Scott Adams' Blog

Is Smiling Unethical?

Posted August 22nd, 2013 @ 8:32am in #General Nonsense

I smile for at least two reasons:

1.       I am happy.

2.       I want to influence someone.

If you smile because you’re happy, that seems honest enough. But what about smiling when you’re not feeling it on the inside, such as during a job interview, or while trying to make a good impression on a potential love interest? Is it ethical to fake-smile?

Research backs common sense on this topic: Smiling influences how people feel about you, and that in turn influences how they act. So if you smile for strategic reasons, you’re not a genial personality so much as you are a manipulative bastard.

On the other hand, don’t we all have an implied obligation to make the world a better and happier place? If a fake smile causes a real smile in others, and that initiates their happiness subroutine as science says it will, aren’t you - the fake smiler - sort of a living saint and a spreader of joy? Or are you still a manipulative bastard?

I was thinking of this recently because an employee at my local UPS store told me I have a “great smile.” I thanked her for the compliment, even though my dentist deserves most of the credit. But I felt a little guilty about it because she was reacting to my professional smile as opposed to my happy smile. And by that I mean that I make a special effort to smile during business transactions because it makes my experience and that of others a little bit nicer. And it’s free, so why not?

Smiles are like compliments in the sense that they cost you nothing while having a real impact on the happiness of others. So I try to dole out both smiles and compliments whenever I get the chance. But I have a tiny reservation about the honesty of it all. I never give out false compliments, so that part is honest. And I generally don’t smile at people unless I think they deserve it. But there’s no doubt that it is intended for effect, and therefore manipulative by definition.

Do you ever smile with the intention of manipulating others? And if you don’t, why are you so selfish?

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On another topic, have you friended Dilbert and me yet on Facebook? www.facebook.com/dilbert

 I also accept all connections on my personal LinkedIN account.

Practice and Genes

Posted August 19th, 2013 @ 8:41am in #General Nonsense

Most of you probably heard of a study that, according to author Malcolm Gladwell, indicates you need 10,000 hours of practice to become an “expert” at anything.

More recently, someone looked at the study and pointed out that 10,000 was an average. If you have the right genes, you might need far less practice, while other people might need far more. So the average of 10,000 hours is a fairly useless number. All we know for sure is that practice is a good thing.

Other writers have been pointing out that it also matters what you practice. If you practice the wrong stuff, it doesn’t matter how much effort you put into it.

What you have read so far in this post is seen as ground-breaking thinking in the field of success. Allow me to list these shocking results:

1.       Practicing the right things is important!

2.       It helps to have the right genes!

Summary: duh

I’ll add one more, um, insight? It goes like this: The only people who can put in long hours of the right type of practice are … drum roll please … PEOPLE WITH THE RIGHT GENES.

Oh, and also victims. If your parents made you practice the flute for 10,000 hours, and it wasn’t your thing, you aren’t an expert. You’re a victim.

Do you know why I don’t put in long hours training for a marathon? Is it a lack of focus and dedication?

No, although I don’t have any of that stuff either, at least for running.

The reason I’m not training for a marathon is that my body isn’t built for it. I’m a lifelong exerciser with 16% body fat. I try to work out seven days a week. But my genes just aren’t right for distance running. I’m built for sprinting. So for me, tennis makes more sense. I’ve played about 8,000 hours of tennis, according to my thumbnail calculation. I should crack the 10,000 hour mark by the time I’m seventy, at which point I expect to win Wimbledon. I hope to God I haven’t been practicing the wrong strokes this whole time.

Anyway, here’s my formula for becoming an expert:

1.       Be born with the right genes. (luck)

2.       Have opportunities that work well with your genes. (luck)

At best, becoming an expert is a process of moving from a game that’s wrong for you to one that fits your genes. That’s the part you can control, at least according to the common view of free will.

The diabolical element of the “expert” conversation is that it relies on an illusion. That illusion is generally referred to as willpower. The idea is that one can hunker down and do unpleasant things that need to be done if one has enough of this thing called willpower.

But willpower is like the horizon. You can see the horizon, define it, and even walk toward it. And yet a horizon exists as nothing but a concept. You can’t scoop up some horizon and put it on a basket.

Willpower is like that. We know what we mean when we speak of it, but it doesn’t exist. It is an illusion.

Let’s say you and I are sitting in a room with donuts in front of us. We both know donuts are bad for our health. Which one of us breaks down and eats a donut first?

Is it the one of us with the least willpower?

No.

It’s the hungriest one.

Willpower is an illusion.

People become experts for the same reason most things happen: luck. You need the right genes and you need to be born into the right environment. The most important skill involved in success is knowing how and when to switch to a game with better odds for you.







 

Inventing the Unnecessary

Posted August 15th, 2013 @ 9:06am in #General Nonsense

Super-Big Problems

Posted August 12th, 2013 @ 1:57pm in #General Nonsense

I’m starting to wonder if the era of super-big problems is over. Wars are trending smaller. Economic meltdowns aren’t quite so deep or lasting. Israel has become so skilled at managing its local threats that a peace treaty would feel like a step backwards. The Gates Foundation is chipping away at malaria. The technology to create and deliver food where it’s needed is better than ever. New energy sources are popping up daily.

