27 Feb 2017

Two Oopsies in Scott Adams’ Posts

Deep Thoughts, Scott Adams 17 Comments

I still enjoy checking in on Scott Adams (the Dilbert creator) to see his rival narrative concerning Trump. (Here’s a good example.)

However, I often find Adams carelessly pontificating on things when I suspect he isn’t nearly committed to the principle as his writing suggests.

The best recent example is his post, “How to Evaluate a President.” Adams opens like this:

Steve Jobs. Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Richard Branson. What do they all have in common, aside from wealth?

They all succeeded without the right kind of prior experience. Apparently they knew how to figure out what they needed once they started. I’ll bet they are all systems-thinkers, not goal-thinkers.

Adams then goes on to argue that Trump is a systems-thinker, and that’s the way to interpret the rocky start to his Administration.

To then give a more concrete example of what a systems-thinker does, Adams writes:

But in any case, as I often say, goals are for losers. Systems are better. As I describe in my book, a good system is something you do every day that leads you to better outcomes, not specific objectives. For example, going to college is a good system even if you don’t know what job you might later want. Any time you learn something valuable, that’s a system. Networking with important people is a system. And so on.

Does everyone see the problem? The four people Adams chose–namely Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, and Branson–did not finish college; Branson apparently didn’t even finish high school. (See here and here.) And this isn’t just ironic; Adams’ example of “going to college to help you get a job later on” is exactly wrong for his broader point.

For a different example of Adams not taking his own pontification seriously, in this post he writes: “On the conservative side, morality is usually seen as coming from God. I’m not a believer, so I see morality as a set of rationalizations for our biological impulses. Luckily, we evolved with some instincts for taking care of each other. “

So my question: If Adams doesn’t believe in an objective moral code, then why does he think it’s lucky that we have instincts to take care of each other? Would it make sense to write, “Luckily, our taste buds evolved to let us know how delicious ice cream is”?

17 Responses to “Two Oopsies in Scott Adams’ Posts”

  1. Gene Callahan says:

    “Does everyone see the problem? The four people Adams chose–namely Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, and Branson–did not finish college; Branson apparently didn’t even finish high school.”

    No, because… there isn’t a problem.

    1) He said “going to college” is good. Three of four went to college.

    2) He did NOT say “The ONLY way to succeed is going to college.” No one can do EVERY good thing! Whatever you recommend as good (besides say breathing) I can find some successful people who did not do it.

    If I say “Learning programing is a good way to success,” are you going to claim I made a mistake because Warren Buffett never learned programing?!

    • Bob Murphy says:

      Gene wrote: “If I say “Learning programing is a good way to success,” are you going to claim I made a mistake because Warren Buffett never learned programing?!”

      Do they have a class on analogies in college?

      Gene if you wrote a blog post saying, “What do Tom, Dick, and Harry all have in common? They’re Luddites. And you should be a Luddite too, by learning to program,” then yeah that would be weird.

      (I think my example there is on the other end of the spectrum from your analogy. What Adams actually wrote is somewhere in between.)

      • Craw says:

        A weak response. You imply Adams is contradictory, because one of his examples is going to college, which his guys (kinda sorta) did not do. You only have a point if those guys are the only “systems” guys so that their suite of tools are the only system tools.

      • khodge says:

        Zuckerberg, for one, went to college, observed a problem, developed a solution, and made useful contacts. Going to college was, for him, far more important than graduating from college.

        Overall, though, picking four highly successful, well-known celebrities strikes me as cherry picking. Using just one example and drawing out his story would be much more illustrative of his point.

      • Keshav Srinivasan says:

        Bob, Scott Adams said Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Richard Branson all had systems. He also said that going to college is an example of a system. That does not imply that going to college is the system that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Richard Branson had.

