Dilbert - C or D?

it's a sign of someone who has expertise in nothing. all you need is expertise in one somewhat esoteric or complex field to understand what is required to have expertise in other fields. if you don't know anything know about anything you don't understand what is required.

like one hour? there are certain trades (refrigeration, electrical, heavy equipment operation) that i've learnt a little bit about over the last few years and you don't need to be a genius by any means to become an electrician but after many many hours of studying it i still do not have anything approaching expertise.

nb he says political topics but a) politics are informed by real world expertise (how can you critique OSHA or the EPA if you know nothing about the fields they're designed to regulate) and b) i know he has shared similar sentiments about all areas of human knowledge.

a couple weeks ago I wrote a blog post suggesting that Adams' affinity for Trump was due to him seeing so much of himself there, claiming repeatedly that if you master hypnosis and persuasion you can achieve anything you want to in life. so Trump winning the presidency would effective vindicate everything he's said on the topic over the last two decades and I would wager that he's got a book on it ready to go. seeing Adams completely melt down amidst the criticism he's received for some of the above tweets solidifies this even further. they are essentially the same person.

Trump has better penmanship.

If only Trump acquired some neurological ailment that rendered him unable to speak... (which his staff is probably praying for)

like one hour? there are certain trades (refrigeration, electrical, heavy equipment operation) that i've learnt a little bit about over the last few years and you don't need to be a genius by any means to become an electrician but after many many hours of studying it i still do not have anything approaching expertise.

Seriously. I spent an hour watching youtube videos just to figure out how to turn off one valve to stop a leak in my house. I'm not a fucking plumber now.

well he clarified this in a blog post, the idea being that the President basically just defers every decision to his/her team of experts which is uh probably not how things actually work

already he's starting to flip on his prediction, arguing that "Clinton's side is winning the persuasion war by painting Trump as mentally unfit"...isn't it the things he says and does that are actually doing that? Clinton's stayed pretty silent after the convention.

https://theringer.com/scott-adams-interview-dilbert-donald-trump-3064e6996421

If you were to name some famous people who’re the best at writing short sentences of humor, I’d be on the short list. Top 100, I think. It’s what I do for a living. So to me it’s always hilarious that people pick a fight with me in public, in a realm in which I’m overarmed and they’re underarmed.

covering Trump this much is doing strange things to his brain

same tbh

i mean this part: covering Trump this much is doing strange things to his brain i am not agreeing w/Scott Adams lol

need to know if scott adams considers himself amongst the top 100 humorists of all time or just of our moment

The Tenth Annual Award for Famous People Who're the Best at Writing Short Sentences of Humor goes to the following 100 famous people...

He's really hedging on his supposed humor cred there.

I feel like I should give him credit for admitting that he a shitty though wildly successful cartoonist. But eh

that kristol burn tho

I’m overarmed and they’re underarmed.

http://www.doctorseanrice.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/excessive-underarm-sweating-www.newbeaty.com_.jpg?

The “learning any topic in one hour” tweet was meant to confuse dumb people so they would talk about it. [Laughs.] It was the purpose. If they got into a conversation about how hard it was to learn the job of president, then my message got through.

a masterful trap

Learn the secrets of 10th dimensional mind chess from the creator of Dogbert.

Dilbert is meant to confuse dumb people into thinking that Scott Adams is a shitty cartoonist.

I'm just wondering what the endgame is for all this - does he have a book in the can in case Trump wins? His record this election has actually been pretty poor - outside of "Trump will win the nomination" he's been off about pretty much everything. Not that it's stopped him this far.

endgame is him dying rich and bitter

why would he be bitter?
he's just trolling for attention and it's working

bitter because a life wasted spouting false platitudes, celebrating Mammon and drawing glorified stick figures

Dilbert, Dogbert, Catbert... how can I ever forget them...

https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/764196587228712960

now in full-on "the polls are skewed" mode

"That was joeks, U R Dumm" - sounds like he's angling for a cabinet position?

I'll be interested to see what kind of career the master manipulator whips up once he goes a little too ham on one of his fringe obsessions and starts getting dropped by newspapers.

he's not being subtle about his motivations to start a new career, so i'm betting this is already happening. well, that and the death of Print Media

now straight up admitting that Trump isn't trying to win...but he totally could if he wanted to

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/08/15/dilberts-scott-adams-breitbart-trump-not-trying-win-moment/

“The thing he got attacked for is something that — I have to swear to make this point — there isn’t one fucking person in the world who disagreed with him. Not one fucking person disagreed with what he clearly said, which is, ‘Why isn’t she talking?’ Because there’s nobody in the United States that I’ve ever met who doesn’t believe that Islam has some questions to answer about gender.”

That moment, he said, removed “any pretense the media had”

Wow

“The election has come down to nothing but persuasion,” Adams said, referring to the art of using words to change people’s behavior —

whew was worried I was gonna have to look up "persuasion" on conservapedia

this unidentified "godzilla" of persuasion he keeps (here and in several blog entries) talking about having joined the clinton team, rescuing her from her own haplessness as she entered the general--

“Clinton stopped talking about her boring policies, and details, and her experience, and she went to pure persuasion. She went to the bigger scare.

“The reason that Trump had done so well is he used fear as his main persuasion point. ‘Hey, immigration will bring the terrorists in, ISIS is controlling the world, the economy is falling apart.’ Those are big fears. And that really helped. Because fear’s a good persuasion. And that was more effective than what Clinton had, which was, ‘I’m experienced, steady hand, same as before, blah blah.’ At a time when people wanted change, those are the very worst messages: ‘I’ll give you more of the same.'”

But then, he said, Clinton changed her approach — possibly because she hired a persuasion expert, whom he calls “Godzilla.”

...

“So the Clinton persuasion game went from non-existent, which I reported on for months, to solid-gold, weapons-grade, almost instantly, as soon as Bernie Sanders dropped out.”

the man's never seen a pivot before and the only explanation he can think of for hillary's performing one is the shadowy presence of a skyscraper-sized penis

which I reported on for months

UPDATE: Clinton still not using persuasion. Watch this space in the PM for news.

the "I reported on for months" part i believe

If you are an American voter, in all likelihood you are deeply hypnotized already and don’t know it. I mean that literally. At this point, nearly every voter is in a deep hallucination. I could give you lots of reasons why I know that, but you wouldn’t believe any of them because cognitive dissonance won’t let my words penetrate your bubble of non-reality.

it's like being in the cave staring at the wall and there's a guy lying facedown on the floor who will not stop shouting about how he's given up trying to get anyone to join him outside

it makes me so angry that this guy is such a moron. idk why maybe bc i liked dilbert as a child and some lingering affection makes it feel like a betrayal. or maybe it's just his incredibly smug way of conveying idiotic sentiment as though it represents the pinnacle of human thought. the mismatch between the quality of his thinking and his self-regard is blanche duboisesque in its self-delusion.

For the most part I think the infuriating thing is his constant need to be right about everything, he gets off on taking the dumbest and most indefensible positions and accusing anyone who disagrees with him of being brainwashed or a "science denier" because his argument contained something like "studies show that men get angry if they don't have sex". His entire worldview is literally "I'm smart and everyone else is dumb", and his argument for Trump is basically "this guy is as smart as I am!" He blatantly plays both sides of the fence as often as he can and acts as though nobody else sees through it. For example this idiotic "I endorsed Hillary Clinton for my personal safety" garbage that he feels the need to tack onto every article and interview he does as though it's some stroke of genius. If Trump is "a poor man's idea of what a rich man is like", then Adams is a moron's idea of what a smart person sounds like.

specifically, scott adams'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(don't answer that)

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

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

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