Oh, this again. We’re all equal, right?
Wrong. SOME people can get over it.
And to add to that, you can’t use emotion to argue with numbers. Go ahead, yell at basic addition, see if it cares. Further, you can’t use reason or logic to address emotional issues. See if you can logic someone into changing their favorite color. Good luck.
And he’s right - poking men’s rights advocates (and feminists) with a stick until they’re frothy is fun 
“Simple systems are probably the best way to achieve success.”
Oh, are they? By what definition of “success”?
Dilbert is mildly amusing and I don’t mind that he makes money from that, but something like Calvin & Hobbes, Peanuts or Carl Barks’ Duck stories go beyond that and have lasting values. Dilbert, I’m sure, will like Garfield slide into obscurity.
Though it pains me greatly, Garfield is far from obscurity. Only irrelevance.
Both this and the misogyny incident were excused by the fact that outsiders don’t understand the context and are not as intelligent as readers of the Dilbert blog:
As emotion increases, reading comprehension decreases. This would be true of anyone, but regular readers of the Dilbert blog are pretty far along the bell curve toward rational thought, and relatively immune to emotional distortion.
It does remind you of how Dilbert sees the world: full of morons and a handful of people like him.
I don’t think everybody is either an optimizer OR a simplifier. As the article points out, probably most people go back and forth between the two approaches as the situation calls for it. I personally think I’ve found a pretty good balance. If I had to say which Dilbert character I most identify with, I’d say that I feel like the mutant offspring of Alice and Wally: I’m a lazy overachiever. I want the best possible results with the least possible effort.
I’d say it depends a lot on the task you’re doing. In certain cases, a fast, ‘good enough’ solution is the best one, especially if the advantages of spending longer at the problem aren’t that great. On the other hand, you’ll often miss the elegant solution that way and using that strategy too much will make you less likely to find the most optimal solution in the first place. John Cleese’s comments on creativity are useful here:
Why do you still need time?
Well, let me tell you a story. I was always intrigued that one of my Monty Python colleagues who seemed to be (to me) more talented than I was {but} did never produce scripts as original as mine. And I watched for some time and then I began to see why. If he was faced with a problem, and fairly soon saw a solution, he was inclined to take it. Even though (I think) he knew the solution was not very original.
Whereas if I was in the same situation, although I was sorely tempted to take the easy way out, and finish by 5 o’clock, I just couldn’t. I’d sit there with the problem for another hour-and-a-quarter, and by sticking at it would, in the end, almost always come up with something more original.
It was that simple.
My work was more creative than his simply because I was prepared to stick with the problem longer.
I have thought about this before in terms of standardization vs specialization. With the observation that any layer of management usually tries to standardize all the layers below it while trying to convince the layers above it that it is uniquely specialized…
Speaking as a software developer who was just thinking about this yesterday:
“Simple” depends on your point of view, and there are different kinds of “optimal”. To optimize something is to make it simpler in some sense, though it may not appear to be simpler in another sense.
Example: a function that computes something. It’s called very frequently with the same arguments. One way to optimize it is to cache the answers, ensuring the computer runs less code (more simple) – and to do this, you write more code (less simple).
Another example: manual transmission vs. automatic transmission. Manual is simpler from an engineering standpoint, and can definitely be more optimal in terms of either fuel economy or racing. Automatic is simpler from a driver’s standpoint. My car’s manual transmission is non-optimal for long trips since my wife can’t take over driving for a while.
Can you not lump feminist in with MRAs please. Thanks.
Well, he certainly didn’t optimize comics. (rim shot)
Thanks for the link. I read the post and his explanation of it and, yeah, he’s a real idiot.
The post was very misogynist and he doesn’t seem to understand that. And this post, about how he simplifies things rather than optimizing them, really shows that he meant just what he said.
Men, apparently, care only about a small number of things and ignore everything else - like, for example, woman making 80% of what men do for the same work. Women, on the other hand, pay attention to all kinds of things that men just don’t care about - like, I don’t know, women making 80% of what men do for the same work. Those crazy women! They must be optimizers while men - at least his kind of men - are simplifiers, when will they learn?
But really, lumping women together with children may have been done for dramatic effect rather than because of any deep thought on his part. Instead, here is what tells us how he really feels:
“But part of being male is the automatic feeling of team.”
