The danger is those three are usually done in social situations where others can "pull you back" - which is why online gambling and drinking/drugs alone can get so bad so fast.

Social media has nobody to pull you back, you just get sucked in to the whirlpool.

Absolutely. Social media is designed to elicit a constant stream of dopamine hits, prey on our need for social validation, keep the amygdala engaged, stoke conflict, and bolster whatever beliefs we carry (no matter how deranged). It’s the ultimate distortion machine and is wildly dangerous, particularly for individuals who struggle to keep it at arm’s distance and fail to equip mental PPE prior to usage.

Just watching it now (and what a house it is). There's a TV in almost every room, and Fox News is on each of them. He says: "Yes, it is the same station on every television, because that's how the system is designed. It's designed so it'll play the same station all over the house. It happens to be Fox News, but I do flip around. It's not nailed on Fox News, in case you're wondering."

I have no television in any room. Having a tv in nearly every room sounds like a nightmare. Doubly so if playing Fox News.

Don't forget his claim that master hypnotists are using camgirls to give him super-orgasms to steal his money. He was a nutter in more ways than just his politics.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201108112121/https://www.scott...

> In other news, for several years I have been tracking a Master Wizard that I believe lives in Southern California. It seems he has trained a small army of attractive women in his method. The women create a specialized style of porn video clips that literally hypnotize the viewer to magnify the orgasm experience beyond anything you probably imagine is possible. Hypnosis has a super-strong impact on about 20% of people. And a lesser-but-strong impact on most of the rest.

> Once a customer is hooked, the girls use powerful (and real) hypnosis tools to connect the viewer’s enjoyable experience (a super-orgasm, or several) to the viewer’s act of giving them money, either directly or by buying more clips. Eventually the regular viewers are reprogrammed to get their sexual thrill by the act of donating money to the girls in the videos. There are lots of variations tied to each type of sexual kink, but that’s the general idea.

> My best guess is that 10% of the traffic that flows through their business model literally cannot leave until they have no money left. The Master Wizard is that good. The women are well-coached in his methods.

This was recorded before he publicly came out as racist[1] and anti-vaccine[2]: https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/scott-adams-...

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/02/23/dilberts-scott-adams-...

[2] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/jan/26/scott-adam...

Well on the health side, he might not quite be Steve Jobs level, but he spent months taking complete nonsense "treatments" where his medical condition (predictably) worsened dramatically. That part's certainly a cautionary tale.

I don't recall where (Vic Berger?), but someone made a compilation of "regret" clips from Trump influencers (Alex Jones and others, and Scott Adams). This was in the circa January 6 days, where humiliation reigned, and they all felt betrayed because "RINOs" dominated Trump's term, "the deep state" was still standing, and he accomplished nothing of note. It's been memory-holed since then but that was the dominant mood back then (they blamed his mediocrity on "bad staffing", which later led to Project 2025).

Well Scott Adams was in there, venting (in a video) that his life had basically been ruined by his support for Trump, that he'd lost most of his friends and wealth due to it, and that he felt betrayed and felt like a moron for trusting him since it wasn't even worth it. Nothing had changed and the country wasn't "saved".

When I was young I didn't understand meaning of the words "do not bear false witness" and it was explained to me as "do not lie". As I've gotten older and now understand the words better, the much broader category of "do not bear false witness" seems like the better precept. Spreading false witness, even if sincere, has great harm.

Does it matter?

How can you tell anyway?

Scott Adams’s boss at Pacbell in 1985 was (still) an SVP (and my boss) at AT&T in 2012.

There was always a buzz and a whisper whenever someone was frustrated: “SHE’s the boss who inspired Dilbert.”

Internally there was a saying that ATT stands for “Ask The Tentacles.”

I haven’t really read the “funnies” since I was a kid but the few Dilbert comics I ever did read NAILED her org.

I will never forget being paged 1,000 times a night - not even kidding — or having my boss demand I “check sendmail” every time anything and I mean anything went down. Voice? Data? CALEA tunnels? IPTV? Fax? No, I can’t go immediately investigate the actual issue, I have to go into some crusty Solaris boxes the company forgot about 11 years ago and humor some dinosaur with three mansions who probably also directly inspired the Peter Principle in 1969 and are still working there.