      • Major-Freedom says:

        I think the fact that the people listed went to college but then dropped out, and did not actually get the finished degree, is exactly how one would expect a systems-thinker to do

        Yeah I don’t see a problem in what Adams wrote there either. He used school as an example of a system thing, he could have used any example really. If he did use another example, his point would have remained, and you may have agreed with his argument. So I don’t think it is the example per se that matters

  2. Rory says:

    Bob, I’m in the same boat as you – Scott is still interesting to read now and again, but his master persuader framework isn’t fleshed out enough for me to find it very compelling, despite his prescience regarding a Trump victory. Now, I’ve read Gene’s point above and I think it’s salient, and probably would be Scott’s defense of his statements if he were here. However, I think the trouble is in justifying the system-thinker worldview with concrete examples purely after the fact, and absent of any statement of intent beforehand. What I mean by this is that the very nature of system-thinking seems to justify almost anything when looked retrospectively and in the context of a successful person. Put another way, it’s hard to imagine an event in Steve Jobs’ life that Scott couldn’t say was a part of his systems-thinking because he could always pluck some sort of silver lining from any event and say it added to Jobs’ “talent stack”, or Jobs’ was playing the probabilities and it didn’t pan out, or both. I mean, supposing Jobs started a used golf ball emporium in Dubuque, Iowa without any logic or foresight, we could always say that even though that didn’t work out, Jobs probably knew that if he started enough business one would succeed, and he also learned valuable lessons in entrepreneurship. Again, because we’re speculating from step one and we lack a statement from the subject that proves they were a goal-thinker, it’s hard for me to think of an event that Scott couldn’t cite as indications that they were/are systems-thinkers, because hey – they’re successful. I don’t want to come down too hard on the systems-thinking stuff because I think it’s a good perspective, but the way Scott cites examples to support it seems circular.

    This is at least tangentially related to my wider criticism of Scott, which is that he doesn’t explain enough about where he may be wrong, ironically weakening the validity of his framework in my view. I’ve commented about this in different terms on a past post. Again, this is not to take away from the correct overall view that he’s had in his predictions for the past year and a half or so, but when he is wrong on certain twists and turns in the story, I feel he tends to dismiss criticism by saying he merely “updated” his prediction – but this usually tends to be information that it seems would have been easily foreseeable if it wasn’t an outright given on his own terms when he made the prediction originally. Additionally, an infinity of facts in the sociopolitical landscape basically ensures he can always point to something that could plausibly update some facet of his prediction.

    Generally speaking I’d like to know how Scott would respond to the following: to what extent does persuasion matter when confronted with traditionally valued skills, like experience? After all, Donald Trump lost in 2012 – is it just that he became a master persuader afterwards, or did his master persuader status ensure that he fine tuned his approach in the next contest? If the latter, it seems experience is a factor, so it would be interesting to know what the interaction of skills of an otherwise persuasion-less person would have to look like to beat a master persuader. Also, Scott is – as he likes to cite often – a trained hypnotist. I actually looked up when his training occurred, and as best as I can tell it was quite early in his life, yet he predicted a Romney victory over Obama in 2012, while now labeling Obama a master persuader. What flipped in the time between his hypnotism training and the 2016 presidential race that he realized that persuasion was a major factor in political success, given that he has cited he consciously used persuasion techniques in his own career often?

    I think explaining the limitations of his master persuader/persuasion framework in this way would actually lend it more credibility instead of being slick with his consistency as you have pointed out here and in other posts.

  3. Mark says:

    This is an easy one, because I can basically just cut and paste some comments I made in an email to Walter Block a couple of years ago.

    In some comments he made on the lrc blog replying to someone about animal cruelty, he said, “I regard this as the biggest and perhaps the only flaw in libertarianism. I share your sentiments fully. I can’t for the life of me figure out a way to make animal torture a crime, compatible with the libertarian non aggression principle.”

