I used to say seeing Dilbert strips in the office is a warning sign. People shouldn’t identify with Dilbert.

https://archive.is/9JVkU

And while we don't have cubicles and TPS reports anymore, people have different grievances and ways of expressing their cynicism.

History does not repeat but it rhymes indeed

Your manager had a boss, too. She had to deal with the oddities and frustrations of corporate life and expectations, too.

Even your CEO has a board to deal with.

I always think it's strange when people draw a mental dividing line between ICs and managers and think people on the other side are living in totally different experiences of the world.

> my former manager organized an offsite where we all watched Office Space together.

Working in management is infinitely more soul crushing than being Peter Gibbons.

I literally brought up The Peter Principle when I quit a job like that.

Office Space is a parable about a software developer who doesn’t want to be promoted beyond his core competency. Peter Gibbons is fighting the Peter Principle.

Did you not realize we’ve built a system where everyone is both oppressor and oppressed. Did you not think she too had an idiot boss?

I watched Office Space with a bunch of coworkers at a previous job. It's a funny movie that most people in startups view as a parody of big company office life. Our company didn't function like the movie.

You sound as though you worked for one of my managers, though he just gave everyone a copy of the DVD for Christmas one year. The thing is, he definitely got it, knew he was part of the system, and did his best to take care of the people working for him.

I don't have stats to back it up, but many people claim that Office Space made a lot of people resign their cubicle jobs and this was a sharp effect on its release.

Perhaps she just had a good sense of humor? It's a great movie after all..

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"I'm a regular boss, I'm a cool boss. You can just call me Stan"

Probably not how you meant it but I chuckled.

Great question. The best team I can name had these things going for them:

- Constrained scope (they were the UI team on an internal product; by the time they got their marching orders the whole thing was a very well understood problem domain)

- Excellent manager (he has infinite calm, deep empathy for the fact that real people are messy and complicated, and an incredible nose for time estimates). There was basically no amount of pressure up-chain could put on him that would shake his cool; he seems to be completely confident internally that the worst-case scenario is he goes and lands on his feet somewhere else.

As a result, his team was basically always happy and high-performing and he consistently missed up-chain expectations set by project managers above him who had to consistently report that UI wasn't going to be delivered on the timeline they set because they had taken his estimates and shaved three weeks off of them, only to discover that the estimates were dead-on and they were the liars. He was insulated from this by (a) keeping consistently good notes on his initial estimates, everything that bumped them, and the final deliverable dates and (b) having skip-level meetings where he could present all of this to his boss's boss clearly.

I had a period where I was on a team like that. We didn't have a manager.

Though some of my worst work periods was when I didn't have a manager either lol.

The manager has decision making power, a well paid senior team, and a clear goal. I have seen it work like a dream.

Pointy Haired Boss :)

"Organization headwinds" diagrams are helpful, thanks for the interesting read.

The PHB is not middle management. Middle management is at least one level above the PHB.

When I ponder this, the "Isn't it obvious?" frame ends up cutting both ways: ex. isn't it obvious this isn't actually an active thought when people make these decisions? (to wit, the theory cited is based on The Office TV series, which also never depicts this)

It's very difficult to fire people in many places. They would prefer you leave on your own.

The order is wrong here:

Governance creates markets -> markets create innovation. These things have feedback loops into governance, but the tail ultimately does not wag the dog.

Engineers-- especially in the Bay where discussion of such is written off as mental illness-- often dismiss politics and governance as nonsense subjects that lack rules and are run by the mob/emotions. The reality however, is that these societal constructs have their own "physics" and operate like a (very complex and challenging to study) system just like everything else in the natural world.

The attitude itself is of course something has been designed and implemented into engineering culture by precisely the leaders you contend are scape goats to society. POSIWID.

How very Dilbertian. If one were to compress the above post into a comic, it would star Dilbert wondering why people with towering intellects like Dilbert weren't running the world in the first panel and then humorously demonstrating in subsequent panels Dilbert's disastrous and irreparable lack of understanding of messy human interrelationships and motivations that have to be navigated to not implode as a leader.

> We are teaching the sand to think and working on 3d printing organs and peering at the beginning of time with super-telescopes and landing rockets.

There are a lot of smart and skilled people involved in making a cutting edge chip fab. It's not one ubermensch in a basement inventing a new TSMC process by thinking really hard. There's technicians, scientists, researchers in multiple disciplines. All of those people have to be organized.

I don't know where you think the "smart" people are, but maybe meditate on the fact that "smartness" is not a single variable that dictates a person's value or success. Someone who is an expert at researching extreme UV patterning isn't going to necessarily run a great chip manufacturer.

It's pretty simple: those people are the absolute experts in their field, similar to those top chemists or whatever. That field is societal power systems.