Dilbert was BARELY satire.

And that’s enough out of me.

I do not know about anybody else, but I do not read comics, watch movies, listen to music, or read books [for pleasure] in order to learn a lesson, learn how to "improve corporate culture", or anything else. Entertainment is, for me, 100% escapist. I indulge in entertainment as a brief escape from reality. If Dilbert had been preachy, which A LOT of comics seem to be these days, I would not have enjoyed it.

[flagged]

Sadly I suspect many people aren’t really driven by ideology as much as they wave around ideology when they think it gets them something they want.

Outside that… ideology is out the window.

It's a long list. Sadly, Dawkins is also on there. And I'd argue Elon fits the bill, too.

This progressive movement is absolutely totalitarian.

As long as you adhere to all mainstream tenets, you're good and virtuous, like pre-2018 JK Rowling. Gay Dumbledore, yay!

But if the mainstream tenets change, and some previously loyal followers disagree with some of them, they should be ostracised, cancelled and vilified, like post-2019 JK Rowling.

The funny thing is that this is what real fascists and communists did to a T, yet, progressive people view themselves as anti-fascists.

[dead]

There's "becoming more conservative," and then there's what happened to Scott Adams.

When my everyday life is no longer impacted by politics, I'll be able to put it aside for a day, because I'll be able to ignore the impact politics has on me for that day.

But that's not the world we live in. It won't ever be the world we live in.

Adams was the one who refused to put his politics aside, this thread is simply a reflection of that.

Not having a dog in this fight, what it really looks like to me is the “haters” started as people who respectfully acknowledged his greatness while also recognizing that there were aspects of him they didn’t like. The real hatred came out when people couldn’t handle this due to sharing a political identity with him.

Perhaps people can decide by themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Political_views

No, his comments about race and supporting political groups that advertise oppression and hate have not and will not be simply categorized as a political view. There are universal truths and morals that do not change and simply saying we have different views does not excuse violating those.

Like trying to treat his cancer with ivermectin?

Doesn't seem to have worked.

Scott did have a lot of really thoughtful articles, but its also true he become much less rational and much more identity based on his reasoning over the last 3-5 years.

Scott Adams said that Republicans would be hunted down and that there would be a good chance they would all be dead if Biden was elected and that the police would do nothing to stop it.

Dilbert was brilliant. Adams' political discourse after that became his primary schtick was quite frequently insane.

Advocating for physical oppression of broad groups and races is not a political view much as you want to normalize it. It’s the same reason all the right’s effort to lionize Charlie Kirk just won’t take, much to their chagrin.

> In a 2006 blog post, Adams asked if official figures of the number of deaths in the Holocaust were based on methodologically sound research. In 2023, Adams suggested the 2017 Unite the Right rally was "an American intel op against Trump."

> After a 2022 mass shooting, Adams opined that society leaves parents of troubled teenage boys with only two options: to either watch people die or murder their own son

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams

Maybe “insanity” is strong but I do not think anyone who holds beliefs like those is thinking straight. Toying with Holocaust denial is not simply “having different opinions to you”.

What did he mean when he said this well reasoned opinion?

“When a young male (let’s say 14 to 19) is a danger to himself and others, society gives the supporting family two options: 1. Watch people die. 2. Kill your own son. Those are your only options. I chose #1 and watched my stepson die. I was relieved he took no one else with him.”

“If you think there is a third choice, in which your wisdom and tough love, along with government services, ‘fixes’ that broken young man, you are living in a delusion. There are no other options. You have to either murder your own son or watch him die and maybe kill others.”

That’s surely from the calm rational mind of someone not filled with resentment and hate right?

This is not about disliking “different opinions” or refusing to hear opposing views. It is about a documented pattern of statements in which Adams moved from commentary into explicit endorsement of collective punishment, racialized generalizations, and norm breaking prescriptions that reject basic liberal principles.

Being “aware of both sides” means engaging evidence and counterarguments in good faith. Repeatedly dismissing data and framing entire groups as inherently hostile is not that. Calling this out is not echo chamber behavior, it is a substantive judgment based on what was actually said, not on ideological disagreement.

