I suppose a lot of people don’t take Scott Adams serious because he’s a cartoonist (the creator of Dilbert). I’ve read all (most?) of his books have found his explanation of… well, pretty much everything, makes the most sense to me. Today on his blog he gives a tidy summary of his world view.

1. Willpower isn’t a real thing. Some people just have greater urges than others. If I resist a cookie and you don’t, it doesn’t say anything about your willpower, but it might say you are hungrier than I am, or you simply like cookies more than I do.
2. I don’t believe in a creator. I see humans as a collection of particles bumping into each other. Or maybe we’re a computer simulation created by some earlier civilization. In either case, no group of particles, or arrangement of ones and zeroes, is superior to another.
3. I have no individual skill that is not topped by at least one person in every demographic group. Every group has people who are smarter than me, stronger than me, kinder than me, more generous than me, more talented, and so on.
4. There is no logical way to rank talents or virtues. Is one person’s excellent musical skill somehow better than another’s good parenting skills? Is your kindness better than your friend’s work ethic? None of these things can be compared objectively.
5. Genes are often destiny. You were probably born with your personality and your preferences, in which case you are not to blame. Or you might have been the victim of some sort of nastiness in your past that changed you permanently, and that probably wasn’t your “fault” in any objective way either. Your particles bumped around until something bad happened, nothing more.
6. For purely practical reasons, the legal system assigns “fault” to some actions and excuses others. We don’t have a good alternative to that system. But since we are all a bunch of particles bumping around according to the laws of physics (or perhaps the laws of our programmers) there is no sense of “fault” that is natural to the universe.