Of course someone who dedicated his time to climbing and understanding power systems will have more power than someone who doesn't.

You got it backwards. We (which we?) don't need them, they need us. They can't play the games they like without massive resource extraction. If someone continually catches the flu, it doesn't mean they need the flu.

We don’t just use these people we create them. Since ancient Egypt the priest class of every society is employed to apply ritual trauma to psychologically prepare princes for their vocation of restless leadership.

Pretty easy to take pot shots at a dead guy who lacks the ability to punch back. Especially when the dead guy hosted a daily show and would have been thrilled to have him come on and debate! Why didnt Mr Codex get around to stating his opinion re: Adams for the past 10 years?

I really enjoyed How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

I think you also have to mention along his talent stack, all his failed business ideas. He really seemed to give his ideas a shot even if they didn't make much sense. I don't think most people would even pursue the Dilbert idea.

Yes, that guy.

"Consider the source".

I actually watched the podcast in question. As I saw it he made a very reasonable and 100% non-racist comment (in the context of the discussion the soundbytes were later taken out of), which related more to the inflammatory, caustic nature of the media narrative on black-white relationships, and whether as a white person it is even fruitful to be engaging in that narrative, if the end outcome is that your engagement will be used out of context to cause even more strife and division by the people pushing this narrative. I.e. you will make more of a difference as a white person by trying to improve the "systems" around you, in a manner that benefits everyone, rather than by engaging in pointless arguments and debates with people who are blinded by a very deliberately promoted agenda.

I very much agree with that point, and have experienced it myself. Ironically, if nothing else, this whole affair and the rush to cancel him and call him racist and disgraced, ultimately proved his very point. Just look at how the links you shared choose to word their posthumous articles.

If you really want an accurate source, just go watch the (entire) podcast. No better source than this. Best case scenario you'll disagree with my take, but now your take is informed rather than misinformed.

And to set the record straight, Adams was the very opposite of racist in my view. He had very nuanced and pragmatic views, including how the best thing the country could do to help black communities should be investing in education across the board, instead of funding and pandering to apologists who inflame the masses but then drain the money from the education system, perpetuating ghetto-like communities.

I haven't seen full height cubicles since my 2006-2011 job.

Still even half-height cubicle desks tended to give you a good sense of "your space" relative to the open concept rows of tables/flat desks.

Currently I go to the office once a week, where I sit at a tiny mobile desk pressed against the side of someone else's cubicle. I'm almost "in" a walkway. Can't imagine how that interferes with focus!

Personally I hated them they felt dehumanizing, and loved my first open floor company

I also don’t like WFH, I wonder if people who like open plans also like RTO

Cubicles are terrible. Especially the full height ones. They have all the same noisy neighbor problems as open spaces but you’re stuck in a tiny box all day. You get a tiny modicum of privacy but not enough to make up for feeling like you’re stuck in a gray box all day.

It was an online serial. Any new plotline or character is a live experiment that might publicly fail to work out. That kind of thing does indeed need a lot of work to become a conventionally structured novel. That said I actually thought the ending was pretty alright. Well, most of it.

I read the whole thing and enjoyed both the premise and the writing, but yeah, it would have benefited considerably from the attention of a professional editor and a couple of rounds of rewrites.

I’m not the person you’re asking the question from but I’m a consultant that has been to well over a hundred organisations big and small.

Employee happiness and team success is essentially random. More accurately: you can go to two “identical” companies directly competing in the same industry at the same scale and they can still be wildly different internally. One can be a depressing march to retirement and death, the other a place where people literally(!) sing with joy in the corridors.

Everything is likely to also be totally different: procedures (or lack thereof), policy, tools, training, etc…

Despite this, all organisations above a certain size are filled with people that are certain that their way is the only way things are done. They’ll argue until they’re blue in the face that nothing else could possibly work… with someone who was at their totally different competitor last week and saw that in fact a different approach is massively superior.

This variability is greatest for small scale workplace practices as typically decided by a “pointy haired boss” (PHB).

They also tend to be most convinced of their own methods, and the most resistant to change.

Not sure this really obvious analysis really helps. I've seen a lot of people thinking they are really smart for saying that everyone including them are idiots. Adams made a lot of declarations or actions that shows that he really thought of himself as "able to see what the idiot sheeple were not able to see", and this quote is not out of character at all: "you idiots don't even realise that everyone is an idiot including me".

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I don't really identify with any particular movement, but it's important to note that there are plenty of people who legitimately oppose the core concept of rationalism, the idea that reason should be held above other approaches to knowledge, this being put aside from other criticisms leveled at the group of people that call themselves rationalists. Apparently, rationalism isn't obviously correct. Unfortunately, I don't really have enough of a background in philosophy to really understand how this follows, but looking at how the world actually works, I don't struggle to believe that most people (certainly many decision makers) don't actually regard rationality as highly as other things, like tradition.

