI writing off as my own -- it defeats the whole purpose for me. Please realize that many of us have been using them for a long time. I really don't want to stop.

egillie• 6 months ago

this plus the word "quiet" also triggered my "maybe AI" alarm

hajile• 6 months ago

AI learned from human writing -- stuff like what I write all the time.

mr_toad3• 6 months ago

We’re going to get to AGI more quickly than expected if humanity keeps on lowering the bar.

protocolture• 6 months ago

For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution.

This is the only issue I have with your statement.

I have a lot of favourite creators who are noteworthy for something bad or another. I like their stuff. The bad stuff doesnt particularly affect me. We get on fine. I read Howard and Lovecraft. I enjoy the heck out of them. I used to watch reruns of the Dilbert cartoon.

The issue here is sort of the implication that family is a net positive despite bad behaviours. Thats bs. Anyone who has had to push shitty assholes from their family isn't happy that they existed, or made better through their existence. Scott Adams is just a niche internet microcelebrity who made some funny comics and said some shitty things on his podcast. Blocking him is a lot easier than getting rid of an abusive family member, and his net effect on someone is going to be a lot lower.

krapp8• 6 months ago

He wasn't family. He created a product for money and you consumed it. Your relationship with Scott Adams was entirely transactional.

Caring about the man this much is like caring about Colonel Sanders or Tony the Tiger, it's weird and kind of gross.

pyuser583• 6 months ago

We have personal relationships with the authors whose work we read.

Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Dostoyevsky have changed my life. Just as much as family.

You can loudly say “no” and I’m loudly saying “yes.”

subjectsigma2• 6 months ago

This has to be one of the more insane takes in the thread. Colonel Sanders and Tony the Tiger aren’t real people, Scott Adams is (was?) a real person.

I listen to an artist who I feel changed my life with her music. When I heard she had attempted suicide I was deeply saddened. I had this irrational but deep feeling like I should have done something to help her, without knowing what that possibly could have been, since I don’t actually know her at all.

Is that “weird and kind of gross” too? To care about people suffering and dying even if you don’t know them personally?

iwontberude• 6 months ago

Dillbert was too passive, it really was annoying.

Peter from Office Space was more liberating.

mr_toad3• 6 months ago

Dilbert was at the bottom of the McCloud hierarchy:

https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:852/0*1sY0ftV55FfIGW_-...

But so were Alice and Asok; being aggressive and proactive didn’t get them anywhere. The ones at the top, like Catbert and Dogbert weren’t just aggressive, they were sociopaths.

myko• 6 months ago

Personally, I disassociate with racist family when they refuse to acknowledge and work on their beliefs

MarsOrWars• 6 months ago

Adam's arguing over a phrase "it's okay to be white" is ironic for an author, when the core misinterpretation was whether 'white' was an adjective or a verb.

He thought it was a label for who he was, while others saw it as a certain way of acting.

weregiraffe• 6 months ago

What parasocial relationship does to a mf

fantasizr• 6 months ago

younger folks may not realize how many of his strips were cut out of the newspaper and taped to fridges, cubicles, and office breakrooms.

pjmorris• 6 months ago

In the 90's, I worked for a small consulting company with large corporate clients.

We joked that we could assess the health of a company's culture by whether Dilbert cartoons were tapped up in cubicles. Companies without them tended to have not much in the way of a sense of humor, or irony, or self-awareness.

macintux• 6 months ago

I suspect there was a healthy medium: none meant cultural issues, while too many meant the entire company was dysfunctional to an extreme.

bityard• 6 months ago

The worst job I ever had was working for a manager who literally had a "no Dilbert cartoons in the workplace" policy. Other cartoons, fine, go crazy. But no Dilbert.

That place wasn't just kinda like Initech in Office Space, it pretty much WAS Initech in Office Space, only way less funny and interesting.

rbanffy4• 6 months ago

I always thought that finding those strips in an office was a warning sign. If they identify with those characters, there was something profoundly wrong.

And yes, the norm was already pretty bad.

allenu• 6 months ago

That brings back memories. They were definitely popular. In the early 2000s, I worked at a small company and one coworker had a bunch of Dilbert strips all over one of her cubicle walls. It wasn't an insane amount, but her cube was on the way to the break room, so it was visible to everyone passing by. Apparently the owners of the company did not like that and had her take them down.

hasbot• 6 months ago

As was Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes. Oddly in my own corporate travels, the practice seemed to have stopped mid-90's. In the '00's and later, cubicle walls were mostly barren. After '08, cubicles had disappeared altogether and they just lined us up along long tables like cordwood.

hyperjeff• 6 months ago

As a young engineer, I was once visited at my work desk by my CEO and the HR team because of all the Dilberts I had up on my cubicle wall. They felt they were harming morale. The engineers around me loved them, but they made fun of management, the real issue. I was surprised it merited the attention. I won a short battle over the issue and was allowed to keep them up. I still have a photo of that cubicle with them up.

Once, before the web existed, I emailed Scott and joked that perhaps he was someone at my company, looking over my shoulder. The comics were often absurd but also so accurate. He replied something friendly, I forget what.

rchaud7• 6 months ago

Back then it was possible for authors and artists to maintain a mystique about who they were. What you saw was what you got and that was it. Making social media a necessity for product marketing changed that forever.

timeimp• 6 months ago

Rest in peace, Scott.

Your Dilbert era was scary with how accurate it portrayed real life.

And your Coffee With Scott Adams era was impressive in explaining the goings on of life.

You will be missed!

riffraff• 6 months ago

I didn't like the person he became towards the end of his life, but Dilbert gave me a lot of laughs and was a perfect representation of what the corporate world looked like to my younger self. May he rest in peace.

renewiltord2• 6 months ago

It was interesting watching him encounter the bureaucracy of healthcare provision in the US. He had a line to the President to get him somewhere but it doesn’t seem to have helped. https://x.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1984915690634252352?s=20

His son died of a fentanyl drug overdose which is really tragic. Scott Adams was definitely a crazy person by the end of his time with all sorts of rants on this and that. But I always viewed this stage with pity rather than outrage. Being crazy after losing your child is perhaps just how things are.

It’s just unfortunate that others treated him as sane.

nemomarx4• 6 months ago

He said some particularly strange stuff about his son, but I choose to believe it was a complicated survivors guilt. losing a child is pretty up there for trauma.

I'm not sure about the hypnotism and manifesting beliefs, but that might have been the start of some deeper mental health issue too.

schainks• 6 months ago

Agree. What an odd tweet. It feels like he couldn’t be bothered to bug Kaiser every day to get the IV scheduled or didn’t have anyone who could make calls for him? Maybe he was truly alone and had no one to trust IRL.

I was a Kaiser Northern California member and yes their scheduling system was dysfunctional — they were the better of the options my employer offered. However, if you’re in need of treatment that is already approved, one phone call was always all you had to do book. Surgery was harder to book than anything, particularly for rare conditions.

ceejayoz3• 6 months ago

https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/02/scott-adams-prostate-can... / https://archive.is/W57Vg

In his May stream announcing his cancer, he said he’d used anti-parasitic medications ivermectin and fenbendazole to treat himself, but they didn’t work. There’s no evidence that ivermectin works as a cancer treatment.

I don't really think bureaucracy was his downfall.

renewiltord2• 6 months ago

No, of course not. He was doing all these alt therapies and they obviously wouldn’t help which I don’t think is that interesting. What I did find interesting is that someone who seemed so “connected” was still subject to all the usual normal-people problems.

51Cards• 6 months ago

I loved Dilbert and I really believe that you often have to separate art from artist if you want to enjoy many things. He put a very unique perspective on corporate and tech environments that made me laugh. Sad to see a human pass but also sadder that later he expressed some disappointing opinions that diminished his contributions.

elil17• 6 months ago

Feels like an appropriate time to remind folks of one of his stranger pieces of work, this board game commissioned by Lockheed Martin: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/60686/the-ethics-challen...

neuroelectron4• 6 months ago

Looks like a office worker themed version of Clue

app2• 6 months ago

Growing up I read Dilbert in the paper every morning. At some point I got one of the compilation books and for some reason in an epilogue Adams included his alternate theory of gravity which was essentially that gravity as force didn't exist and things pressed down on each other because everything was expanding at the same rate. He said he had yet to find anyone who could refute this.

Even at 12 I could tell this guy was an annoying idiot. Loved the comic though.

jeffbee• 6 months ago

Yeah, at the end of one of his books, I forget which, he described how he could manifest reality, such as getting a specific score on the GMAT not by targeted studying but by staring as hard as possible at the mail before he opened it. Absolute lunatic.

jimmydddd4• 6 months ago

--absolute lunatic. To paraphrase Adams, he always said manifestation was likely not "magic" but that when you tried it out for yourself, it *seemed* like it happened by magic.

isamuel• 6 months ago

I also remember this, and in fact I found an old Dilbert newsletter from 1996 ("Dogbert's New Ruling Class") where he describes it:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdb/1996Mar/0000.ht...

The simplest objection I can see is orbital mechanics.

app2• 6 months ago

Thanks for finding this!

emmelaich2• 6 months ago

from the same newsletter. How to be Funny.

Humor often comes from the weird thoughts and emotions involved in a situation, as opposed to the simple facts. The best fodder for humor can be communicated by a simple description of the situation and then saying "So then I was thinking..."

alphazard• 6 months ago

things pressed down on each other because everything was expanding at the same rate

I don't think this originates with him, it sounds like an amusing joke a physicist would say because the math happens to be equivalent, and there is not an experiment to differentiate between the two.

mixmastamyk2• 6 months ago

Minus the expanding clause, you are describing Newtonian vs. Einsteinian physics.

usrbinbash• 6 months ago

He said he had yet to find anyone who could refute this.

Which is why it's so important for people understand the Principle of Parsimony (aka. Occams Razor), and Russels Teapot.

Also, refuting it is rather easy, and doesn't even require modern technology, Henry Cavendish performed the experiment in 1797 [1]. Nothing in the experimental setup would change if all involved objects expanded.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_experiment

wtcactus2• 6 months ago

I don’t know Scott’s theory, but gravity as a force indeed doesn’t exist. That’s a classical physics concept.

For the last century, the accepted theory is that gravity is indeed not a force but a manifestation of the space-time curvature. That’s one of the main points of general relativity.

antod2• 6 months ago

My physics is very rusty and very basic, but I don't think classical physics said gravity was a force either. eg in Newton's 2nd law or engineering mechanics, gravity is the "a" or the "g" not the "F".

pokstad• 6 months ago

I just watched a Veritisium video that said the same thing: https://youtu.be/XRr1kaXKBsU

Zee2• 6 months ago

"Everything expanding at the same rate" sounds vaguely similar to the truth that what we feel as gravity (standing on earth) is us and everything around us accelerating upwards from the center of the gravity well - and what we feel as "pressure" on our feet is from the earth "holding us up" (in crude terms). So, it sounds crazy but it's not too distant from the truth.

