So Scott Adams has been busy of late getting a reputation as a jackass, and he feels this is unfair, so naturally he published a long blogpost about how everybody is being unfair to him just because he created a sockpuppet account to go on Metafilter and give himself props:
As a general rule, you can’t trust anyone who has a conflict of interest. Conflict of interest is like a prison that locks in both the truth and the lies. One workaround for that problem is to change the messenger. That’s where an alias comes in handy. When you remove the appearance of conflict of interest, it allows others to listen to the evidence without judging.
Well, yes, not telling people who you are does remove them of the ability to respond to you, but I have to respect Adams’ ability to try and present lying to people as a positive. People will tend to get offended when you lie to them, and unfortunately just because Adams had reasons for lying to them doesn’t make it not rude to the Metafilterites who honestly engaged his sockpuppet.1 It also manages to conveniently overlook the fact that, even though Adams’ identity was not known by his debate partners, they still disagreed with his points, rendering his “well they would have disagreed with me just for knowing who I was” line of argument basically invalid.
This week for example, I’m the target of Men’s Rights advocates, Feminists, and one bearded taint who is leading an anti-creationist movement. What do those folks have in common? In each case they are using the same strategy. They take out of context something I’ve written, present it to the lazy Internet media who doesn’t check context, and use it to demonize me to gain publicity for their respective causes. That’s how advocates get free publicity. They find a celebrity to target.
Now this deserves honest examination.
Adams portrays himself as the undeserving target of multiple groups, characterizing their anger at him as being the spawn of misunderstanding – either accidental or purposefully created by a nasty third party. The problem is that, for someone who’s complaining about “lazy Internet media,” he’s being awfully lazy in characterizing these attacks. Men’s rights’ activists aren’t pissed at Scott Adams over a misunderstanding: they’re angry at him because he called them a bunch of pussies.2 Feminists aren’t pissed at Scott Adams over a misunderstanding: they’re angry at him because he compared equal work for equal pay to a child wanting candy for dinner and minimized the difference in amount of sacrifice necessary to maintain a job and family that exists between the genders, not to mention the fact that defining weakness by use of the word “pussies” isn’t something feminists traditionally like at all.3 And scibloggers… well, we’ll get to them.
Adams does this regularly: he says something that even an idiot would know is offensive (or at least gratuitously stupid), then gets hurt when people are offended and says “I was only joking” or “it was a thought exercise!” or something else that expresses the general sentiment that it’s everybody else’s fault for taking him seriously when he says something in a thoughtful-seeming tone, even when his actions after the fact make it perfectly obvious that he knows he’s been bad.
Fine, then. Here is a thought exercise. A man repeatedly says things that are obviously likely to provoke people into anger, then, when they get angry, claims that they shouldn’t be getting angry because he was not sincere. Is this A) his fault or B) everybody else’s fault?
The same thing is happening today with a Republican official who emailed some friends a humorous photo of President Obama’s face on a chimp and a punch line about his birth certificate. If your only context is what the Internet says about this story, you assume it’s a typical racist act by a Republican who is already guilty by association.
It’s funny that Scott Adams, in this rant, is complaining about the media being “lazy” by characterizing her as a racist. Why is it funny?
But if I add the context that Googling “George Bush monkey” gives you over 3 million hits, and most of them are jokes where President Bush’s face is transposed on a monkey, you see what’s really going on. Democrats and advocates of civil rights are using the media to further an agenda at the expense of a woman who was probably so non-racist that the photo in question didn’t set off her alarms as being a career-ending risk.
Well, no, it’s not funny because Scott Adams just compared the tired old joke about George Bush having a chimp-like face to the historical racial slur of black people being compared to monkeys, which is a painfully false equivalency because white people also generally don’t get upset when you call them the n-word. It’s because this woman “who was probably so non-racist” has previously defended other people for making racist jokes and statements. It’s a shame Adams didn’t bother to find this out before championing the aforementioned racist, who of course has it just as bad as Adams.4 5
If you wonder how the evolution rumor started, it’s partly because I made the following argument: The evidence for evolution, by its nature, seems fishy to the average non-scientist independent of the underlying truth. That’s a statement about human perceptions, not the objective reality of the theory.
