Tag Archives: Scott Adams

Is Earth a seeded planet?

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“One possibility is that we will build 3D printers and create organic humans based on our software personalities just to experience reality through five senses. An organic creature can keep learning its entire life. So our future software selves might find a need to bring some of our minds back into organic form just to keep up the challenge and the learning. And you know where this is going. If the scenario I described might happen in the future, how can we know it didn’t already happen and we are the second-generation organic humans?”

Scott Adams thinks it is and makes his case here.

Scott Adams: Marriage and Happiness

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“Marriage is probably a great solution for 20% of the public. The rest of us need better systems. […] I don’t think traditional marriage is going away anytime soon. But it probably isn’t a coincidence that there are more single and divorced people than ever. Traditional marriage is the biggest obstacle to happiness in the United States. I give it twenty years before society acknowledges it to be a bad fit for modern times.”

Scott Adams on traditional marriage »

Scott Adams: The user interface to reality

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“The so-called ‘truth’ of the universe is irrelevant because our tiny brains aren’t equipped to understand it anyway. […] Our human understanding of reality is like describing an elephant to a space alien by saying an elephant is grey. That is not nearly enough detail. And you have no way to know if the alien perceives color the same way you do. After enduring your inadequate explanation of the elephant, the alien would understand as much about elephants as humans understand about reality. […] Today when I hear people debate the existence of God, it feels exactly like debating whether the software they are using is hosted on Amazon’s servers or Rackspace.”

Scott Adams: The Age of Magic

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“Imagine walking to a crosswalk and doing the “halt” hand motion in the direction of traffic. Your ring and your watch can tell by their orientation to each other that you have formed that gesture and so they send a “pedestrian waiting” message to the street light. The lights change for you and you cross. It will feel like magic. Or point at something in a vending machine and your watch and ring can detect which item you selected, charge your credit card, and send a code to release the item. To an observer it will seem that you pointed at an item and magic released it.”

Do you have any marketable skills?

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stacking-beer-cansIf you asked 100 people “Do you consider yourself a success?”, I’d expect 90 of them to answer one of two ways: a) Yes b) Depends on how you define success. (Which sounds like “no” to me)

During my working years (I never thought in terms of ‘career’) I don’t recall thinking in terms of success. My defining question was “Am I enjoying what I’m doing?” Yes. I did, I am. Did I have a system? I would have said, no, I was just lucky.

Reading Scott Adams’ How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big got me thinking about success.

“The best way to increase your odds of success — in a way that might look like luck to others — is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job.”

Adams provides a list of skills in which he thinks every adult should gain a working knowledge.

  • Public speaking
  • Psychology
  • Business Writing
  • Accounting
  • Design (the basics)
  • Conversation
  • Overcoming shyness
  • Second language
  • Golf
  • Proper grammar
  • Persuasion
  • Technology (hobby level)
  • Proper voice technique

In the book he makes his case for each of these skills. As I read, I evaluated my own knowledge of these skills.

  • Public speaking – Got my BA in Speech and Theater, taking lots of public speaking course along the way
  • Psychology – a course or two
  • Business writing – several books and some courses
  • Accounting – almost zero knowledge
  • Design – Yeah. Spent the last 10 or 15 years creating and websites for the company and clients
  • Conversation – co-hosted daily radio show for a dozen years. Hundreds of interviews
  • Overcoming shyness – college and community theater; 10,000 hours of airtime on the radio
  • Second language – nope
  • Golf – nope
  • Proper grammar – writing courses, public speaking, radio, all contributed
  • Persuasion – a couple of course in college; wrote countless radio commercials
  • Technology – geek wannabe. Got the computer/internet bug early and never lost it
  • Proper voice technique – see above

Turns out I had a pretty good handle on 9 of the 13 skills in Adams’ list. Not by design, mind you, just luck. Looking back, however, I can see how these skills combined and overlapped to make me well-suited to the work I wound up doing.

I can here all those zippers coming down, ready to piss on any idea that has Scott Adams’ name on it but I’d challenge you to read his book first. This little bit is just one idea in a couple of hundred pages.

I read a butt-load of management books during the first half of my working life but stopped after reading The Dilbert Principle and seeing myself lampooned on every page. Never read another management or self-help book, until this one.

How to Fail at Almost Everything

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howtofailThe full title of Scott Adams’ book is: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Kind of the Story of My Life. (Too long to fit in the headline space above.) Easily one of the better “how to succeed” books I’ve read. And I’ve read a bunch of them. I won’t try to explain how Mr. Adams’ approach differs from the others. As always, the best I can do is share a few excerpts that spoke to me.

Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them.

In our messy, flawed lives, the nearest we can get to truth is consistency.

Sometimes the only real difference between crazy people and artists is that artists write down what they imagine seeing.

My optimism is like an old cat that likes to disappear for days, but I always expect it to return.

Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work start out bad and stay that way.

If no one is excited about your art/product/idea in the beginning, they never will be. Don’t be fooled by the opinions of friends and family. They’re all liars.

Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success.

Everything you learn becomes a shortcut for understanding something else.

I don’t read the news to find truth, as that would be a foolish waste of time. I read the news to broaden my exposure to new topics and patterns that make my brain more efficient in general and to enjoy myself, because learning interesting things increases my energy and makes me feel optimistic. Don’t think of news as information. Think of it as a source of energy.