DamnInteresting• 6 months ago

Scott Adams did me a considerable and unsolicited kindness almost 20 years ago, back in 2007. One day my site traffic logs showed an unexpected uptick in traffic, and recent referrals overwhelmingly pointed to his blog. Of course I recognized him from Dilbert fame, both the comic strip and The Dilbert Principle.

I sent him a thank you email for the link, and he replied graciously. This began a conversation where he referred me to his literary agent, and this ultimately led to a real-world, dead-tree-and-ink book publishing deal[1]. He even provided a nice blurb for the book cover.

I can't say that I agreed a lot with the person Scott Adams later became--I only knew him vaguely, from a distance. But he brought humor into many people's lives for a lot of years, and he was generous to me when he didn't have to be. Today I'll just think about the good times.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-damn-interesting-book/

Edit: I found the relevant Dilbert Blog link via the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20071011024008/http://dilbertblo...

dazzawazza• 6 months ago

That's a great story. Thank you. I hope you've had the opportunity to give someone else a leg up.

Accepting that people change, and that people are inherently full of contradictions, is part of growing up... and changing.

daed• 6 months ago

Interesting that he basically called for a more idealistic version of the Green New Deal back then.

LeoPanthera• 6 months ago

The Wayback Machine is an international treasure.

derf_• 6 months ago

You are not the only person he did this kind of thing for: https://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2025/5/...

Tycho2• 6 months ago

I kept meaning to tune in again to his livestream before the end. It was always a good listen as he went over the news with his dry sense of humour and judgment on fact vs fiction.I liked how he kept going after they cancelled all the Dilbert syndication - good lesson in resilience. RIP.

helpfulclippy• 6 months ago

Scott Adams shaped my sense of humor and perspective on a lot of things. Even in later years, when I disagreed with him immensely on a lot of things, I found that there was a thread of insight in what he said regarding how people experience reality and the power of words and images. Ultimately I tuned out, but before I did I followed his line of inspiration (which he was very public about, often naming books and authors) for a lot of that and was not disappointed. I was grateful that the insight was again sincere, and learning them didn’t take me to the places I did not want to go — the places he himself seemed to sincerely enjoy.

It’s not hard for a lot of us to criticize who he became. He certainly had no shortage of criticism for others. I looked up to Scott a lot as a kid, and as an adult found him to be a man like any other, with limits and flaws… not merely in spite of his accomplishments, but often because of them. There’s a lesson there that I wish to carry too.

bckr• 6 months ago

A family member has been living with prostate cancer for around a decade. Get screened and get treated.

rishabhd• 6 months ago

Well.. RIP.

anonu• 6 months ago

One thing I appreciated from Scott was his "compounded skills" concept. He explained it: he wasn't a very good writer or illustrator. But he combined those skills with some humorous business insights to make Dilbert.

That concept of merging skills stuck with me.

Onavo• 6 months ago

I got the same from patio11's blog posts too.

munificent• 6 months ago

I'm very fond of a quote from Tim Minchin that I'll paraphrase as: "I'm not the best singer or the best comedian, but I'm the best voice of all the comedians and I'm the funniest singer."

Don't max one stat. Be a unique, weird combination of several.

SpaceNoodled• 6 months ago

Guess he never met Tom Lehrer

jl6• 6 months ago

A.J. Liebling wrote: “I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.”

arwhatever• 6 months ago

Steve Martin said that after 60 years of playing, he considered himself to be a pretty good banjo player. But then he saw Eric Clapton play guitar and thought “This guy’s not funny at all!”

tetris11• 6 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Personal_life

He has described a method he has used that he says gave him success: he pictured in his mind what he wanted and wrote it down 15 times a day on a piece of paper

I somehow read about him doing this when I was 18, and it was something that I used to help me excel in my university exams. For 7 years I did this during my exam period, and each time I got the exact grades I wanted.

He gave immense focus to a kid with back-then undiagnosed ADHD, and helped me structure my life in general.

I am very grateful to him.

technothrasher• 6 months ago

This being a nerdy site, my first thought was that title was referring to Scott Adams the game designer famous for his text adventures in the 70s and 80s. Scott Adams the cartoonist makes me less sad.

_DeadFred_• 6 months ago

Every Christmas since I was a teen I would get a Dilbert desk calendar from my mom (who worked in software startups since 1979). When my mom was dying of cancer during COVID the people in our small, red state town yelled at her for wearing a mask. She could barely move to go shop, and she was harassed to tears. It all turned me from hippy libertarian (that moved from California to a red state) to fuck conservatives. It's so weird to find out the lessons I learned from people like Scott Adams, they never learned from/for themselves.

Firehawke2• 6 months ago

I try to consider how I feel about this, and all I come back with is an emptiness, a follow feeling.

I'm not going to gloat, nor am I going to consider him even remotely a good person based on things he's said and done. I will never know him outside of his works and the things he's said and done, so I can only judge on those merits.

I guess all I can really do is shake my head and wonder what could have been had he not completely lost his way; his death by cancer was likely (not guaranteed, but there's always some hope if treated early and properly) preventable, but he made a choice.

I guess I'll just remember the early, funny, too-true-to-life material and try not to think too much about what happened after that.

jimmydddd4• 6 months ago

--[not] remotely a good person? Depends on the metric I guess. Adams-- helped and cheeredd up thousands (millions?) of people, said racist stuff. --You (probably) or me --helped maybe one or two people, didn't say racist stuff.

BigTTYGothGF• 6 months ago

I'm reminded of the dril quote about drunk driving, or the LoGH one about Frederica being made happy.

spankalee5• 6 months ago

I don't get "avoiding the ugliness" when someone dies. We need to acknowledge the ugliness and try to do better.

Acting like "oh, he was trolling", or "it was just a small amount of hating Black people and women" is exactly how you get Steven Miller in the fucking White House.

We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again, and that means calling out the bigotry even in death.

wussboy2• 6 months ago

Is "calling out the bigotry" useful? I feel like the Internet has been used for this purpose pretty consistently for the last 15 years. Is it effective? Is there less bigotry now than before?

I would argue it has not in fact been useful, that making it shameful hasn't reduced it, and that calling it out in death is not useful in reducing it. I think we do it because it's easier than doing something useful and it makes us feel good.

I hate bigotry as well. I encourage to do something IRL about it.

lotsofpulp• 6 months ago

Making the bigotry known is helpful, because while it might not cause a reduction, it is valuable information for all members of society.

mrtesthah• 6 months ago

Think about all the things people have done in the real world the last 50 years to combat bigotry. During the civil rights movement of the 60s, black people sat at segregated lunch counters and marched peacefully in the street, and were consequently spat on and attacked by white mobs, beaten by police, sprayed with fire hoses, attacked by dogs, etc.

In the last 10 years, the modern black lives matter movement has triggered similar violent backlashes, with every public gathering drawing a militarized police response and hateful counter-protesters. On a policy level, even the most milquetoast corporate initiatives to consider applications and promotions from diverse candidates of equal merit are now being slandered and attacked. In education, acknowledgment of historical racial and gender inequality is under heavy censorship pressure.

It really does seem like the more effective we are at acting IRL, the greater the backlash is going to be.

yellowapple3• 6 months ago

Is "calling out the bigotry" useful?

There is immense value in acknowledging and learning from the mistakes of others, yes, even after their deaths.

noobahoi• 6 months ago

He was just 'trolling' for leftist Democrats. So no ugliness. There.

testdelacc1• 6 months ago

I see where you’re coming from. But I’d argue that there’s broad consensus that his bigotry at the end was bad. So in this one moment, when we’ve just learned that he’s died, we can recall the good as well as the bad.

It is shameful to have those views. But perhaps we can bring it up tomorrow rather than right this minute.

inglor_cz8• 6 months ago

By this standard, many, of not most of the artists that lived prior to the Civil Rights Era are to be thrown out.

I don't really want to study fluctuating levels of religious bigotry in Bach's life when I listen to his works.

shimman2• 6 months ago

What's wrong with this tho? Maybe we should stop uplifting people when we find out they are nasty individuals. Acting like there aren't also artists that are good people is odd, these are the ones deserving our attention.

FWIW, I use to be a big fan of Crystal Castles (like listening to 4+ hours a day for close to a decade). It was a core part of my culture diet. Once it was known that Ethan Kath was a sexual predator that groomed teenage girls, I simply stopped listening or talking about them ever.

Why is this hard? IDK, it really feels like people put too much of their identity into cultural objects when they lack real communities and people in their lives.

Also throwing it out there, I don't really know much about Scott Adams (or his work for that matter). Dilbert comics weren't widespread memes on the phpBB forums I'd post on throughout the 00s and 10s.

edit: spelling

RIMR4• 6 months ago

Enjoy Bach's music all you want, but when I read his biography those difficult details better be in there, and if that ruins his music for you that's on you.

victorbjorklund2• 6 months ago

We can hold people today to modern standards.

You can’t burn a woman at the stake today and say ”oh well, 300 years ago it was normal so”.

zemo2• 6 months ago

I think there's a big difference between the following:

- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who died hundreds of years ago, whose work is in the public domain, who does not materially benefit from your spectatorship (what with them being dead and all)

- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who is alive today, whose work they have ownership of, who materially benefits from your spectatorship

- enjoying the work of an unrepentant bigot who died mere minutes ago, whose work is owned by their estate, whose heirs materially benefit from your spectatorship

I think the first category is fine, the second category is unambiguously not fine, and the third category is ambiguous, but I would err on the side of "don't consume".

mempko2• 6 months ago

In any period of history, there are people who know things are wrong and are vocal about it. There are artists prior to the Civil Rights Era that were not bigots. The problem you have is the artists that were celebrated AT THAT TIME which we know about were also those accepted by the status quo which allowed them to be known.

People knew slavery was wrong when slavery was happening. People knew child labor was wrong when child labor was happening. People knew segregation was wrong when segregation was happening. Those people were not rewarded by society.

Teever• 6 months ago

'Don't speak ill of the dead' comes from an era where everyone genuinely believed that the dead could haunt you from the grave.

It continues to have prominance in our society due to inertia and the fact that some people want a positive legacy to endure long after they pass regardless of whether or not they did anything in life to deserve that kind of legacy.

As the person you're replying to wrote it better than I ever could I'll write what they just shared becauase I think it's worth repeating, "taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest."