Generally speaking, the world’s biggest problems have shifted from the right-now type to the pending doom type. Climate change might end us all someday. A meteor might head our way. The global economy might disintegrate because of (insert reason). Iran might build a nuke and use it. Immigration problems might evolve from a nuisance to a huge problem. Pipelines might burst and pollute stuff. Demographics might make us a world full of senile oldsters. And so on.

There’s a lot of scary stuff in the “might” category. Luckily, the Adams Theory of Slow-Moving Disasters predicts that any problem the world sees coming gets solved. We humans are surprisingly competent when we focus.

The great thing about the connected world is that we can see problems developing early enough to head them off. We can monitor climate change over time. We can detect terror plots before they are executed. We can identify financial bubbles early. We can alter lifestyle to ward off predictable future health problems.

A huge advantage of the connected world is that we can study what one government does to address a given problem and then steal those best practices. We could be a lot better at doing that, but the trend seems clear enough.

1.       We now have the means to predict most problems well in advance.

2.       We can borrow best practices from anywhere in the world.

3.       Modern technology provides immense problem-solving tools.

Now that civilization has the ability to identify problems early, and the ability to research and borrow best practices to solve those problems, the weak link is government. Our current forms of government - at least the democracies - are poorly designed for data-driven decisions. Dogma, superstition, money, and reelection concerns will always trump data.

I don’t think there’s a realistic hope of reengineering the basic forms of our elected governments anytime soon. Perhaps we need an independent group of scientists and engineers to identify trending national problems, rank them for importance, and identify best practices from other places. The entrenched political parties will of course ignore data and best practices as they always have. But perhaps the existence of well-publicized best practices will encourage future candidates to run on platforms of data over dogma.

I would feel most comfortable if the scientists and engineers in this independent group were atheists who don’t vote and aren’t strongly aligned with any political party - sort of like having eunuchs guard the harem.

Chromecast Review

Posted August 7th, 2013 @ 1:19pm in #General Nonsense

I’m an early adapter of Google’s new $35 Chromecast product.

I ordered it as soon as I read about it, but not because I wanted the product. I wanted to test my powers of pattern recognition. I do that sometimes. If you live long enough, you can predict which sorts of things won’t work even before you try them. In this case, it seemed unlikely to me that I could scroll through content on my phone and tell the Internet to send it seamlessly to my Chromecast dongle so it could display on my TV. Too many hand-offs and synchronization problems, I thought. It just feels like the sort of thing that looks good on paper but never works when you get it home.

So here’s my review of the Chromecast:

1.       Looks good on paper.

2.       Doesn’t work when you get it home.

Okay, some details.

The set-up only has a few steps, but the on-screen directions for one of the steps was so oddly worded that I predict no more than 20% of the general public would be able to decipher it. I stared at it for a few minutes and considered quitting. Eventually I took a guess at what the directions meant and it worked out. Most of the readers of this blog would have guessed right too. To put it in perspective, if you are the type who can buy a wireless router and set it up without help, Chromecast would be easy enough to set up. Otherwise you might need to ask for help.

To be fair, the setup is just one poorly-worded instruction away from being genius. And I’m sure by now someone has posted a YouTube video of how to do it.

Once Chromecast was up and running, I couldn’t immediately adjust the TV volume because my universal remote didn’t have the TV’s internal speaker volume on its top menu screen. In my house, that means I would be the only one who could figure out how to drill down to the internal speakers menu on the universal remote to adjust volume. If your TV doesn’t have external surround sound speakers, it’s not an issue.

I downloaded apps for Netflix and YouTube - which is about all I can do with Chromecast and my iPhone - and waited for the system to not work, because that’s how this sort of thing goes. And sure enough, the pattern held. The apps would lock up on a regular basis. Sometimes the video and the sound didn’t sync. Overall, it didn’t work well enough to trust it for an entire movie.

In the few minutes of uninterrupted video and sound I was able to produce through Netflix, I could see the potential of the thing. If it ever worked, it would be fantastic, especially for the price.

I was also impressed that I could move the device to another TV and it retained its setup programming, at least within the house where it has the same WiFi. That was handy.

Your experience with Chromecast might be different. And I would expect some of the bugs to shake out soon. I like the promise of it. And if you have a teen who likes to watch YouTube clips on a big screen, it could be a great gift. It works well enough for that if you don’t mind the occasional technical problems and freeze-ups.

Start-up Awareness Enterprise

Posted August 5th, 2013 @ 1:39pm in #General Nonsense

This is just a mental exercise. I’m not planning to execute the idea I describe below, but it seems as if it would work.

Suppose I offer all of you a chance to become partners in a business whose only function is to generate rapid, massive interest in new start-ups that would otherwise have trouble getting attention. In return for our help, we’d ask the start-ups to assign small equity positions to our organization. Each of us would share evenly in the spoils.