The sciblogger community isn’t pissed at Scott Adams because they think he’s a creationist: they’re pissed at him because he raised a bunch of easily debunked arguments and treated them as reasonable evidence that creationists had a point, then backpedaled and claimed he was only engaging in a “thought exercise” once people pointed out that his arguments were stupid and that all he had done is prove that creationists survive by peddling lies over and over again.6 People don’t get offended by the process of examining why creationism gets a toehold. They get offended when Scott Adams does it really, really badly and in a way which gives unfair credence to creationist arguments.
Besides which, it’s not like Adams ever comes up with anything novel out of these thought experiments.
I will add some context though. Keep in mind that creating the hapless Dilbert character largely in my own image launched a twenty year career of daily self-deprecation. Likewise, about half of what I write outside of the comic is unambiguously self-deprecating. I’m a short, near-sighted, bald, over-the-hill guy with a bad sense of direction and an astonishing lack of competence at 99% of life’s challenges.
Yes, but Adams is also a millionaire many times over, so really, self-deprecation on his part isn’t charming. (Also, frankly it’s amazing that this self-deprecation all of a sudden disappears whenever somebody points out that Adams has said something really dumb, which makes it seem less like humility and more like a minstrel show.)
Let’s take a moment to call back the discussion of how the messenger changes the message. A large number of you are reading my explanation of the evolution rumor and dismissing it as my pathetic attempt at revisionist history. I’m back pedaling! I got caught being a moron and now I’m trying to save face!
See how this works? The messenger with a strong self-interest is automatically non-credible, and should be.
And this is why Adams had to lie about his identity on the internet!
There are some types of information that can only be communicated by an unbiased messenger. And the most unbiased messenger in the world is one that is imaginary, such as my invisible friend, PlannedChaos.
This is simply drivel. An imaginary messenger is by definition biased towards its creator, because that’s how creators roll. “PlannedChaos” wasn’t ever going to give anybody a reasonable, even-handed critique of Adams’ controversial writings, because he was Adams. Of course, possibly Adams will now claim that he was trying to point this out all along and we’re the stupid ones for falling into his trap, but for someone complaining about laziness on the part of his critics, this is the worst kind of argument if it’s intentional, because it’s baiting, pure and simple. We can either assume that Adams is sincere when he initially writes on any topic, or assume he’s full of crap when he writes anything: when you have someone who claims to be baiting people, those are your only two options for dealing with them efficiently.
On the scale of immoral behavior, where genocide is at the top, and wearing Spanx is near the bottom, posting comments under an alias to clear up harmful misconceptions is about one level worse than Spanx.
“HEY YOU GUYS THERE ARE MURDERERS AND RAPISTS AND STUFF OUT THERE SO WHY ARE YOU GETTING ALL MAD AT MEEEEEEEEEEE?”
- His complaint that Metafilter is a “cesspool” is just kind of nuts, because Metafilter is probably one of the most balanced and fair discussionblogs on the interwoobs, but whatever. Maybe Dogbert wrote it. [↩]
- Rightfully. [↩]
- And also there’s the fact that Adams soon deleted the post from his blog, demonstrating that he knew perfectly well that he had written something offensive, and then maintained afterwards that no, that blogpost he hastily deleted was totally cool you guys. [↩]
- Maybe she was engaging in a “thought exercise!” [↩]
- To say nothing of the fact that his argument is just boneheaded. Seriously: who in the hell doesn’t know that you don’t compare black people to monkeys? Like, ever? [↩]
- See also: Adams’ comments on atheism. [↩]
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Adams is running full tilt to that zone where you can’t enjoy the work without being painfully aware of the cretin that created it. Or, as it’s called, the Johnny Hart Zone.