We should strive for honesty in these kinds of discussions over sensitivity.

neom• 6 months ago

When I was a young man my mother did use that but explained ill more in the sense of unfair/unkind. I guess as an adult you realize everyone ends up living a somewhat complicated existence, and it's easier (maybe even sometimes safer) to say this person was bad than it is to say this person did unacceptable things.

SoftTalker7• 6 months ago

In the modern era it's usually said because the dead person cannot defend himself.

Now, Adams had plenty of opportunities to defend/explain his comments on certain issues, and he did not satisfy many people with those or perhaps dug himself in deeper (I myself really only know him from Dilbert in the 1990s, and am only superficially aware of anything controversial he did/said outside of that).

But I don't see anyone saying anything about him now that was not being said when he was alive.

m0llusk• 6 months ago

No. Disbelief has always been around. That there is no Church of Disbelief is a feature not a bug. Not speaking ill of the dead has a range of connotations, probably most prominent being avoiding easy targets that can't defend themselves. Want to show righteousness and strength of conviction? Then try a live target. There are many.

stetrain16• 6 months ago

In the context of the above comment I read "avoiding the ugliness" as avoiding incorporating it and continuing it in your own life, not shying away from talking about and addressing it.

This comment actually makes a specific point of calling it out compared to some others here.

pbreit• 6 months ago

One good reason to avoid it is because you're probably wrong.

spankalee5• 6 months ago

Wrong about what?

Are you saying that Scott Adams was right and, say, white people _should_ avoid black people? Or are you saying that we shouldn't remember how awful people were once they die?

RajT882• 6 months ago

The thinking is that not "speaking ill of the dead" is not just respect, but doing anything else is pointless.

You will not change them, and everyone present already made up their mind on their behavior.

Arainach2• 6 months ago

They didn't, though. Plenty of people who had one reputation at their death have had that reputation change over time, especially with more information and awareness of what they did. Sometimes their reputations improve, sometimes they decline.

Speaking only positively about people distorts the reality.

teknopaul• 6 months ago

Adams stated he was racist and thought that was aok.

I'd say calling him out as a racist is not exactly speaking ill of the dead in this case.

nutjob2• 6 months ago

Respect is earned by your actions and deeds, not by your death.

When someone I know dies, I speak frankly about them, good or bad, because to do otherwise is a lie, and the most disrespectful thing to do is to misrepresent a person who no longer can represent themselves.

Scott Adams did what he did, that's surely not in question. Honor his life by speaking frankly about how he affected oneself and others, good or bad. Let the chips fall where they may.

optionalsquid2• 6 months ago

The best we can do for the dead is remember them as they were, good and bad, not demonize them nor write hagiographies for them

Angostura• 6 months ago

So, no need to speak of them at all

DonHopkins3• 6 months ago

The mendacious speaking that Scott Adams did of the living was a hell of a lot worse that speaking factually about him after he died.

SilverElfin• 6 months ago

Agree with this. I didn’t agree with it in the past, but I can see now that it has caused the issue you raise. I don’t know if this is a great insight, but one reason I think people have not connected the results (Stephen Millers in the White House) back to the action (not speaking ill of the dead) is because THEY are not the ones affected. When Stephen Miller is in the White House, it’s all the non white people - including legal immigrants and naturalized citizens and citizens born here - that are living in fear of where the administration will go. I doubt others are aware that there is this fear, or even that the DHS’s official account tweets out threats to deport a third of the country.

ALittleLight2• 6 months ago

Ah, yes. Trump and friends are in the White House because nobody called them racist. Excellent political analysis.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 6 months ago

We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again,

We have made our society shameless. Pornographers, gamblers, and truly creepy people are told that it's fine to be what they are. I dunno, maybe that really is the case. But having abandoned shame as a method of social cohesion, you don't get to resurrect it for those things you dislike. The two-edged sword cuts both ways.

I did not follow the Scott Adams brouhaha when it happened, and vaguely I somehow get the impression it's like the Orson Scott Card thing. I'm afraid to check for fear that when I do I will find there was nothing he should've been ashamed for. People use the word "bigot" to mean things I can't seem to categories as bigotry.

psunavy03• 6 months ago

The difference is Orson Scott Card only seemed to have been called out for being a bog-standard Mormon, at least as far as I know.

standardUser• 6 months ago

Personally, I despise an outspoken bigot like Scott Adams more when they die, not less, because now their window for growth and repentance has closed. The grotesqueness they harbored becomes permanently tied to their legacy.

nobodywillobsrv• 6 months ago

What exactly was the bad stuff? He was insensitive about empirical reality or he was literally wrong about something in the sense of being very confident about something despite having little data? Or something else? I only remember the cartons really but was aware some people seemed to be irked about him recently.

jimmydddd4• 6 months ago

Some random internet poll said many people of race A agreed it was "not OK" to be a person of race B. Adams said if that were true, then people of race B should probably not hang out with people of race A that thought it was not OK to be race B. The internet did its thing and quoted him out of context, and tried to cancel him. He dug in his heels and doubled down. He also liked a certain president that many dislike. And here we are.

CaptWillard3• 6 months ago

"We need to make it shameful to be bigoted again"

Interesting way to put it. For the past decade or so, many flavors of bigotry have been lauded and socially rewarded.

At the same time, many valid viewpoints and statements have been mislabeled as "bigotry" by the incurious and hivemind-compliant.

These things are balancing out lately, but quite a lot of damage was done.

jakeydus4• 6 months ago

Care to elaborate on what flavors of bigotry have been lauded and socially rewarded/what valid viewpoints and statements have been mislabeled as bigotry? I feel like you're being intentionally vague to avoid taking a stance here.

sprucevoid4• 6 months ago

These things are balancing out lately

What measures and data do you base that claim on?

https://www.cgdev.org/blog/update-lives-lost-usaid-cuts "lives lost based on the decline in outlays (current spending) may be in the range of 500,000 to 1,000,000 and potential lives lost based on the decline in obligations (commitments to future spending) are between 670,000 and 1,600,000."

What is your best estimate of deaths due to "woke" or whatever you consider the scourge of the "past decade" to be?

How many visas revoked due to the holder being not woke enough? How many people were deported from the US for being insufficiently woke? And so on. "Woke" may not be what you meant. Whatever you meant, present your measure and data.

derefr• 6 months ago

I think this is a question of who you're talking to, and is something you have to evaluate on a case-by-case basis.

If the person/people you're speaking with, already followed this public figure, or was forced by society to be aware of the life of this public figure at all times — and so were surely also aware of the bad turn that person's career/life took — then to your audience, the ugliness would have already been long acknowledged. To your audience, the ugliness may be the only thing anyone has spoken about in reference to the public figure for a long time.

And, for an audience who became aware of the public figure a bit later on in their lives, the bad stuff might be all they know about them! (Honestly, there are more than a few celebrities that I personally know only as a subject of ongoing public resentment, with no understanding of what made them a celebrity in the first place.)

In both of these cases, if this is your audience, then there's no point to carrying on the "this is a bad person" reminders during the (usually very short!) mourning period that a public figure gets. They already know.

On the other hand, if you presume someone who has no idea who a certain person is, and who is only hearing about them in the context of their death — then yes, sure, remind away.

I think, given the audience of "people in a comment thread on Hacker News about the death of Scott Adams", people here are likely extremely aware of who Scott Adams is.

---

That said, on another note, I have a personal philosophy around "celebrations of life", that I formed after deciding how to respond to the death of my own father, himself a very complicated man.

People generally take the period immediately after someone's death as a chance to put any kind of ongoing negative feelings toward someone on pause for just a moment, to celebrate whatever positive contributions a person made, and extract whatever positive lessons can be learned from those contributions.

Note that the dead have no way of benefitting from this. They're dead!

If you pay close attention, most of a community does after the death of one of its members, or a society does after the death of a public figure... isn't really a veneration; there is no respect or face given. Rather, what we're doing with our words, is something very much like what the deceased's family are doing with their hands: digging through the estate of the deceased to find things of value to keep, while discarding the rest. Finding the pearls amongst the mud, washing them off, and taking them home.

Certainly, sometimes the only pearl that can be found is a lesson about the kind of person you should strive not to be. But often, there's at least something useful you can take from someone's life — something society doesn't deserve to lose grasp of, just because it was made by or associated with someone we had become soured on.

I think it's important to note that if we don't manage to agree to a specific moment to all mutually be okay with doing this "examination of the positive products of this person's life" — which especially implies "staying temporarily silent about the person's shortcomings so as to make space for that examination"... then that moment can never happen. And that's what leads to a great cultural loss of those things that, due to their association with the person, were gradually becoming forgotten.

Nobody (save for perhaps a few devoutly religious people) argues that you should never speak ill of the dead. People really just want that one moment — perhaps a week or two long? — to calmly dredge up and leaf through the deceased's legacy like it's a discount bin at a record store, without having to defend themselves at each step of that process from constant accusations that they're "celebrating a bad person."

And it is our current societal policy that "right after you die" is when people should be allowed that one moment.

Feel free to call out Adams' bigotry a week from now! The story will still be fresh on people's minds even then.

But by giving them a moment first, people will be able to find the space to finally feel it's safe to reminisce about how e.g. they have a fond memory of being gifted a page-a-day Dilbert calendar by their uncle — fundamentally a story about how that helped them to understand and bond with their uncle, not a story about Adams — which wouldn't normally be able to be aired, because it would nevertheless summon someone to remind everyone that the author is a bigot.

spankalee5• 6 months ago

I was directly responding and replying to jchallis, but a mod detached my comment from its parent and now it makes less sense without the proper context. Great job.

mdhb• 6 months ago

The moderation on this site is really such garbage. Filled with all kinds of weird and subtle manipulation, almost never openly acknowledged and they are more than happy to gaslight you when you confront them about it.

TheCondor• 6 months ago

I agree with the sentiment. I think timing is pretty important, though, and a cooling-off period might be a kind gesture for his loved ones.

I posit that self-reflection might be a better avenue to understanding this world where Steven Miller is in the White House, at least in the immediate. Personally, I stopped reading Dilbert quite a while before he cancelled himself, just because it wasn't available in a medium that worked for me. I do have a couple books on the shelf of old Dilbert comics and I considered getting rid of them when the racism came out. I cracked one open and laughed out loud at a handful of the comics and so the books are still in my house. I abhor racism, but he already got my money. At least for me, and maybe I'm damaged, I still laugh at some of the comics, even after I knew he was a jerk. I think if one of my black friends told me he was offended that I had those books, I'd get rid of them.