> Scott had well reasoned opinions and was consistently aware of both sides of issues and news.

[citation needed]

Here are my own citations:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams

"In a 2006 blog post (which has since been deleted), Adams flirted with Holocaust denialism, questioning whether estimates of the number of people killed during the Holocaust are reliable [...] If he actually wanted to know where the figures come from, he could have looked on Wikipedia or used his Internet skills to Google it or even asked an expert as he once recommended"

"Just 3 hours after the 2019 Gilroy Garlic festival mass shooting, Adams attempted to profit off of it by trying to sign up witnesses for a cryptocurrency-based app that he co-founded called Whenhub.[58][59][60]"

"After being yanked from newspapers due to racism, Adams moved his operations to a subscription service on Locals. While Adams continued to create a "spicier" version of Dilbert "reborn" on that site, Adams' focus shifted towards "political content". His Locals subscription included several livestreams with "lots of politics" as well as a comic called Robots Reading News, with a little bit of alleged self-help media content as well.[73] His Twitter feed also increasingly focused on angry MAGA politics.[74]"

"Adams continued to believe Donald Trump's Big Lie and maintained that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was rigged. In March 2024, when Adams falsely suggested that US "election systems are not fully auditable and lots of stuff goes 'missing' the day after the election", the Republican Recorder of Maricopa County Stephen Richer explained that US elections actually were fully auditable, and gave some information on the actual process officials use for auditing elections.[82]"

Wow, what a scathing retort. I hope the original poster realizes he was staring into the abyss for so long it started staring back into him.

His body isn’t even cold yet and the character assassinations are already pouring in. The „empathy havers“, allegedly.

The entire purpose of your brand-new account seems to be complaining about HN and comparing it to Reddit. Is this how you are going to raise the level of discourse here?

Seems like he aligned pretty perfectly with the Fox News/Newsmax echo chamber.

> His politics were not insane just because you disagreed with him.

Literally nobody is claiming that his politics were insane because they disagreed with him.

> edit: downvoted and flagged for saying we shouldn't hurl ad-hominem attacks

Absolutely not what "ad hominem" means.

> It wasn't too long ago criticizing someone on their obituary was considered classless.

It's very easy to avoid getting criticized in your obituary, don't be an asshole.

If you devote your life to being an asshole, the civilized response gloves will come off and maybe more people should learn this lesson.

Completely agree. If you're motivated enough about a topic to post about it online, you're probably emotional about it and unable to see it in a clear-headed manner.

The people I know who have the most reasonable political opinions never post about it online. The people who have developed unhealthy and biased obsessions are the ones who post constantly.

Unwillingness to engage with others breeds extremism. There are many who are silenced if they do not fit into the social dogma. Those people eventually lose it if they can't find a productive outlet.

>He also just passed away, show some respect.

It takes more than dying to earn respect.

The reaction to Adams death is simply a reflection of how he lived his life.

There’s this curious demand (often though not exclusively from right leaning folks) for freedom of speech and freedom from consequences of that speech. It doesn’t work that way.

You have the freedom to say reactionary things that upset people as much as you want. But if you do, then you die, people are going to say “he was a person who said reactionary things that upset people”.

I've never entirely understood "don't speak ill of the dead"; it seems like a vastly-scoped rule with far too many exceptions (and that can prevent learning any lessons from the life of the deceased). Forgive the Godwin's law, but: did that rule apply to Hitler? If not, then there's a line somewhere where it stops being a good rule (if it ever was one to begin with) – and I'd feel confident saying that there's no real consensus about where that "cutover" occurs.

To me, comments like "the entire arc of Scott Adams is a cautionary tale" rings less of vitriol and more of a kind of mourning for who the man became, and the loss of his life (and thus the loss of any chance to grow beyond who he became).

That rings empathetic and sorrowful to me, which seems pretty decent in my book.

Why shouldn’t you speak ill of the dead?

You can’t have a middle ground when your tenets offer up personal harm to a significant portion of the population.

Its really not enough to say that Adams simply had different views. He was incredibly hyperbolic, attention seeking, and intentionally inflammatory.

He treated his cancer with the anti-threadworm medication Ivermectin.