Honestly, I don’t have a big problem with Scott Adams running under an alias. If he wants to hide behind a pseudonym to defend himself – who cares? I’m sure there’s one other person in this world who agrees with Adams. Would it matter if that one guy was the one dropping the comments rather than Adams himself?
An internet comment war is so steeped in anonymity anyway, who cares if its Adams defending himself or some third party doing it. The arguments stand or fall on their own regardless of who said them. PlannedChaos’s anonymity didn’t manipulate anyone. Who cares who is behind the keyboard?
The internet’s come a long way. Now we only follow celebrity trolls.
I honestly think he’s doing it because he’s an attention whore and doesn’t care what kind of attention he gets. Maybe his mommy didn’t give him enough candy when he was a child. It’d certainly explain his attitude towards women if nothing else.
I think Scott Adams is a genius and you’re all terrible people for hating on him. The man is only teasing us to get our mids to work on another level!
Copyright © 2011 Scott Adams
Adams would be doing a lot better off if he’d learn a couple of facts about life:
1) Not everyone is going to like everything you do
2) Sometimes its best not to respond directly to your critics
3) If you are the kind of person whose ego requires everyone to like everything you do AND requires you to respond directly to your critics, get off the Internet immediately. You will do something stupid and/or possibly drive yourself insane
Adams comes across as an unthinking idiot every time he does one of these things where he digs himself into a hole and then just keeps digging. He needs to either learn to just say “I was wrong, I’m sorry” and move on or stop responding at all. And if he can’t do that he should stop posting on the Internet because it’s eventually going to start hurting his sales.
Wow, now Adams is defending racists, too? Geez. Stop digging, man!
The other weird argument, that he keeps putting forth, is that his blog is written for a certain audience and can’t be properly understood by people outside that audience. Bizarre.
Daiyami-It’s not bizarre, it’s just circular. It’s the tired old “you’re too stupid to be worth arguing with. I can tell because you don’t already agree with me.” This is a pretty common argument on the internet, and a sure sign that the writer cares more about feeling smug than about answering their critics. It’s a lot like referencing Hitler in that once this happens, the only value the discussion has is the train wreck factor.
To be fair, that’s a common problem on Metafilter too, for certain issues.
…the tired old joke about George Bush having a chimp-like face…
That joke will never get tired!
No no, I particularly like how he is drawing an equivalency between sockpuppeting, and wearing Spanx, in terms of “immoral behavior”. Wearing Spanx is on a continuum with genocide.
I can only assume it is because Adams feels that anyone who wears any kind of undergarment that changes observers’ perceptions of the wearer’s body (including, but not limited to, all bras that change the way a woman’s breasts naturally sit, which is to say, all of them; and the aforementioned products that are supposed to smooth and in some cases mildly compress flab so as to minimize its appearance) is basically a LIE AND DECEPTION being perpetrated on the observer. Because… what? It makes Adams bitter to think that he can’t quite tell whether a woman he’s looking at is actually hot, or maybe is only hot because Spanx is helping her out a bit? That’s immoral???
Wow.
Yeah. That’s TOTALLY like sockpuppeting to fool people into thinking that someone who totally isn’t you is willing to defend your to your critics.
I probably don’t even need to point out that A) there’s a huge difference between George Bush monkey pictures you find on Google and a Republican official consciously and deliberately passing around insulting images, and B) putting “obama monkey” into Google will probably get you about twice as many hits.
Turns out “george bush monkey” gets about three times as many Google results as “obama monkey”. Not sure what to make of that. I’d compare image searches too, but I really don’t want my boss to walk behind me and see a bunch of pictures of monkey Obama.
As anyone who has ever (tried to) manage very intelligent people knows, it is very easy for a certain class of them to convince themselves that they are correct about all things, all the time, because any reasonably smart person can come up with a plausible-sounding argument. The argument, of course, be nonsense, but that’s not the point.