In theory, the name is supposed to imply that they're pursuing rational thinking and philosophies, not that their decisions are the rational choice.

That said, I was surrounded by rationalists in my younger years by pure coincidence and spent some time following the blog links they sent and later reading the occasional LessWrong thread or SSC comment section that they were discussing each day in chat.

It's pretty easy to see that the movement attracts a lot of people who have made up their minds but use rationalisim as a way to build a scaffold underneath their pre-determined beliefs in a way that sounds correct. The blogs and forums celebrate writing of a certain style that feels correct and truthy. Anyone who learns how to write in that style can get their ideas accepted as fact in rationalist communities by writing that way. You can find examples throughout history where even the heroes of the rationalist movement have written illogical things, but they've done it in the correct way that makes it appear to be "first principals" thinking with a "steelmanning" of the other side along with appropriate prose to sound correct to rationalists.

Right up there with calling your group "The Good Guys"

Or naming your cult “The Reasonabilists”

https://parksandrecreation.fandom.com/wiki/The_Reasonabilist...

Well, I agree but think it is even worse than this. Anyone who hasn't got wind of the opposition between rationalism and empiricism is squarely placing themselves in a very ancient thought-space, more Plato than Kant, no Popper, no modernity.

They are basically outing themselves as either having little curiosity, or as having had very limited opportunity to learn... Still if they expound on it, the curiosity deficit is the most likely explanation.

>J. W. Goethe was obsessed with "Farbenlehre" [0], which is so weird that it is "not even wrong".

I think that's a bit harsh? Goethe's color theory is taught in every art school to this day.

Goethe and science is an interesting one. In some sense he may have been a Newton of another, separate (and in some sense orthogonal) approach towards a science of nature [0]. One that takes primarily an intuitive/integrative/phenomenological approach to the world, rather than a mathematical/analytical. Somewhat analogous to continental vs analytical philosophy (or German vs British, if you want to be reductive).

The latter showed its strength once the industrial revolution rolled around and it gave the tools to understand and design ever more impressive technology, with the Goethean approach becoming ever more fringe. And after WW1+2 the cultural sphere that nurtured it was basically done.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethean_science

The example I gave what about Adams being convinced to "know better" while it was clearly not true, which is to me a clue that when it comes to his view on society and business, which already looks pretty simplistic to me, the idea that he "knew better" is more probably the result of him thinking that and managing to convince others people who also like to see themselves as smarter than others.

I think the article explains that Adams "turned bad" because it is the sad consequence of him being smarter than the rest of the people. I'm pretty sure that someone who has time to lose can got through the article and pick up all of the quotes about how Adams was clever and the managers were so dum.

I'm not saying Adams is not smart because he has done stupid things, I'm saying that Adams has probably thought of himself as very smart while not smart at all in field X because it is pretty clear he has done that in fields Y and Z (which is the first clue).

The second clue is about the fact that the "smart thing" he came up with is quite simplistic.

Ironically enough, Carl Sagan on marijuana:

"I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can’t go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books."

https://www.organism.earth/library/document/mr-x

I got the impression he actually really likes Jon, he’s just kind of a jerk who can’t express himself.

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I think that may have only been in the animated TV show?

There was presumably a lot of money and status on the line, so I'm sure had he realised what was coming he'd have been happy to learn enough logical notation to express !(It's OK To Be White) && !(It's !OK To Be White). If anyone figured out what positive statement he had to say he'd probably have said that too. The man was notable for his philosophical rejection of shame.

> What is interesting that while 'Dilbert empire' fell in the process for not accepting white inferiority, full blown resistance marketing market is taking ( or maybe has taken already ) shape fueled largely by highly polarized populace.

I must be daft. There must be some cultural context I'm missing so that I don't even understand what you're saying. Accepting white inferiority? Full blown resistance marketing market? Huh?

Yeah, probably unfair to name GenX exclusively - more of a late boomer/early gen-x phenomenon. Perhaps it's just the new mid-life crisis, "corvette in your 40s" is beyond silly these days, but rich, powerful 50-60 year olds thinking they're badass rebels is super common.

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Yes, exactly. Their minds grew with them, they didn't become ossified in their 20s

That's a pretty wild take. Maher's views have been basically consistent, the others have not. Musk has also veered hard-right

Which race and gender do you need?

"I never quite understood the argument that God should be "perfect""

My understanding from reading the bible while I was still christian is pretty much, that in the older parts, god was indeed not almighty. He was just the god of a desert tribe. And of course a stronger god than the other gods of the inferior tribes ... slowly evolving to obviously the strongest god up to the point that there was only one god. And there can be only one god if he is almighty. Or, so powerful that the difference does not matter anymore.