How about Harry Potter? I'm certain that there are some folks here who have been hurt by Rowling's statements and I'm also certain that there are some folks here that would sacrifice a limb to live in the Harry Potter universe. Do you separate the artist from the art or what's the rational thing? I have the Harry Potter books on my shelf, I've actually read them out loud to my children. They also are aware of LGTBQ issues, they know and are around LGTBQ people and we have had conversations about those issues. Is that enough? Should one of my kids pick up the Dilbert books, I have a conversation locked and loaded and I already know that I've raised them to be anti-racism. I don't know that I'm super eager to put more money in to J. K.'s pocket, I probably won't go to Disney Harry Potter Land or whatever they come up with but I've bought and read the books and I haven't burned them.

And make no mistake, had I known he was a biggot in 1995, I don't think I would have continued reading Dilbert or ever bought books. The problem is it made me laugh, then years later I found out he was a jerk and I still laugh at the comics, I remember laughing the first time I read some of them, and I think of that more when I re-read them than I think about Scott Adams. Fact is, he still made me laugh all those years ago, I can't put that back in the bottle, it happened.

kgwgk• 6 months ago

I think if one of my black friends told me he was offended that I had those books, I'd get rid of them.

Don't be so hard on your friends, let them be offended if they want.

nailer4• 6 months ago

Did you support Scott Adams when he called out bigotry? Why / why not?

jccalhoun• 6 months ago

Whenever I heard of Adams, I always remember that time in 2011 when he made a sockpuppet account on metafilter to pseudonymously praise himself. https://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Scott_Adams,_plannedchaos

sidcool• 6 months ago

This makes me extremely sad. He'll make heaven a better place. RIP

diego_moita• 6 months ago

I stopped paying attention long before he became a freak.

After a couple of years his jokes became repetitive, formulaic, obvious,...

For some people that might be a good thing. Chuckling at an old joke is like trying again the food or music they used to love when they were young. Being funny or revealing isn't the point, being familiar and reassuring is what matters.

He had a moment at his time. A few more years and no one will remember him.

twalla2• 6 months ago

"If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things."

I'm certain at least some small part of my own success can be attributed to my exposure to this idea, and for that I give my respects to Adams. As far as Adam's character (or lack thereof) is concerned, that's already being discussed elsewhere in this thread by others more eloquent than myself, so I'll leave that to them.

addaon• 6 months ago

2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

Is this idea that top 25% is "very good" at something innumeracy, or a subtle insight I'm missing? There's got to be a million skills that you could assess rank at -- writing embedded C code, playing basketball, identifying flora, PacMan, archery, bouldering… I can't imagine ever being able to not continue this list -- and you should expect to be in the top 25% of roughly a quarter of those skills, obviously heavily biased towards the ones you've tried, and even more biased towards the ones you care about. It's hard to imagine anyone who's not in the top 25% of skill assessment in a dozen things, let alone two or more…

OkayPhysicist2• 6 months ago

If you consider your denominator to be the population of practitioners, rather than "everybody", top quartile would be pretty good. To use chess as an example, the 75th percentile of the global population probably knows the rules and nothing else. The 75th percentile of chess players would be an Elo of 1800 and change.

twalla2• 6 months ago

Ignore the numbers - the gist is being good enough at the right two or three things can create similar value for you as being the best at one specific thing.

Everyone (for the sake of my argument) wants to be an engineer at a FAANG but there are tons of folks making more money with more autonomy because they've found a niche that combines their good-enough technical ability with an understanding or interest in an underserved market.

tomjen3• 6 months ago

Okay, make it two useful things then. Be a top 25% marketeer and a top 25% programmer and you are worth so much more than either separately.

ygjb2• 6 months ago

I think it's generally accepted that at a high level being in the top quartile is considered very good. Not excellent. Not unicorn. Just very good.

Beyond that, it's not about becoming very good at two different, completely orthogonal things, it's about becoming very good at two things that are complementary in some way that is of value to others. Being good at PacMan and Bouldering is only particularly valuable if you are competing for opportunities to participate in a hypothetical mixed reality video game, or perhaps a very niche streaming channel. Being the top quartile of embedded c code, and flora identification could result in building software/hardware tools to identify flora, which is a niche that currently has multiple competing products that are high value to those interested.

carabiner• 6 months ago

He wrote that 20 years ago. I think today, it's more like top 10% in 3 or more things.

x0x0• 6 months ago

a [chemist, biologist, mathematician, DSP researcher] who can code at a professional level (that 25%) is worth far more to the right position than either of those skills individually.

aidenn07• 6 months ago

It depends on the population you are taking from. Being the top quartile embedded C developer in the world is perhaps unimpressive (there are up to 2 billion people better than you at embedded C programming), but being the top quartile embedded C developer within the population of professional embedded C developers is much more impressive.

raincole2• 6 months ago

It's (obviously) a random number pulled out from someone's ass. However, I think top 25% isn't that off. It means top 25% of people who actually tried.

If it still sounds easy, try to reach top 25% rank of a video game that you are not familiar with (diamond in Starcraft II or whatever). You'll find it's literally the workload of a full-time job.

olalonde• 6 months ago

He recently announced his plan to convert to Christianity, appearing to invoke Pascal's wager: https://youtu.be/ldiij_z3mUY?t=717

I wonder if he managed to do it in time.

pizzafeelsright5• 6 months ago

According to the letter read by his ex wife, yes.

amai• 6 months ago

Scott Adams is dead, but Dilbert will be alive forever: https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com

Tade0• 6 months ago

I remember stealing my dad's newspaper to read the included Dilbert strip and it shaped my understanding of corporate life. Fortunately it proved not to be this grotesque, but I have a few stories to share, like anyone who was ever put in such an environment.

I recall having a "huh?" moment when I once saw the titular character say that there's no evidence for climate change.

The strangest thing is that I hail from a particularly conservative region of the world and I've met many such Scotts Adamses in college (some of whom went on to work in FAANG companies). I don't share these views and I could never wrap my head around the idea that a clearly intelligent and often otherwise kind person could be like this.

xrd• 6 months ago

When I first started working in tech 25+ years ago, I really enjoyed Dilbert. It was ubiquitous in my circles and seemed accurate.

Then, I had my own startup, and as a manager of people, had to come to terms with a bunch of personality defects I brought in that I was blind to. Those blind spots really made me a bad manager. I'm grateful I got to learn about myself in that way.

But, then I started to view Dilbert differently. It felt like only some of the characters deserved empathy. I bet Scott Adams would hate that I used that word to critique his comics.

Is it just me? I always felt like half of the people were stupid no matter what the situation. Did I miss a more complex part of Dilbert?

I haven't been able to separate who Scott Adams was, or more specifically, the racist things he said, from his cultural commentary, no matter what insights there are. And, I can't admire "4d chess" because it feels like it is bragging that you can predict the winner if you throw an alligator and Stephen J Hawking into a pen together.

gs173• 6 months ago

Is it just me? I always felt like half of the people were stupid no matter what the situation. Did I miss a more complex part of Dilbert?

No, a lot of characters were clearly meant to be unlikable, but based on a kind of person that exists in real life. I don't think you were meant to care much for e.g. Topper.

RyJones2• 6 months ago

One of my emails to Scott ended up in his first book; I was the one who emailed about carrying ice.

Fair winds and following seas, Scott.

profsummergig4• 6 months ago

Elaborate, please? (The excerpt that ended up in the book.)

RyJones2• 6 months ago

here you go.

https://blog.ryjones.org/adams

voidfunc• 6 months ago

Scott Adams was influential on me in my younger years but he was always a bit out there and that caught up with him eventually. The brain rot that took him in the last decade made him basically unreadable.

tac19• 6 months ago

RIP. You will be missed.

znpy• 6 months ago

I will forever love the Dilbert cartoons. They were a masterpiece.

jdboyd• 6 months ago

https://archive.is/ccbGQ

Since I get a paywall and it looks like no one has posted such a link yet.

FWIW, I think the Inc article is better: https://www.inc.com/jennifer-conrad/scott-adams-dilbert-dies...

But the link posted to HackerNews isn't the one getting the discussion traffic.

rcarmo• 6 months ago

But Dilbert still lives on. As a telco person, Dilbert was always uncannily accurate -- to the point where I was once accused of telling Adams about a specific event :)

OGEnthusiast• 6 months ago

Hugely enjoyed his work when I was younger. RIP to a great artist.

mcv3• 6 months ago

Scott Adams is a bit of a mystery to me. Like most here, I loved his comics in the 1990s and 2000s. I even joined the mailinglist for his werd rd and surely ironically intended Dogbert's New Ruling Class. Through Dilbert, he came across as a hero of underappreciated tech workers, and a critic of ignorant managers, so it feels really weird that he became such a supporter of the ultimate pointy haired boss.

I remember how he predicted Trump's victory all the way back in 2015, early in the primaries. He argues that Trump (and Kanye, for that matter) were super-convincers who used mass hypnosis techniques. Sounds utterly bizarre, and yet mass hypnosis struck me as the only possible explanation of Trump's popularity. Because there were certainly no rational arguments for it.

And yet, this seemingly critical (if unhinged) thinker who claimed to see through those alleged hypnosis techniques, somehow fell for it.

I don't think I'll ever understand Scott Adams.

SoftTalker7• 6 months ago

Supremely confident, charismatic people are very attractive. There's no "mass hypnosis" about it, other than that it's something that's baked in to many of us. Obama had those qualities also, and won the Presidency twice despite lacking much experience or traditional qualifications.

ekjhgkejhgk2• 6 months ago

Supremely confident, charismatic people are very attractive.

They're very attractive to vast masses of sheep, yes.

They're not attractive to everybody.

triceratops• 6 months ago

Obama...won the Presidency twice despite lacking much experience or traditional qualifications.

He went from Illinois state senator (7 years) to US senator (4 years) to President. A prodigious rise, but hardly non-traditional or inexperienced. The equivalent of a new grad at a FAANG becoming a director or VP within a decade.

mcv3• 6 months ago

I find him neither confident, charismatic, nor attractive. I still don't understand how anyone can believe such a blatant liar. Or like such a terrible excuse of a human being. But clearly there's something about what he does and how he acts and talks, that appeals to some people. Mass hypnosis is as good an explanation as any, if you ask me.

But that's not my point. My point is that Scott Adams identified it, which to me sounds like recognizing it as fake and manipulation. And yet he supported the guy. That's the thing I really don't get. Then again, JD Vance called him the American Hitler and is now his VP. Many of his most loyal lackeys have called him terrible things. People are easily corruptible, I guess. Or recognize in him a useful tool for their own worst goals.

ekjhgkejhgk2• 6 months ago

This whole "Trump is very good at persuation therefore I support him" is bullshit.

Yes, Trump IS very good at persuation. But that is no justification to support him. No, he supported Trump because he liked the things that Trump says and does. Everything else is just trying to make himself sound less bad.

kamens5• 6 months ago

The minimum recognition Scott Adams deserves should be having updated the world model of those who read his blog.