Generally, the only thing that keeps this kind of person from falling down the solipsism rabbit hole is some kind of critique that they cannot easily ignore. Scott Adams has been, pretty much, answerable only to himself for a couple of decades, so I doubt anything can penetrate the force field of “But I was able to string words together in a clever-sounding way that, if not analyzed, might appear to be an argument! I win!”
I really think that all of you liberal feminists are missing the point here. The fact is that ‘PlannedChaos’ was a work of genius meta-fiction, and one that demands inveterate questions as to the very nature of “debate” and “argument” themselves. Who else is the thinker, but the very thought that first was thought of by thinking thoughts, hmmm?
The simple factoid may escape those who are imprisoned in their mental deficiencies, or their femininity, but it’s as true as my natural instinct for aggressive sex. Men are the largest forgotten minority in society, and multi-millionaires are the most forgotten of all.
All of you are hounding poor Mr. Scott Adams, who I hear has a perfectly satisfactory penis size, and should be ashamed of your fear to see the radical nature of his words.
I don’t really see a lot of Dilbert as “self-deprecating” as he describes it. In my eyes the whole thing seethes with “all the people above me at work and all the women I try to date are idiots who can’t see things my way- THE RIGHT WAY -and I’m perfectly fine here by myself, marinating in my smug superiority.”
He’s that annoying kind of Mary Sue character who is not just right about everything but a long-suffering martyr for it. Which I don’t see as incompatible with the kind of person who wrote the dumb crap he’s getting called out for.
It’s actually sad to read some of the early Dilbert collections and watch the even halfway interesting characters and concepts get phased out in favor of Dilbert, the Neverending Opiate of the Office Drone™.
Damn, didn’t realize Scott Adams was such a dick. Although I started to wonder when he wrote about his business ventures in college.
I think it’s hilarious that to Adams it’s the *appearance* of conflict of interest that’s importance, rather than the conflict of interest itself. Like creating a sockpuppet actually creates a new, independently thinking person.
Benman: I think with the Google searches the difference can be entirely explained by George Bush’s much longer public history (about 8 years longer).
[…] a denial that amounts to “I’m a genius who is always taken out of context”. (See full evisceration by the Mighty God King for much more, including Adams on how feminists are just like children […]
I really don’t take issue with what he did. I just think it is incredibly stupid how he is justifying it.
If he had just said “hey, I like arguing with people without them knowing who I am” then who on the internet could blame him?
I’m pretty sure that the last President we had who wasn’t compared to a monkey at some point was George Washington.
“Turns out “george bush monkey” gets about three times as many Google results as “obama monkey”.”
Shorten “george bush” to “bush” and the proportions change from 3:1 to 1:2. Fascinating indeed.
All articles on Scott Adams must include his compulsion to mention his “certified” (?) geniusness.
Elimination bracket!
Quarterfinal 1:
Scott Adams v. Jaime Lassiter
Quarterfinal 2:
George W. Bush monkey v. Darkseid
Quarterfinal 3:
Charles Darwin v. Johnny Hart
Quarterfinal 4:
River Tam v. River Song
FIGHT!
My favorite part of the whole Davenport story is how she keeps saying horribly racist things to explain how non-racist she is. “But I have black friends!” “I like to be Christian to everyone, regardless of their race.”
Where are this woman’s grandchildren? is what I want to know. Can’t they be like, “Christ, Nana, shut the frick up already.”
Creating “sockpuppets” is a perfectly valid use of internet anonymity for exactly the reason Adams said – when people know your identity, they’re very very likely to ignore whatever point you may or may not have and judge the messenger rather than the message. A false identity makes it easier to change people’s opinions, and in an important reversal it also makes it easier for one to change his own opinion – it makes the shame of having to admit error sting that much less.