    I emailed him and suggested he was starting in the wrong place, and that the Bible answered the question. I quoted some applicable Bible verses and then said,

    “Ultimately, we are addressing morality here. But the NAP is not sufficient. We need an authority outside of our self; otherwise it’s just an opinion. How do we “impose” (I know that’s a contradiction) the NAP on someone who doesn’t start there? Someone who doesn’t believe in the same morality we do? The Hitlers, Stalins, Bushes, Clintons and Obamas of the world?

    “As wonderful as your arguments are on many subjects (I don’t agree with you about everything), they ultimately boil down to being an argument for morality. E.g., you believe it is wrong to steal – so do I. It violates the concept of personal property and is often done violently. But again, how do you answer the person who doesn’t believe that it’s wrong? (You know, like Congress.) If there are no absolutes, what do you do with the person who simply says your opinions about morality, ethics, the NAP, statism, anarchism, etc, are just that – opinion? The result of random collisions of atoms in your brain. Remember the old Goldwater slogan – “In your heart you know he’s right?” How much more true is that when it comes to God? There is a reason we all know the difference between right and wrong even if we don’t act that way. The NAP is not enough, as your frustration at not being able to provide a suitable answer to your correspondent shows.”

    Of course, I just got his standard reply with a bibliography of everything he’s written. (An exaggeration, but not too far from the truth.)

    The same thing applies to Scott Adams. In his fantasy world of evolution, he has no other source of morality other than opinions that are a result of random collisions of atoms in the re-arranged pond scum called his brain.

  4. Andrew_FL says:

    “I see morality as a set of rationalizations for our biological impulses. Luckily, we evolved with some instincts for taking care of each other.”

    This is literally the wrongest statement I have ever read in my entire life. Imagine how totally ignorant of human beings you’d have to be to misunderstand human nature that badly.

  5. Craw says:

    Why? Do you deny we have ANY instincts for taking care of each other? He said some, the denial of some is none after all. No maternal instinct? Or do you deny we evolved?

    • Andrew_FL says:

      If you think “morality” is the same thing as “instincts for taking care of each other” you don’t really understand what morality is.

  6. AdamOops says:

    All you need to hear to know Scott’s lazy thinking is at the end of a Stefan Molyneaux interview.

    He says that homebuilders in CA refuse to build homes with basements – simple ‘holes in the ground’ according to Scott – because they are lazy. Government needs to mandate basements.

    No thoughts on the ideas that maybe people don’t prefer basements, mold, flood damage, millennials don’t own enough crap for basements, etc.

    Market fail or Scott logic fail?

  7. Harold says:

    “a good system is something you do every day that leads you to better outcomes, not specific objectives.”

    The problem here is that you can’t define “better outcome” without some sort of goal. What do we mean by better outcome? So for Trump, a good system is one that fulfills the objective of making Trump more money. That does not necessarily lead to a successful presidency by anybody else’s standards.

  8. Keshav Srinivasan says:

    Bob, when Scott Adams says “Luckily, we evolved with some instincts for taking care of each other.” that does not imply that he thinks that taking care of each other is an objectively moral thing to do. He could just by saying, “I personally prefer to live in a world where my fellow humans take care of each other, so I’m happy that evolution has given humans instincts to do so.”

    For the record, I’m not a Scott Adams fan. I think his views are wrong and reasoning is often utterly illogical, despite the fact that he prides himself on being a logical thinker.

    • Keshav Srinivasan says:

      his reasoning*

    • Bob Murphy says:

      Keshav wrote:

      Bob, when Scott Adams says “Luckily, we evolved with some instincts for taking care of each other.” that does not imply that he thinks that taking care of each other is an objectively moral thing to do. He could just by saying, “I personally prefer to live in a world where my fellow humans take care of each other, so I’m happy that evolution has given humans instincts to do so.”

      Right, that *is* what he’s saying Keshav. And I’m saying that makes no sense. Did you get my ice cream analogy?

  9. Harold says:

    What was the ice cream analogy?

    Why does this make no sense? It seems a reasonable thing to say, but I am not sure what your objection is.

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