It is hard to remember how thoroughly Trump's presidential run was seen as a joke in 2015. I bet most people can't remember and somehow think they always knew Trump stood a real chance. That is likely a lie.

Scott made specific, reasoned, unique arguments about why Trump would win, with high conviction. This was at a time when it was about as non-consensus and unpopular as possible to do so (it wasn't just that people didn't want Trump to win, there was a complete dismissal of the possibility from both sides of the aisle).

The fact that Scott was right, and continued to be right when forecasting much about politics, taught me a lot about the nature of the world we live in. Scott clearly understood something important that I did not at the time.

croes• 6 months ago

Or it’s survivorship bias

kamens5• 6 months ago

Genuine question: did you read his blog and arguments in detail?

_zagj• 6 months ago

There's a saying in investing that a lot of analysts get famous for being right "once in a row."

kamens5• 6 months ago

Same question to you: did you read his blog and arguments in detail?

stevoski• 6 months ago

A fine time to acknowledge Scott Adams’ remarkably simple and clear financial advice: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/scott-adams-financial-advice/

I think it is pretty good.

You can, of course, debate it - and HN being HN people probably will.

emil-lp• 6 months ago

Here it is, unabridged

    Make a will.

    Pay off your credit card balance.

    Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.

    Fund your company 401K to the maximum.

    Fund your IRA to the maximum.

    Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.

    Put six months’ expenses in a money market account.

    Take whatever is left over and invest it 70 percent in a stock index fund and 30 percent in a bond fund through any discount brokerage company and never touch it until retirement

    If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issue), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges you a percentage of your portfolio.

hearsathought2• 6 months ago

Solid advice overall. But I have to disagree with the 401k advice.

Fund your company 401K to the maximum.

Fund it up to amount your company matches. The maximum you can contribute to 401k is 40% of your salary I believe. I wouldn't contribute 40% of my salary to the 401k. Just the amount your company matches ( 5% or whatever it is for your company ). That 5% match ( or whatever it is ) is free money. It would be foolish to leave it on the table.

rchaud7• 6 months ago

70% in a stock fund is extremely risky if you are close to retirement. You will not have fresh income to dollar-cost-average your way back into the black in the event of another market crash.

jojobas8• 6 months ago

This is solid advice assuming the shit doesn't hit the fan. In Adams' lifetime many countries' pension funds went bust and inflation ate any soft assets.

jpadkins12• 6 months ago

I am glad he came to Jesus before the end.

ks2048• 6 months ago

Can't tell if this is sarcasm. This was his statement (he says "I'm not a believer"),

Next, many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I'm not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So, here I go:

I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. I won't need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified for entry.

michaelsbradley• 6 months ago

Seems a bit off, but I don't say that in a judgmental way.

If a person presented themselves for the Catholic/Orthodox catechumenate with the caveat "I'm not a believer but...", a director with a good humor would reply with something like: "Of course you're not, not yet, supernatural faith is a gift received in Holy Baptism."

Now, if at the end of the catechumenate (several months) the person admits they can't really offer intellectual assent to what they've been taught, that it boils down to their wanting to hedge their bets and that's all, then the director is going to speak to the priest of the parish, and more than likely the priest is going to meet with the person and tell them they're not prepared for baptism.

There are time crunched situations and emergency baptisms, for sure, but even then for an adult asking to be baptized, there generally needs to be a profession of intellectual assent ("I believe...") and an express openness to the gift of faith.

Someone I know recently joined the Catholic Church, in the setting of a community that uses the "pre Vatican 2" forms. Here are the questions-answers that are asked in the public setting (liturgy/rite) of the Sacrament of Holy Baptism in the older form:

What are you asking of God’s church?

Faith.

What does faith hold out to you?

Everlasting life.

If, then, you wish to inherit everlasting life, keep the commandments, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments depend the whole law and the prophets. Now faith demands that you worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in unity, neither confusing the Persons one with the other, nor making a distinction in their nature. For the Father is a distinct Person, so also the Son, so also the Holy Spirit; yet all Three possess the one nature, the one Godhead.

Do you renounce Satan?

I do renounce him.

And all his works?

I do renounce them.

And all his attractions?

I do renounce them.

Do you believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth?

I do believe.

Do you believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was born into this world and suffered for us?

I do believe.

Do you also believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting?

I do believe.

Receive the sign of the cross on your brow and on your heart. Put your whole trust in the heavenly teachings. And lead a life that will truly fit you to be a dwelling place for God. On entering God’s Church acknowledge with joy that you have escaped the clutches of death. Worship God the Father almighty, and Jesus Christ, His only-begotten Son, our Lord, who is coming to judge both the living and the dead and the world by fire.

Let us pray. I entreat you, blessed Lord and Father, almighty and everlasting God, to point out the way of truth and godly knowledge to these servants of yours who grope in uncertainty and doubt in the darkness of this world. Open their inner sight, the better to see you as the one God, the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father, in union with the Holy Spirit. May it be their good fortune to enjoy the fruit of this avowal both now and forevermore; through Christ our Lord.

I sign you on the brow that you may take up the cross of our Lord. I sign you on the ears that you may listen to the heavenly teachings. I sign you on the eyes that you may see the grandeur of God. I sign you on the nostrils that you may sense the sweet fragrance of Christ. I sign you on the mouth that you may proclaim the word of life. I sign you on the breast that you may believe in God. I sign you on the shoulders that you may take on you the yoke of His service. I sign you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, that you may come to your eternal destiny and have life without end.

[ Many more prayers and blessings ]

Do you wish to be baptized?

I do.

I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, has caused you to be born over again of water and the Holy Spirit and pardoned you all your sins. May he now anoint you with the chrism that sanctifies in Christ Jesus our Lord, and bring you to everlasting life. Take this white robe and keep it spotless until you arrive at the judgment seat of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you may be rewarded with everlasting life. Take this burning candle as a reminder to keep your baptismal innocence. Obey God’s commandments, so that when our Lord comes for the joyous wedding feast you may go forth to meet Him with all the saints in the halls of heaven, and be happy with Him forevermore. Go in peace, and may the Lord be with you.

You can read the full text here: https://latinmassbaptism.com/rite-of-baptism-for-adults/

The text of the rite is given fully in Latin, and then fully in English, so keep scrolling. Seems like their TLS cert is expired, but the website is okay.

We should pray for the repose of Scott's soul, full of confidence in God's mercy.

maxlybbert• 6 months ago

I'm positive he was trolling.

cloudfudge5• 6 months ago

The way I read his statement was as a joke. He wasn't a dumb guy. Surely he would have had the thought that if God is all-knowing, you obviously can't "fool" God by simply mouthing the right words right before you die.

dennis_jeeves28• 6 months ago

Surely Jesus understands nuance and will give an all clear heaven's pass to someone who is an atheist but still an essentially good guy? Or is he mean and dictatorial and say 'thou shall worship me else you will rot in hell' ?

SV_BubbleTime2• 6 months ago

A. Pascal’s wager

B. Pretty sure, last I checked anyhow, is that accepting Jesus is pretty much the big requirement in the New Testament.

krapp8• 6 months ago

The Bible (at least as far as the New Testament is concerned) is absolutely and explicitly clear on the matter. Being an "essentially good guy" doesn't matter, nor does being an amoral bastard - if you sincerely accept Christ you go to heaven, otherwise you burn in hell.

cloudfudge5• 6 months ago

Surely Jesus understands nuance

Megachurch culture would like a word

buellerbueller• 6 months ago

Scott Adams exemplifies both sides of my personal maxim that "Good things can be created by Bad people."

IMO, it doesn't diminish the quality of the Good things.

rrrip• 6 months ago

Scott's estate shared his final words via his X account.

A Final Message From Scott Adams

If you are reading this, things did not go well for me.

I have a few things to say before I go.

My body failed before my brain. I am of sound mind as I write this, January 1st, 2026. If you wonder about any of my choices for my estate, or anything else, please know I am free of any coercion or inappropriate influence of any sort. I promise.

Next, many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I'm not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So, here I go:

With your permission, I'd like to explain something about my life.

For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent, as a way to find meaning. That worked. But marriages don't always last forever, and mine eventually ended, in a highly amicable way. I'm grateful for those years and for the people I came to call my family.

Once the marriage unwound, I needed a new focus. A new meaning. And so I donated myself to "the world," literally speaking the words out loud in my otherwise silent home. From that point on, I looked for ways I could add the most to people's lives, one way or another.

That marked the start of my evolution from Dilbertcartoonist to an author of - what I hoped would be useful books. By then, I believed I had amassed enough life lessons that I could start passing them on. I continued making Dilbert comics, of course.

As luck would have it, I'm a good writer. My first book in the "useful" genre was How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. That book turned out to be a huge success, often imitated, and influencing a wide variety of people. I still hear every day how much that book changed lives. My plan to be useful was working.

I followed up with my book Win Bigly, that trained an army of citizens how to be more persuasive, which they correctly saw as a minor super power. I know that book changed lives because I hear it often.

You'll probably never know the impact the book had on the world, but I know, and it pleases me while giving me a sense of meaning that is impossible to describe.

My next book, Loserthink, tried to teach people how to think better, especially if they were displaying their thinking on social media. That one didn't put much of a dent in the universe, but I tried.

Finally, my book Reframe Your Brain taught readers how to program their own thoughts to make their personal and professional lives better. I was surprised and delighted at how much positive impact that book is having.

I also started podcasting a live show called Coffee With Scott Adams, dedicated to helping people think about the world, and their lives, in a more productive way. I didn't plan it this way, but it ended up helping lots of lonely people find a community that made them feel less lonely. Again, that had great meaning for me.

I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my work, I'm asking you to pay it forward as best you can. That is the legacy I want.

Be useful.

And please know I loved you all to the end.

Scott Adams

antonymoose5• 6 months ago

Thank you for sharing that. I cannot fathom what it must feel like to write one’s own post-humous press-release.

rurban• 6 months ago

Interestingly he left out the episodes with his second wife, the young insta model, which he was very proud of then. Kristina Basham (now married to another guy)

mooglevich2• 6 months ago

Dilbert was great, and one of my favorite comics for a long long time. But yeah. Adams turned out to be kinda a jerk, at best. Of late, I've kinda concluded that no single piece of art or single artist is so great that I can't live a full life without it, regardless of how much I love said work or artist. I think individuals should have the right to read and enjoy Dilbert, but I also think if you don't like him and can't let that go, don't give your limited time and attention to the comic. There are lots of other great comics out there!

mempko2• 6 months ago

I've talked with Scott Adams. In private he seemed a lot more reasonable than in public. I always wondered how much of his public life was a show, a way to make money.