I’ve been in the habit of creating multiple online identities, having them argue against each other about issues I don’t have a strong opinion of my own on, and attach myself mentally to whichever side seems to be winning. This is extremely useful, a modern form of Socratean dialogue of sorts, and also something that would get you locked up if you tried to do it in real life.
Sadly, anonymity by itself can’t solve all debate related problems – people still can, and will, be quick to judge the tone of the message rather than, again, the message itself. Even when it comes from a person whose entire career is based on mocking people.
The message itself can be stupid of course, like disbelieving evolution. But it should be allowed to stand by its own merits, rather than be dismissed because you don’t like the guy who said it, or the way he said it.
I disagree with everything the above guy said.
Harry Potter SUCKS!
Not as much as Game of Thrones! That totally BLOWS!
acabaca suggests s/he has discovered some new form of techno-Socratic investigation. Anyone who has played chess against themselves knows this to be false, a chimera. Fake moves orchestrated by one agent don’t really get to the bottom of anything. (Also, just get a moleskin notebook or something, don’t get us involved.)
Further, s/he glosses over any potential downside to sockpuppetry. I can imagine many, but the salient one to this particular case is that the existence of the sockpuppet is being used to give the impression of the approval of more participants, not to enhance investigation into ideas.
Google, say, Mary Rosh.
Thank you Chris. This is an excellent response, not just to Adams, but to a lot of moronic internet sophistry I see out there. The bit about the Bush chimp vs. Obama chimp is particularly dead on. There’s nothing more frustrating than people who pretend not to see a difference, and act like it’s “unfair” that Bush can be compared to a chimp but Obama can’t. IF YOU WANT TO FIND A JUVENILE WAY TO INSULT OBAMA, FIND A MORE CREATIVE WAY TO DO SO. One that isn’t racist.
I’ll be linking to this post a lot.
this would all be much more convincing* if Adams’ objective arbiter of dispassionate Socratic truth hadn’t been going around repeatedly telling people that Scott Addams is a Certified Genius.
*not really
I like to think of people like Scott Adams as arguments for a 100% top marginal tax rate.
Because too much money just drives some people fucking crazy.
And also there’s the fact that Adams soon deleted the post from his blog, demonstrating that he knew perfectly well that he had written something offensive, and then maintained afterwards that no, that blogpost he hastily deleted was totally cool you guys.
There needs to be an official internet rule that anybody who deletes or alters* a post has lost the argument.
*I don’t mean editing a post to add new information or to clarify an argument, but somebody who is trying to delete information in a post to hide that they ever said it.
You know what would be awesomely ironic? If there was a Dilbert strip about the evil of sock-puppetry…
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-02-01/
Nevermind then
So I followed the link to Dilbert.com, and got a pop-up. Not for anything that was humorously appropriate — it involved cartoon puppy dogs, or something — but it just tips the “is The Man Behind Dilbert a jerk or not?” balance that much farther in the “jerk” direction.
I would like to mention, on another point, that “I have Black friends!” isn’t a horribly racist thing to say. It’s something that people who think that racism begins and ends with a visceral hatred of all other races say. And, much like saying “I’m against littering,” when asked about their support for environmental issues, it’s pretty depressing coming from a politician of any kind.
It’s funny how when Einstein performed a thought experiment, the breadth of human knowledge was expanded and we advanced as a species. When Scott Adams does some thought experimentin’, it’s a just a trollboss on the internet howling away.
AND Einstein got more ass than a toilet seat.
Look what Scott Adams did to Norman Solomon, author of “The Trouble with Dilbert”:
He had Dogbert insult a fictional version of Norman Solomon because Solomon criticized him for supporting some downsizing and making lots of money.
“Turns out “george bush monkey” gets about three times as many Google results as “obama monkey”.”
Well it fucking well should: Bush looked a bit like a monkey and his admin was prone to really impulsive and short sighted actions.