Anyway, the logical fallacy of the "almighty" thing was the main thing for me to give up on the concept. I cannot accept a concept, that puts me in hell (or heaven), eternal damnation (or salvation) for being who I was made to be, influenced by an environment also totally controlled by the creator.

I'm remembering it not because it makes a good point, trying to reason about God is futile and pointless, but because it's funny both alone and because of its central role in the novel as saving humanity from a global holy war. Like that's just hilarious.

There's no reason a god has to be perfect. But certain major religions do make that claim. It's an argument about a specific concept of god that has a lot of traction.

An author who "actually wanted to write about" how Adams was a terrible person, but feels obligated to include some praise to pacify the Politeness Police, probably would not write these words:

"I loved Scott Adams. Partly this is because we’re too similar for me to hate him without hating myself."

You seem to think the only thing that matters is Adams' engagement with right-wing politics and race; all else is fluff that OP only writes under duress, to not get canceled by the rationalist community's weird norms.

That is a complex hypothesis; here's a simpler one: OP is writing his honest thoughts. He sees Adams as a complicated, flawed person who should not be wholly defined by their worst comments or bad decisions. Adams isn't an evil villain worthy of dismissal and contempt. He's more of a tragic anti-hero who made bad choices -- but very understandable ones if you know his character sheet, backstory, the times he lived in, and the immediate pressures. Or at least that's the way OP views him.

It's a careful, nuanced article. It's fine with me if you don't agree with the author's viewpoint! But I do object to your accusations of disingenuousness for what appears to me to be a sincere, heartfelt eulogy.

Were you perhaps hoping for an article along the lines of, "He said that about black people, he is the enemy, when we think about him we should have nothing but fury and contempt in our hearts, and the righteous should rejoice in his death"? Are you thinking "Of course every community has cancel-cudgel-wielding norm enforcers that everybody carefully censors their words to avoid, this community must just have different censorship rules than the ones I'm used to, because the possibility of a community that doesn't immediately ostracize people for wrongthink is absurd"?

If so, I...was going to make a snarky comment about how this blog and the rationalist community are not places for you, but actually, I just feel bad for you; the politics of the 2010s and 2020s has traumatized [1] you and a lot of other people. You need to spend more time in places like this, not less -- communities where people try to keep their discourse on higher rungs [2] [3].

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-traum...

[2] https://waitbutwhy.com/whatsourproblem

[3] https://fourminutebooks.com/whats-our-problem-summary/

I think many who dislike Trump (myself included) don't really want to think of him as having skills of any sort.

But I think it's more so that he does absolutely have certain skills such as persuasion or, some argue, charisma. He just doesn't have any of that pesky morality or sense of responsibility to the greater good, the entire citizenship, etc. that often gets in the way of such ambitions.

So we're left with a master manipulator who will hurt a great number of people, maybe benefit a few if necessary, but ultimately a subset of people think he's genius and a net positive. And I can't help but think that the only ones who think he's a "net positive" are either personally benefiting, or have been persuaded to believe it, despite reality painting a different picture.

I dunno if the "just paraphrasing [...] Fox" works as an explanation for success. It sounds like you believe he just keeps unaccountably stumbling into piles of cash and power?

TPOT is "this part of Twitter", a loose community of (roughly) post-rat affiliated people; the "squishy half" is presumably referring to the fact that a substantial number of such people end up quite big into woo of various sorts.

There is a no-joke they’re serious effort to link gym and fitness with conservative values.

People on the left point to statistics and a study or two showing decent correlation. People on the right readily agree regardless of their fitness saying it’s because of discipline and personal responsibility.

I think it’s funny to see people on the left lean into it.

Shocking that no answer ever came.

What "Star Trek Academy" that Paramount just put out did to the Star Trek franchise is what I'm expecting them to do to Dilbert.

When I made that comment. This article had only 5 comment threads. And three of them talked about how "it's okay to be white " and superiority. All dead now just like my comment .

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I have a much darker hypothesis about it - when people are left to compete, they often resort to badmouthing those who they think could outcompete them.

Thus, the reputation of the most competent gets destroyed, while the village idiot remains as the only one left unscathed.

He even fooled Scott. Impressive!

In another way Trump is actually rather like Adams himself: his one great talent is as an entertainer and self-publicist, but he feels that he deserves success in business and leadership, so that he can be hailed as a great builder and decision-maker. Trump does have the personal charisma and feel for manipulation which Adams longed for, though. (Though it does help Trump that he started with the charisma boosts of inherited megawealth and the associated upbringing.)

There’s a reason war and peace wasn’t written on a single page.