The idea that men are all on team ‘man’ is what allows a lot of men to go on doing nasty things to women. When a white man uses a racial slur in a job interview with another white man, he is showing that he thinks all white people are racist. When Rob Ford (sorry, top of the mind example) talks about how it’s okay that he smoked crack because he was in one of his drunker stupors, he is saying that everybody goes into drunken stupors on a somewhat regular basis. When Scott Adams says he likes his team, he is saying that he knows men feel the same way he does - though with a healthy does of No-True-Scotsman, I’m sure. He is saying that women do not feel the same way he does, and he is saying there is no point in trying to bridge the gap. That is two things: 1) a foundation on which to build misogynist rationalizations; and 2) stupidly false.
Of course, as Adams says, “People don’t change opinions just because new information comes in. They interpret the new information as confirmation of their existing opinion.”
Most of us, armed with that knowledge, would start trying to see how we ignore information that goes against us and favour that which agrees with us. We would try to do better. Not Mr. Adams, it would appear. Better to simply accept that this is the human condition and treat everyone with a contempt - somehow missing how contemptible that makes him.
If an idiot and a genius disagree, the idiot generally thinks the genius is wrong. He also has lots of idiot reasons to back his idiot belief. That’s how the idiot mind is wired. It’s fair to say you disagree with Adams. But you can’t rule out the hypothesis that you’re too dumb to understand what he’s saying.
And he’s a certified genius. Just sayin’.
Never gets old…
I can’t believe I’m the first to say it, but:
Christ, what an asshole.
So am I. And let me tell you something about being a genius - it doesn’t mean you are right. Geniuses have the intellectual capacity needed to rationalize pretty much any position.
As to your point that people who disagree with Adams may be wrong, and may simply not understand him: it has nothing to do with him being a genius. It is valuable to actually consider opposing views from anyone, regardless of what an IQ test shows. And maybe Mr. Adams has some very good point to make that he isn’t able to articulate here. But by suggesting that his critics might be misunderstanding his rather clear writing are you saying there is some kind of DaVinci-Code-Cipher embedded in it?
Of course you can, because idiot or genius is a false split that doesn’t enter into things. People have ways of evaluating arguments independently of the source. Real-world evidence, logical reasoning, and so on can be understood by nearly everyone, even if it may take some longer to work through them. If you can’t put them together to substantiate your beliefs, you haven’t given good reasons, whether you are otherwise smart or not.
What I notice is that there are two general ways of getting things wrong. There are elementary mistakes, like believing sources that aren’t trustworthy or making simple mistakes in your reasoning. I think these are a little less common among educated or clever people, because they’re often easy to correct; you simply provide evidence for what went wrong.
And then there are committed mistakes, where someone has managed to prop up an erroneous position through confirmation bias and rationalization. These are much harder to correct, because people can often invent ways to dismiss the correction. And that invention is something that clever people are good at, so they are particularly prone unless they are extra careful not to fall into this trap.
Suffice to say, somebody who thinks that being a genius means they won’t make mistakes and know more than everyone else is not taking that care. They are going to be wrong way more often than someone less intelligent but more willing to consider what other people have figured out.
Not that I think you were planning to listen - welcome to the BBS, by the way - but I thought I might add to the point @anon50609448 was making anyway.
Bullshit. Emotion is a form of reason. It may not always lead to the best conclusions, but emotions do often have reasons. Emotion is also a cause of logical thinking. They are inextricably linked.
I do have to agree with one thing: Scott Adams is definitely a simplifier.
I’ve been reading The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski and it’s provided me with much food for thought. If you can get over his inferiority complex vis-a-vis science being distinct from engineering* what you come away with isn’t a heady respect for delightful simplicity, but for the agonizing foresight of good engineers. It posits that good engineering is not simply defined as generating a system that “Does what you tell it to, when you do it right.” but as “Does what you want it to. Period.” The virtues of simplicity notwithstanding, systems do not exist in a vacuum, they must interact with quirky, complicated, and sometimes incredibly stupid humans.
*A valid point, which he belabors to death.
Dilbert is using “simple” as a stand-in for “quick and dirty,” but as anyone who has designed systems knows, simple is usually the most difficult and time-consuming thing to pull off.
Dilbert you say…
Actually, I think he uses “simple” to mean “whatever I think is the best way in most cases.”