Skills in which every adult should gain a working knowledge:

* Public speaking
* Psychology
* Business Writing
* Accounting
* Design (the basics)
* Conversation
* Overcoming shyness
* Second language
* Golf
* Proper grammar
* Persuasion
* Technology (hobby level)
* Proper voice technique

When politicians tell lies, they know the press will call them out. They also know it doesn’t matter. Politicians understand that reason will never have much of a role in voting decisions. A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments. That’s even true when the voter knows the lie is a lie.

The point of conversation is to make the other person feel good.

People who enjoy humor are simply more attractive than people who don’t. If you don’t have funny friends, find some.

Escape from my cell, free the other inmates, shoot the warden, and burn down the prison.

HAPPINESS

(Happiness is) a feeling you get when your body chemistry is producing pleasant sensations in your mind.

We’re all born with a limited range of happiness, and the circumstances of life can only jiggle us around within the range.

The single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want. […] A person with a flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person who has everything except a flexible schedule. Work toward having control of your schedule.

Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are.

Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. If you can’t even imagine an improved future, you won’t be happy no matter how well your life is going right now.

Dying at age eighty isn’t worse than dying at a hundred. If you meat diet is a bomb with a long enough fuse, it might kill you at just about the time you’d want it to.

Scott Adams: Does God have a personality?

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“What’s the difference between a typical religious view of God versus a skeptical view in which there is nothing to the universe but matter and the laws of physics?

Answer: personality

The religious view is that God has a personality of sorts, albeit one that is often unfathomable. And that means God has some sort of intentions, ambitions, goals, or whatever the God version of those impulses might be. If God had none of those impulses, he would just float in space doing nothing.

The problem with the idea that God has a human-like personality is that human personalities are nothing but weaknesses and defects that we romanticize. For example, I might be kind to others because I want them to be nice to me, or perhaps I simply feel guilty when I’m not nice. God wouldn’t have feelings of guilt and he wouldn’t need a strategy just to be loved. He would have everything he needed all the time. Logically, God couldn’t have a personality in the sense that humans do because our personalities are expressions of our defects and our DNA and our neediness.

For example, if you’re ambitious, that’s a romantic way of saying you’re afraid of failure, or you’re greedy, or you want to impress someone. God would not need any of that. Pick any human personality trait and it is either trivial or it is based on some sort of human limitation.

Even your sense of humor is based on a brain limitation. As a professional humorist, I make my living by writing thoughts that the normal human brain can’t process without a hiccup that triggers a laugh response. God wouldn’t have a sense of humor because he always knows how the joke ends, and no idea gives him a hiccup when processing a thought.

You can pick any personality trait and find the human defect that is behind it. Are you a highly social person? It probably means you have a fear of being alone, or you’re so needy that you have to have the approval of others to feel right. Would the creator of universe have social needs? It seems unlikely.

If you agree that God wouldn’t have a human-like personality and human-like needs and ambitions, you end up with a God who is indistinguishable from the sum of the laws of physics.

Language is part of the problem. Did God personally dictate every word in the holy books, or did the laws of physics guarantee that the particles in the universe would bump around until those books were written by someone? If you take away the human personality from God – because it makes no sense that he would have one – then God can still be the “author” of the holy books because he is the sum of all physical laws in the universe. The only difference between a religious and a skeptical interpretation is the choice of words.”

Your ability to imagine the future

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“Your ability to imagine the future is what drives your decisions today. If your imagined future looks like a big foggy nothing, you might as well enjoy today because tomorrow is unknowable. But if you can vividly imagine your future under different scenarios, you’ll make hard choices today that will, you hope, get you to the future you imagine and want.”

— Scott Adams

 

Scott Adams: Immortality

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“The poor among us, and people with certain religious beliefs, will remain 100% human for as long as the more advanced beings – the cyborgs and robots – allow it. Life will be somewhat awkward when part of civilization is immortal and part is not. But the one thing we know for sure is that the richest cyborgs and robots will eventually consolidate power. For starters, only the people who have wealth will be able to afford the jump to immortality. So the first robots with human minds and the first immortal cyborgs will be rich. Just imagine how much money Larry Ellison will someday have if he stubbornly refuses to die and dilute his fortune across less-capable heirs. Eventually most of the world will be owned by five multi-trillionaire robots that live on yachts the size of Connecticut. The immortal cyborgs, with the limitations of their organic parts, will be mere millionaires who can’t stop complaining about “the Kevlar ceiling.”

“It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that a digital representation of your mind, no matter how accurate, is still “you” in some sense. But I think that fear will go away as soon as we see the first robot that thinks and acts exactly like Uncle Bob did before he made the jump. If Uncle Bob the robot acts human enough, we’ll come to see him as the same entity that once inhabited an organic shell. When technology is sufficiently advanced, we’ll get past the magical thinking about spirits and souls and the specialness of having organic parts.”

Time Magazine

Scott Adams: Government transparency

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“Ninety percent of government corruption would disappear overnight if all government conversations were recorded.” Scott Adams imagines transparency on the workings of government:

“So let’s say government officials are required by law to hold work-related meeting in rooms that are wired to record everything happening. Every meeting would be encrypted and stored on government servers. One would still need a court order and a good reason to view any recordings, but I have to think it would keep most politicians from doing anything too outrageous. Even their phone calls would be recorded.”