But then the way he dealt with his cancer make me reconsider. Adams publicly acknowledged trying ivermectin and fenbendazole as alternative cancer treatments, which he later declared ineffective, before pursuing conventional medical care in his final months. Unfortunately by then it's too late.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo

Something is wrong with us engineers. We need to have less magical thinking. More scientific and mathematical education.

OkayPhysicist2• 6 months ago

The problem is that the same personality trait that makes for good engineers, namely the hubris to think "just because this problem hasn't been solved by anybody else doesn't mean I can't solve it", also gets applied to everything else.

yellowapple3• 6 months ago

I've lost enough loved ones to cancer to know that it's not something I'd wish on even the worst people. My opinions of Scott Adams are… complicated, to say the least, but above all I'm glad that he's no longer suffering.

I understand he sought to convert to Christianity in his last days. I hope he succeeded in finding God — that he understood that there's more to faith in Christ than chanting “I do believe in Jesus! I do! I do!”, that it requires identifying and purging the hatred in one's heart and replacing it with the unconditional love Christ exemplified. That journey is hard enough when you've spent most/all of a lifetime trying to tackle it; deathbed conversions are even harder, with no time to put that newfound unconditional love into practice. No time for apologies to those harmed, no time for righting one's wrongs — only bare, raw remorse and shame.

May Scott Adams rest in peace. May he be remembered honestly — both for what he got right and what he got wrong.

tibbydudeza• 6 months ago

I loved his work and still do but he put himself front and center over his work and some of his fans like me realized he was actually a vile person.

The best cartoonist is invisible like Banksy and the guy who did the Cow cartoons and Calvin & Hobbes.

ALittleLight2• 6 months ago

The first email I ever wrote was to Scott Adams. He actually replied!

I was a child and had just read and enjoyed one of his older books, maybe the Dilbert Principle. I came from a religious household and I was surprised by something in the book that revealed him to be an atheist.

I looked up his email, or maybe it was in the back of the book, and wrote him a quick message about how and why he should convert. He replied to me (unconvinced) and I replied back, at which point he realized I was a child and the conversation ended.

When I heard he was dying of cancer I wrote him another email, again offering my own unsolicited thoughts, this time on cancer and experimental treatments. He did not reply, but I thought there was a kind of symmetry to it -- I wrote him towards the start of my life and again towards the end of his.

Interesting guy, I've enjoyed several of his books and the comics for many years. He had a big impact. Tough way to die.

nonethewiser4• 6 months ago

Here is the video of the comments he made which people are referring to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKx9_TceBMQ

andyjohnson05• 6 months ago

As with many others here, I admired his early creative work, but found his political beliefs to be abhorrent. An illustration, I guess, that we are maybe all of a mixture.

I'm sorry about the manner of his dying, even if the world may also be a marginally better place without the bile he inflicted on it. Still, I'm sorry he's died. He was only ten years older than me.

And my favourite Dilbert cartoon is still the one about "eunuch programmers" [1].

[1] https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1993-11-09

(Edit: url)

teddyh4• 6 months ago

Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1993-11-09>

andyjohnson05• 6 months ago

Thanks! Edited.

hearsathought2• 6 months ago

Why does every other comment apologize for adams' political views? It's like a bunch of people were conditioned or brainwashed into reflexibly regurgitation nonsense.

pizzafeelsright5• 6 months ago

Long ago where one's politics is elevated to the position of identity the culture shifted and continues to shift.

I realized early on through IRC that some people cannot have a professional or cordial relationship with someone opposed to their position. The moment someone found out I believed in the opposite of the group I was attacked.

iso1631• 6 months ago

I have no idea what the politics of the CEO of Boeing or Ford or Home Depot is. They don't stand on stages brandishing chainsaws, or writing op-eds about political viewpoints, thus I don't disagree with them on politics. Some CEOs do that and thus choose to associate their companies and their business with politics.

If you make your politics part of your identity, as Adams increasingly chose to do throughout the 2010s, then it will become your identity, and that associates his output with his politics.

tokai• 6 months ago

Because Adams views were crap.

nailer4• 6 months ago

What did he do that you object to?

sph2• 6 months ago

I didn't read Dilbert to learn about politics.

dennis_jeeves28• 6 months ago

It's like a bunch of people were conditioned or brainwashed into reflexibly regurgitation nonsense.

Has happened on a grander scale in the past in China, Germany, Russian and others. This is hardly anything.

maxlin3• 6 months ago

How is one supposed to just accept this as part and parcel in the free world itself.

ajkjk2• 6 months ago

it's an internet comment section, reflexive regurgitation is literally what they are for

GaryBluto3• 6 months ago

It's quite bizarre I agree. The fact that the only comment I've read that doesn't follow the pattern was this one is disheartening.

maxlin3• 6 months ago

Because Adam was a spawn of a greater society.

It's better to read of what he thought of and learn from that, than to try to align oneself to the weird anti-human reaction his passing has raised from the woodwork.

techblueberry2• 6 months ago

I know three things about Scott Adams. He wrote comics, he wrote management books, he was passionate about his politics. He clearly very much wanted his politics to be part of his public persona, why is it wrong to make it part of the three things one eulogizes about him?

brigandish2• 6 months ago

Because they're not eulogising him through his politics or eulogising his politics, and they're not really talking about him when they do it.

The_President• 6 months ago

Brainwashed, you say…

All you need is

A cup or a mug or a glass

A tankard chalace or stein

A cantine jug or flask

A vessel of any kind

Fill it with your favorite liquid, I like coffee

And join me now for the unparalled pleasure

The dopamine hit if the day

The thing that makes everything better

Its called the similtaneous sip

And it happens now

pstuart3• 6 months ago

Shared ceremony is a kind of magic.

Adams' political views were highly distasteful to me, but I think it's important to recognize all facets of a person. One can appreciate one aspect and hate the other. It's ok to have mixed feelings.

instagraham• 6 months ago

It's an elephant in the room and a default instinct to address it

alecco2• 6 months ago

Because everybody is scared of being cancelled or doxxed by the angry mob. Because everything you write online will be out there forever and it's smart to be concerned of being branded guilty by association in some dystopian-but-not-unlikely future.

jpadkins12• 6 months ago

Left wingers viciously attack their own if they don't sing from the hymm book. They are scared of being labeled.

hackernj• 6 months ago

https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/2011127129354744155

phendrenad2• 6 months ago

Scott Adams was a legitimate genius. Nobody else could have made Dilbert.

People are saying that he said some bad things. I just want to encourage people to look past the ramblings of a dying man, even in our hyperpolarized age.

Uhhrrr2• 6 months ago

This is one of my favorite strips of his: https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/...

Another one was the one where he went to work in Marketing, and they were doing their research by yelling questions into a well. But I can't find that one.

teddyh4• 6 months ago

This is one of my favorite strips of his: […]

Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1997-01-13>

Another one was the one where he went to work in Marketing, and they were doing their research by yelling questions into a well. But I can't find that one.

Here it is: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1992-04-09>

Uhhrrr2• 6 months ago

Thanks!

mannanj3• 6 months ago

I loved this guy. His writing and book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big particularly impacted me early and exposed me to First Principles, biases, and in particular not giving a f*k about what people care so much.

he was one of those people who was attacked during COVID and labeled and propagandized against as a scapegoat for the failings of our unaccountable leadership - the cancel culture was unfair and unwelcome towards him. I resonated with that too.

I hope his legacy lives on - it will in me.

cosmicgadget9• 6 months ago

Weird, he was a huge fan of that unaccountable leadership.

mannanj3• 6 months ago

There's more unaccountable leadership than just the side you follow.

KaiserPro• 6 months ago

I grew up with dilbert being referenced. I was on the early internet, so things were odd. It was full of nuts and wierdos.

Scott Adams stuck out to me because his cartoons were funny and sarcastic. His books felt like he was letting me in behind the scenes. He talked to me, the reader about dealing with large amounts (for the time) traffic to his website in a honest, funny and simple way.

His books also had a link to his website, which was pretty unique for a non-technical book at the time.

I also quite liked his TV show.

I stopped reading them regularly as I grew up. I would see the odd salient dilbert in slack or email.

during the trump primary, thats when I bumped into his other side. It was heart breaking to see someone who made what I thought was such observant cartoons shit out such bile.

journal• 6 months ago

I think it's time hn added obituaries.

neuroelectron4• 6 months ago

Here lays YC...

nickstinemates• 6 months ago

RIP.

ilaksh• 6 months ago

In a weird way, I want to give him credit for saying out loud what he actually thinks. It's a good reminder for people to see it out in the open.

The reality is that there are tens of millions of racists in the United States. In fact, they put a group of Christian Nationalist (Nat-C) white supremacists in the White House.

It's not a Scott Adams problem in particular, and trying to make the issue just about him is a cop out.

Loved Dilbert anyway.

whiddershins• 6 months ago

I appreciated Scott Adams, and am sad he has passed away. I learned a lot from him and his perspective helped me through difficult times.

The comments here are very unfortunate. When someone dies, it is appropriate to speak of what you appreciated about them.

That's it. That's all you need to say. And you aren't required to say anything at all.

Apologizing for liking him because of x or y or explaining that you liked him despite z is in poor taste and, frankly, cowardly.

I appreciated Scott Adams, and am sad he has passed away.

turtlesdown113• 6 months ago

Scott Adams was an unrepentant racist.

LaGrange• 6 months ago

Bye, nobody will miss you.

I’m trans, I’m autistic, and I caught on how bad he was day one, as his comics had a very specific slant to them that felt less like truly looking at workplace dynamics, and more acting misanthropic and aggrieved.

I get you might have not caught on so soon - I’d call myself lucky - but you had plenty of time to figure out that not only he isn’t good, but also never was.

shwaj• 6 months ago

There are literally dozens of people in this very HN conversation that are missing him.

turtlesdown113• 6 months ago

There are literally dozens

asdefghyk2• 6 months ago

at age 68, which is relatively young

knicholes• 6 months ago

Why in the hell is there so much social signaling? "I really enjoyed his work for <reasons and experience here>, but <you don't need to include literally any of this because it's taking a moral high horse and trying to promote ones ego/values>"

mlindner• 6 months ago

RIP to Scott Adams, I'm much younger than most here talking about his work (I didn't enter the work force until the 2010s) but I still found Dilbert interesting.

I saw him most as a victim of cancel culture with people attacking him for things he wasn't and exaggerating his minor issues into much larger ones. There are billions of people in the world with views that are probably worse than Scott Adams' but people always feel the need to attack the nail that sticks out.

keithnz• 6 months ago

I worked in a large company in the 90s and it really felt like Scott was spying on us with the comics he wrote. Such a great comic strip, and I liked his book the Dilbert principle. I followed his blog for quite a while then things started going off the rails a bit and I stopped following, I also ended up in smaller companies and Dilbert felt less relevant and I haven't really been following what has been happening with him. Kind of glad I didn't. I'm appreciative of the years of humor Dilbert provided in the 90s.