Obama on the other hand doesn’t look like a chimp except in the very racist sense of “looking like a chimp” that says that all black people are inherently chimp like, even though non-albino chimps are far far darker skinned than black human beings are. Plus he’s going to go down in history as one of the better public speakers as far as presidents are concerned and has this habit of 1, going through his close political advisers at a rate of knots, and 2, of turning up to meetings of other politicians and getting them to all shut up and for the time they’re hanging around at the meeting, get them to all sort of agree to what he wants them to do through a combination of fear and pure fast talking. And that’s before we even get into how 3, his primary effect upon american politics has been to throw it into absolute nation-wide chaos with a bunch of mad dadaist clowns that seem to be leading his political enemies into largely self destructing until Obama gets a comfortable second term electoral win.
So you’d think the Obama/Joker mashup image would be far far more popular among his detractor; If you’re going to demonise him, he’s the joker, not a chimp (assuming that the “hope” imagery wasn’t so distinctive that your visual political mockery couldn’t actually just involve Obama himself).
I’d like to request “I should write Dilbert.”
No-one should write Dilbert.
I had a discussion with a feminist friend about the pussy / weakness link, and did some research, and was surprised to learn that ‘pussy’ as slang for a weak, ineffectual person actually seems to have a totally different etymology than ‘pussy’ as slang for female genitalia.
Bush looked a bit like a monkey
A bit?!? Dude looked like a chimp. Period. There was a website waaaayyyy back, I think before the 2000 election, called Bush or Chimp? It was uncanny how much that man’s facial expressions look like a that of a chimpanzee.
@highlyverbal: “Fake moves orchestrated by one agent don’t really get to the bottom of anything. (Also, just get a moleskin notebook or something, don’t get us involved.)”
But it’s precisely the involvement of others which makes it work. My own comments are fabricated or half-hearted, but the responses to them will be genuine and earnest. It’s different from solitaire chess in that there are countless players, and the only purpose of my own comments is to pit them against each other and see who wins. It’s basically trolling, except the purpose is to glean something useful out of the exchange (trolling is another extremely useful thing with a bad rap BTW, also insulting people is inherently a good thing and should happen more often, but that’s best left for a separate argument).
“the existence of the sockpuppet is being used to give the impression of the approval of more participants, not to enhance investigation into ideas.”
Giving the impression of the approval of more participants is precisely something that is needed to enhance investigation into ideas, if said ideas are so unpopular that most people will dismiss them off hand without bothering to even consider the evidence.
In an ideal world people would pay no mind to how many of their peers agree or disagree with an idea while judging its worth, they would only consider the idea itself. But we clearly don’t live in one. We live in a world where sometimes the only way to make people even consider the facts is to first tell them lies.
One of the sad truths of popular culture is that cartoonists go insane if they work at it for decades. By being alone with their work for so long and constantly expressing small, bite-sized thoughts without other people to discuss those issues with, they get very, very weird. The heavy isolation required by the work takes a toll.
This is why Jim Davis and his farming out of “Garfield” to a huge team of assistants was genius.
Trolling is indeed educational.
Like for example, from acabaca’s trolling, I learned that acabaca is a sociopath.
acabaca said: “I’ve been in the habit of creating multiple online identities, having them argue against each other about issues I don’t have a strong opinion of my own on, and attach myself mentally to whichever side seems to be winning. This is extremely useful, a modern form of Socratean dialogue of sorts, and also something that would get you locked up if you tried to do it in real life.”
Wow. And you’re proud of this.
Hey, what’s groupthink applied to one person only?
babadaba said: “I disagree with everything the above guy said.”
Ah shit.
[…] think Scott Adams would know better than the engage in sock puppetry, but you’d be wrong. And “dilhole” is a great […]
Something lots of people are missing is that different web communities have different standards regarding identity. On 4chan, anonymity is core, for example. Facebook requires real-world identity. Other sites fall somewhere in-between. Metafilter does not require real-world identities, but does expect users to keep to a single site identity (with some small exceptions) and not to misrepresent themselves for real-world gain.