Scott Adams' BlogReaction to Bad News
When something unexpected and bad happens to you, what is your initial reaction?
I hate to admit this, but my first reaction is usually excitement.
0 CommentsDo Open Networks Boost Your Odds of Success?
Every time I hear of a study suggesting that doing (whatever) is important for success, I ask myself if the authors interpreted the correlations correctly.
And I rarely think they did.
0 CommentsAdams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters - update
Regular readers know about my law of slow-moving disasters. The idea is that society always avoids global disasters that are slow-moving because we rise to the challenge even when it seems impossible.
Peak oil didn’t happen
Y2K was a big nothing
Malthus was wrong that we would run out of food
0 CommentsFrom Magic to Science (sort of)
When I was young and trying to figure out the world, nearly every piece of popular “advice” people offered was complete bullshit. Let’s look at a few.
0 CommentsWhat is More Dangerous?
[Update: Link added]
Is it more dangerous for a humorist to insult Mohammed or to discuss Bill Cosby?
I suppose it depends whether you are in France or the United States.
See this [NSFW] Playboy interview of Patton Oswalt. Search for “context” or “Salon” to get to the good part. He has the same problem I have with the bottom-feeding part of the media. I don’t think people realize how big a deal this is.
0 CommentsNote to Designers of Gmail
In Gmail, this icon means “return” to prior page.
A few inches away, on the same page, this icon means “reply.”
I’m curious if anyone on the Gmail design team noticed that these two icons are not what I like to call “different.”
I wonder if the team knows I have clicked the wrong one of those two icons approximately 7,285,942 times. And that’s just this week.
Is it just me?
0 CommentsAlone Together Technology
There’s no succinct way to ask this …
Could you network together via wireless technology a bunch of over-ear headphones with integrated microphones so that when one person talks the sound is captured by all microphones in the room and used to create nearly-perfect sound-cancellation in the other networked headphones?
0 CommentsHow Do You Know When Something is Working?
Is the war on terror – or whatever we call it lately – working?
I think the answer depends on whether you think in terms of goals or systems. If the goal is to stop all future terror attacks on the homeland, we can never know if that is working because we don’t know whether there will be an attack tomorrow. We can feel good about what has happened so far, but the future is a far bigger slice of time than the recent past and we know nothing about how the future will unfold.
But if you see the war on terror as a system, as opposed to a goal, you ask yourself different questions.
0 CommentsMoney is the New Morality
The traditional view of money-vs.-morality is that you want to start with a moral foundation and then you can pursue making money in a way that makes the world better. You treat your employees and customers well, act honestly, and perhaps even donate your wealth to those in need.
0 CommentsWhen Ideas Win
I love watching a good idea kill a bad idea.
It doesn’t happen often. The more typical situation is that people have opinions, those opinions are resistant to data, and everything stays the same until you die.
But sometimes a new idea is just so obviously better than competing ideas that once it is released into the wild of the Internet it becomes like a virus that hunts and destroys the weaker ones.
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