DonHopkins3• 6 months ago

Speaking of evil trolls: The EVIL Scott Adams should not be confused with the GOOD Scott Adams who made Adventures for microcomputers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)

I found a great bug in Zork, the original one on MIT-DM, and it was also in the Infocom version. The troll that confronted you under the white house would gobble anything you gave to him. And he had an axe that he menaced you with. So I tried "GIVE AXE TO TROLL", and he ate his own axe, then cowered in the corner! So then I tried "GIVE TROLL TO TROLL" and he unceremoniously ate himself and POOF disappeared in a puff of logic.

Unfortunately it forgot to clear the troll flag, and whenever I tried to exit the room, the troll would reappear, block me from exiting, and disappear. Decades later the Zork source code was leaked and I was able to verify that yes, there WAS a troll flag.

Let's hope the EVIL Scott Adam's troll flag was cleared, and he doesn't ever reappear to menace innocent people, like he accused Black people of being a hate group, and said White people should stay the hell away from Black people!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23108936

    #ROOM {"MTROL"

    "You are in a small room with passages off in all directions. 
    Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the
    walls."
           "The Troll Room"
           %<> #EXIT {"WEST" "CELLA"
              "EAST" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "CRAW4" %,TCHOMP}
              "NORTH" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "PASS1" %,TCHOMP}
              "SOUTH" #CEXIT {"TROLL-FLAG" "MAZE1" %,TCHOMP}}
           (#FIND-OBJ {"TROLL"})}

    <PSETG TCHOMP "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture.">

fukukitaru• 6 months ago

[flagged]

yamal4321• 6 months ago

I did a quick look at Wikipedia - he has racist views, a vaccine denier, and to top it all off, of course, a Holocaust denier...

I tried reading his comics—just some run-of-the-mill jumble for a corporate audience.

So who is he? And why are there so much praise in the comments?

pcthrowaway• 6 months ago

In a 2006 blog post, Adams asked if official figures of the number of deaths in The Holocaust were based on methodologically sound research

This is probably a result of contracting brainrot by adjacency, but I wouldn't outright call this holocaust denial.

Dilbert is an iconic comic, and perhaps the most culturally impactful "office humor"

krapp8• 6 months ago

Hacker news is full of people who worked in tech in the 90s and vibed with the comic.

And Hacker news has its share of racists, anti-vaxxers and Holocaust deniers for whom Scott Adams became not just a prophet but a soldier on their side of the culture war.

russellbeattie• 6 months ago

Scott Adams is yet another example of the need to separate a person's work from their qualities as a person. It's just something we have to accept: Bad people can make great things.

An example that I like (that doesn't include WWII Germans) is William Shockley. He was a pretty horrible person all told. He didn't kill anyone, he was just a shitty guy. And yet the world owes him a debt for accurately describing how semiconductors work at the atomic level. Silicon Valley basically wouldn't exist without him.

Adams is like that as well. His work was funny and insightful, his politics were abhorrent. He will always have an asterisk next to his name in the history books because of it.

(Not that anyone will care about Dilbert in another decade or so. Much of it today is already about a moment in business that is long past).

octaane• 6 months ago

His comics were often funny, and bleakly real. His politics and opinions were unfortunate. Bye Scott.

err4nt• 6 months ago

Goodbye to our thought-provoking jester. There will never be another quite like him.

kuil009• 6 months ago

As someone who enjoyed 'Dilbert' at times long ago, I offer my condolences with a sense of appreciation for the work itself

vlod3• 6 months ago

For those that liked Scott Adams might like some Lofi-like music by the artist "Akira The Don". He sampled some videos from Scott against Japanese anime.

https://www.youtube.com/@akirathedon/search?query=scott%20ad...

mystraline• 6 months ago

Maybe his corpse can identify as 'living'?

If you think that's repugnant, then I refer you to his comic where he parodies a black engineer as white.

https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/uh21my/scott_adams_...

The guy had a point about 1990s business culture, but lost that narrative down extremism and conspiracy theories. Guy was pure trash for the last 10 years.

SV_BubbleTime2• 6 months ago

It’s not hilarious, but it’s a fair take on how seriously and stupidly non-falsifiable declarations are in a society that only functions on the objectivity of its laws.

Its DEI and post-modernism colliding. That’s a fair take.

tbrownaw8• 6 months ago

Maybe his corpse can identify as 'living'?

Kind of like the opposite of spending a year dead for tax purposes?

dayyan3• 6 months ago

Scott taught many how to think, which saved the United States.

Capricorn24813• 6 months ago

Wow this really tops everyone else for insane hyperbole. It was a comic strip.

rullelito• 6 months ago

So satire can't have a large cultural impact? Very interesting theory without much support.

YcYc102• 6 months ago

Care to elaborate?

dayyan3• 6 months ago

- https://www.amazon.com/Loserthink-Untrained-Brains-Ruining-A... - https://www.amazon.com/Reframe-Your-Brain-Interface-Happines... - https://www.youtube.com/@RealCoffeewithScottAdams

vlod3• 6 months ago

For those that want to know more context about his comments about race, it was based on a poll [0].

Make you're own mind up.

YouTube is being unprecise with the start of link. Starts at 13m 20sec

[0] https://www.youtube.com/live/K6TnAn7qV1s?si=sfYWC6w0Hgf3m9cd...

didgetmaster• 6 months ago

Once upon a time, you could enjoy the works of a creative person at face value; mainly because you didn't know much of anything about their personal life.

That seems to have all changed in this age of the Internet; where every aspect of your life is exposed for all the world to judge (at least if you are famous). All your words (written or spoken) are presented as proof positive that you and your works are not to be tolerated; even if they are from your teenage years.

It seems like you cannot say anything these days without offending a large number of people; some of whom will try to lead a boycott against you.

I generally like to enjoy a good book, movie, blog, or comic strip without letting politics get in the way.

techblueberry2• 6 months ago

Scott Adams intentionally made it his entire online persona. Im all for letting people be people, but if you’re literally going to do everything in your power to prevent me from ignoring it…

tombert2• 6 months ago

I generally like to enjoy a good book, movie, blog, or comic strip without letting politics get in the way.

It's certainly easier once they're dead. I can't speak for everyone, but part of the issue is that we don't want to financially support anyone who is doing bad stuff, so once they're dead I don't have to worry about funding them.

Hyperbolic example; suppose David Duke wrote a fantasy novel. Let's even assume that this fantasy novel had nothing to do with race or politics and was purely just about elves and gnomes and shit. Let's also assume that the novel is "good" by any objective measure you're like to use.

I would still not want to buy it, because I would be afraid that my money is going to something I don't agree with. David Duke is a known racist, neo-Nazi, and former leader of the KKK, and if I were to give him cash then it's likely that some percentage of this will end up towards a cause that I think is very actively harmful.

Now, if you go too deep with this, then of course you can't ever consume anything; virtually every piece of media involves multiple people, often dozens or even hundreds, many of which are perfectly fine people and some of which are assholes, so unless you want to go live in a Unabomber shack then everything devolves into my favorite Sonic quote [1].

So you draw a line somewhere, and I think people more or less have drawn the line at "authorship".

[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...

antisthenes2• 6 months ago

Once upon a time, you could enjoy the works of a creative person at face value; mainly because you didn't know much of anything about their personal life.

Don't let anyone tell you you can't.

gyomu• 6 months ago

Once upon a time, you could enjoy the works of a creative person at face value; mainly because you didn't know much of anything about their personal life.

This is a strawman and absolutely not backed by historical evidence.

Look into the lives of Caravaggio, Milton, Voltaire, Wilde, Verlaine, Goya, Balzac, Courbet, Rimbaud, Schubert, Manet, Wagner, Dickens, Zola, Tolstoy... and see how their personal lives and/or political views/positions negatively affected their standing despite the huge recognition their creative work had.

neuroelectron4• 6 months ago

Going to miss you Clott Adams. Your self-depreciating humor is a benchmark we really need, especially in the black community, which to it's detriment, has been gassed up to the point were self-reflection is very difficult. Mysterious forces prefer it to be this way and despite us knowing that "black pride," like any kind of pride is a sin, it doesn't seem to be allowed to be addressed. Despite the internet building many places for such discussion, instead we get censorship in various forms including spam, bots, well poisoning, deboosting, filter bubbles, ineffective search, dark patterns, and so on.

A cyberattack targeting an oncology journal has taken it offline that published a peer-reviewed study from Tufts and Brown University exploring links of COVID injections to newly diagnosed or rapidly worsened cancer shortly after COVID injections. Did this have anything to do with your cancer? It doesn't seem like this kind of question is allowed to be entertained either.

In the early 2000s we would say that the Internet sees censorship as a network failure and routes around it. Now we see that was wishful thinking. The Network Effect prefers centralization and the government prefers subtle control and liability shields held by corporations.

lins1909• 6 months ago

What a hilarious comment

bdhe• 6 months ago

A cyberattack targeting an oncology journal has taken it offline that published a peer-reviewed study from Tufts and Brown University exploring links of COVID injections to newly diagnosed or rapidly worsened cancer shortly after COVID injections. Did this have anything to do with your cancer? It doesn't seem like this kind of question is allowed to be entertained either.

We had billions of COVID shots. Even if there was a weak correlation with 1% of the people going on to get rapidly worsening cancer we'd be seeing cancer spikes everywhere. Do we have anything remotely close to that in real life?

Why'd you call him Clott Adams?

adornKey• 6 months ago

Seeing them and hearing about them in the media are different things. You have to look for data yourself - it won't come to you.

I met several people working in cancer medicine, and they tell me that they're seeing the spikes. And some statistics showed very early that something is wrong. But chances are low you'll read anything about that in the media.

Look around and see who is dying. It's an old saying about wars that people will not bother to check if something is going wrong before not at least 5-10% of the population have died.

neuroelectron4• 6 months ago

Scott Adams said "anti-VAX were right— accidentally"

Just search for it and read about his dialog with the community around the shot.

He was given the nick name "clott adams" for buying the official narrative at first and getting boosted.

https://x.com/sablaah/status/1610002947135475713?s=20

maxlin3• 6 months ago

Good god this is not good news. I knew Dilbert as long as I could read. The man as a thinker only fairly recently. To no loss.

The world is less without him.

shevy-java• 6 months ago

No more Dilbert. :(

accrual• 6 months ago

RIP Scott Adams. His humor was always slightly outside my realm but as I get older I appreciate it more. Mr. Adams was young too. RIP Mr. Adams. Thank you for your deep unreliquishing jabs at society.

Artoooooor• 6 months ago

Now. When my company got double-dilberted (eaten by bigger company that got eaten by even bigger one) and became corporate bullshit. When the whole world goes Dilbert. Very bad news.

robotresearcher2• 6 months ago

Adams seemed to me to have made a career out of a 'smartest guy in the room' schtick. Someone is always too smart to go along with the norms, such as Dogbert. They see through to what the normies can not. In 'The Religion Wars' there's explicitly 'The Smartest Guy In the World'. It's a version of a Mary Sue.

The problems come when the author believes this about themselves. They probably are smart, and Adams' work is enjoyed because he cleverly recognizes and points out stuff that resonates with people. When this is strongly reinforced, too much, too long, I think it's really unhealthy for some people. Adams seemed to need to show that his thought could not be constrained by convention. He got strong, addictive attention for this. He wanted to be thought of as smart, rather than good.

I think the antidote, or at least a protective, to this is being surrounded by people who impress you more than you impress yourself.

[Edit: removed a couple of examples of other smart people to avoid stimulating their fans and haters]

Jamesbeam• 6 months ago

I respect the work of Scott Adams as one of the greatest cartoonists of my lifetime, and I wish his family and friends the strength to move forward and to keep the good memories of him in their hearts and thoughts until they hopefully meet again. Everyone we lose to cancer is a tragedy.

My very limited personal memories of him are not the one of a kind person, though.

He might have had just a very bad day, but I had to endure this guy on a six-hour flight in the early 2000s, and after he insulted basically everyone from Hispanic people to people of colour and even shushed the lady behind us when she said she can’t listen to his bullshit anymore, I took a deep breath, looked him in the eyes, and told him I fought in two wars, and the only thing that happens if you keep hate for your "enemies" in your heart is that it will eat you from the inside. Let it go.

I wished him the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.

He laughed right in my face and told me I don’t get it and that he is going to die of old age. He was for sure a fighter and stubborn of his own views.

But in the end, he died at a young age, with hate-fuelled cancer inside his prostate and bones suffering from the same mental condition millions of people on the Internet do day by day.

People are disturbed not by things but by their view of things. And People already knew 1846 years ago it is how it is.

Marcus Aurelius started each day telling himself: ‘I shall meet with meddling, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and unsociable people.’

Nothing has changed but the Theater.

People now decide to be disturbed by their view of things over the internet, things that will not matter in their whole lifetime for them personally in real life, and Scott Adams is unfortunately the perfect example.

He was disturbed by his view, that half of people of colour in the US were ungrateful and "anti-white", tho he lived to the age of 68 without ever being harmed by a single black person in his life, as far as I know.

The death of Scott Adams is many things at once. A tragedy, a warning, and a foreshadowing of what happens if you cannot accept the world as it is and just be happy with what you got.

Life is precious. Don’t throw it away keeping hate in your heart and enemies in your head, trying to change how the world works or what our species is, a bunch of assholes all sharing the same fate.

Deal with it or die miserably like Scott. You have a choice here. Choose your friends, enemies and fights wisely is all the advise I can give anyone.

sbochins• 6 months ago

I think in the end he’ll mostly be remembered for his support of trump and his abhorrent political views. He had a great comic strip that reasonated with people. He also wrote some interesting books. It’s a good reminder that your accomplishments can easily be wiped out by bad choices.

tonymet4• 6 months ago

Praise to his ex wife Shelly Miles for supporting him through his hospice and final days.

Scott Adams was a great guy, who seemed candid, approachable, funny and exceedingly sharp.

Life is a gift. I pray he passed without too much suffering, and he's with God now.

Rest in Peace Scott Adams.

tonymet4• 6 months ago

side note to those who scorn him. Think about movies like Star Wars where the fallen resurrect as their younger image. In the 90s/early 2ks geeks all loved Dilbert & Scott Adams. It wasn't until the Trump campaign that folks became resentful. Maybe take this moment to put ill feelings aside and remember him as we all did -- as Dilbert's Dad.

nevster• 6 months ago

I mean no disrespect by this but when I saw the headline on HN I immediately thought it was about Scott Adams the text adventure guy. And then I started watching the video and was a bit confused at first before it all clicked.

Gormo• 6 months ago

That Scott Adams is alive and well: https://x.com/ScottAdamsDev, https://www.msadams.com/index.htm

rhgraysonii• 6 months ago

The creator of Dilbert, a comic strip about a man who hates his job, written by a man who hated everyone, has died. Hacker News convenes an emergency session of its Philosophy Department to determine the optimal framework for grieving a racist cartoonist.

lyu07282• 6 months ago

The philosophy department of our post-political/ly illiterate community seem to mostly boil down to the question if his vile opinions and speech should matter, failing to comprehend the associated real world consequences of this bigotry. Particularly ironic considering he died of an illness he refused to be treated for due to his anti-scientific bogus medical beliefs, presently mirrored by the person in charge of health care in the fascist US government.

khiemdn• 6 months ago

R.I.P Mr.Adam

jdlyga• 6 months ago

I loved Dilbert in the 90s, and had no idea that Scott Adams got himself embroiled in controversy towards the end. Another funny guy that let his right leaning views become his entire personality.

JuniperMesos• 6 months ago

I don't think he let his right-leaning views become his entire personality. Getting embroiled in controversy is something that happens because of the way other people react to your views, not directly because of those views themselves.

jnaina• 6 months ago

I love the music of Michael Jackson, the comedy of Bill Cosby, and the biting brilliance of Scott Adams’ comics.

I also accept the uncomfortable reality that each of these men had deeply ugly sides. That knowledge hasn’t erased my appreciation for their work, even if it has complicated how I see the people behind it.

I reconcile these two aspects, by deploying them in separate Docker containers in my brain, air-gapped, sandboxed, and blocked by multiple layers of mental compliance checks.

dzonga• 6 months ago

from Scott you learn to separate the idea from the person.

biggest impact was probably talent stacking + affirmations

I say this as a black person

SanjayMehta2• 6 months ago

I emailed him twice and he replied both times.

One was an incident involving expense reports in a large company.

The other was my manager's pep talk where he urged us to "increase our acceleration while keeping our momentum constant."

defrost6• 6 months ago

Your manager called you fat and suggested you lose weight ?

Nasty.

SanjayMehta2• 6 months ago

Don't quit your day job.

rexpop10• 6 months ago

Good riddance! He was a nasty bigot who promoted racism and misogyny.

His comic was never that good.

His cultural influence as a celebrity has been massively, disgustingly negative. The world is better off without him.

sgt2• 6 months ago

Downvoted. You seem like a pretty bitter person. People are allowed to have opinions, just like your "crazy" uncle with whom you'd rather not discuss politics at thanksgiving.

dsunds• 6 months ago

I grew up with Scott Adams.

My very fist job as a junior dev in a corporation, pre dot-com, his comics resonated with me and my co-workers. My proudest achievement was finding a way through the corporate firewall to get his comics off the internet and post them internally.

As I grew older his work became less interesting and less relevant as I moved to the pointy haired side. But as a natural skeptic his impact helped shape me and my career. It worked for me!

I don't understand what causes such successful people to take a hard turn toward apparent bigotry. As you age you have to reconcile change and your place in history. I'll try to take lessons from Scott Adams and my other would-be heroes as I go and hope to leave the world better off in my small way.

46493168• 6 months ago

Scott had prostate cancer, probably for a few years since by the time he publicly announced having it (May 2025) there were signs of the cancer spread to his hip and lower vertebrae. Rather than treating it immediately with surgery, drugs, or traditional cancer therapy, he took ivermectin and other de-worming medication. He was begging RFK jr / trump to grant him access to an "experimental" cancer treatment in November. After being paralyzed and starting radiation therapy because the cancer had spread into his spine. The man's life is a prime example of how modern conservatism will rot your brain. Prostate cancer is one of the most survivable cancers in adults (especially men over the age of 60), and he died painfully over the course of years because he believed in grifters over doctors.

byyoung3• 6 months ago

That’s not modern conservatism. It’s just stupidity. Conservatism is misinterpreted as extremism and stupidity.

brigandish2• 6 months ago

There's something very revealing about the need to caveat an expression of admiration for someone's work with "of course, he was a terrible man", and it's not revealing about the man in question.

dhruv3006• 6 months ago

A wonderful person !

gigatexal• 6 months ago

He wrote a funny comic that pilloried the absurdities of corporate life and terrible bosses.

And then he went crazy. Racist. The full throated support for Trump meant I stopped by thinking about him.

Somehow dying of ass cancer seems like cosmic karma somehow.

He soared to great heights and then threw it all away later in life. Such a shame.

big-chungus4• 6 months ago

how does that have anything to do with hackers

bitfilped• 6 months ago

The amount of closeted racism and blind defense in this comment section while knowing this is the peak represention of our industry makes me ashamed to be an engineer.

turtlesdown113• 6 months ago

It's a very common approach. Telling low performing white men they should blame black people and women for their woes is a soundtrack that resonates well.

tomaytotomato• 6 months ago

RIP Scott Adams

I recently purchased his 2026 calendar for a family member who works in the consultancy world, they really enjoy it.

Starting my dev career in a big corporate telecom I used to attach Dilbert strips to the end of my presentations, sometimes people would laugh, others, normally execs didn't get the irony or commentary.

Then when I went to more modern and cool startups the same Dilbert comic strips still apply which I found hilarious.

A lot of our influences or heroes have faults and I hope we can all put them to rest and just remember Scott's great achievements with Dilbert and his many books on Management or Psychology.

I will just leave this scene from the Dilbert TV show, that describes the engineering curse:

"The Knack" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8vHhgh6oM0

LightBug1• 6 months ago

Brave putting that on youtube. Guaranteed not to be the most nuanced of responses.

Enjoyed Dilbert growing up. Everything else? Not so much ...

No further comment.

ratbum• 6 months ago

Rest in piss

brodo• 6 months ago

Behind the Bastards did a two-part Podcast on him: https://youtu.be/8nyEkHqP65c?si=oorC_viWbnZLH-wb

therobots927• 6 months ago

Rest in piss scott

kderbyma2• 6 months ago

So sad....I knew this was coming when he got ill recently....I will really miss him. I enjoyed his podcast, despite sometimes disagreeing quite a lot - he somehow was always someone who felt sincere in a way.

gillesjacobs• 6 months ago

I liked his cartoons and he did no wrong.

lkos• 6 months ago

One tangential observation: as a young software engineer, I became acquainted with Dilbert comics and liked them a lot. However, over time I realized that they contain a certain negativity that is not helpful. My work experience improved significantly after I stopped reading them.

Scott Adams has died

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