I (or my minions) would filter through the start-up offers and pick only the ones that appear to have huge potential if the public takes notice. When I mention a start-up on this blog, I’ll ask all members to check it out, download the app, sign up for the service online, and talk it up on social media. I’d only choose start-ups that don’t charge for the basic offering. And I’d try to pick things that seem relevant to all of you.

You’d be free to ignore any start-up that looked dumb in your opinion. That way you don’t have to bend your personal ethical standards and recommend something you don’t love.

If this business model works, I would expect to attract an ever-growing population of new members to our organization. We don’t want the new recruits diluting our existing equity, so we’ll only give the newbies a share of future business, not past deals. The more people in the group, the more power we’ll have, and the more equity we can ask for.

There would be a big free-rider problem with this model. There’s nothing to stop you from signing up and doing nothing to help. So we’d need a way to check that you participate. Perhaps we need our own app that sits between each of you and the sign-up pages for the start-ups. Or maybe we register all of the user names we use for social media (but not our passwords) so the start-ups can cross-reference their customer sign-ups and “likes” against our list. This part of the idea needs work, but seems doable.

Would this business model work?

About the Bear Thing

Posted August 2nd, 2013 @ 3:26pm in #General Nonsense

More than a few of you wondered if I wrote the prior post about bears.

I did.

Was I drunk or on drugs when I did it?

No, but that’s a great idea for next time.

Was it some sort of social experiment?

Well, sort of.

My general approach to life goes like this:

Try something –> Observe results –> Learn –> Try something else

I’m well-suited for drawing comics and writing blog posts because I can erase/delete/adjust a thousand times before the public sees it. I’d be bad at, for example, walking a tightrope across a canyon or doing brain surgery. Those professions don’t respond well to “oops.”

I use this blog to practice my writing, try different styles, float ideas, and generally get into the heads of the public. It’s a bad idea in my profession to assume I know what other people want to read. I can only know for sure what is in my own head. And as a general rule, the people who go into my line of work don’t think like normal citizens, for better or worse. So I take a business approach to writing; I test different styles and topics, observe the reactions, and adjust accordingly.

With the bear post, I wrote it as a character instead of my normal personality, and imagined the reader being a particular type of person who would drink beer - lots of it - with that character. That’s what produces the different style. And now I know your reactions to it. Thank you.

In October you’ll hear a lot about my upcoming non-Dilbert, non-humor, non-fiction book. The approach I took in the book comes from what I learned after trying different topics here and observing which topics and styles had the biggest impact on people.

I appreciate all of you for putting up with me. Truly. I hope my new book returns the favor. It is designed to do just that.

Bears: Worst Mammal Ever

Posted July 30th, 2013 @ 1:48pm in #General Nonsense

I hate bears. They’re fat, oversleeping, furry assholes. And can they leave a frickin’ picnic basket alone for one minute? I don’t think so. Bears have no emotional intelligence. None.

Try petting a bear. That’s a no go. I mean, you can try, but that bear will claw your nads off like they were two blueberries in September. And they will not apologize for that. They’ll just keep pawing through your trash like nothing even happened. Bears don’t give a shit.

Speaking of shit, the forest is full of it. That bear you see is 10% bear skin and ninety percent intestines. When a bear eats your potato salad from the campsite, the salad barely has time to turn brown before it’s getting pinched off on some innocent bush in the forest. And what did the bush do to deserve that? Nothing. You don’t see humans do that sort of thing. No human ever says, “I think I’ll drop a deuce on the cat.” We humans respect nature. Bears don’t. They pollute and they don’t give a hoot.

And what does a bear do when it has an itchy ass? Does it buy some ointment and suffer silently like a proper mammal, or does it find some majestic redwood tree that is minding its own business and use it as an ass-scratcher? These questions answer themselves, folks.

Sometimes you hear of a trained bear in a Russian circus, riding a tiny bicycle, wearing an undersized hat, and you think how cute. But you only hear of those trained bears in Russia. Oh, there’s a reason. It’s because Russian men are not metrosexuals. That bear is actually a guy named Boris who hasn’t trimmed his eyebrows or shaved his back in forty years. The circus doesn’t even pay him. They just hand him a little hat, a little bicycle, and a pitcher of vodka. The rest just happens. So don’t tell me how trainable bears are. While Boris is riding that tiny bike, bears are trying to break into your camper to eat your kids. Bears suck.

I’m afraid of anything that sleeps half the year without dying. Bears call it “hibernating” because it sounds better than lazy. That’s nothing but good marketing. Those furry bastards even managed to become California’s mascot, or state animal, or whatever-the-fuck. What kind of message does that send to our kids? If the state mammal can’t get its furry ass out of its den for six months, how are we supposed to get the kids to school by 8 AM? I want my state animal to be a wise owl, or perhaps a porpoise that saves a surfer from a shark. I think I speak for all Californians when I say we don’t want to be associated with bears. It makes the whole state look bad.

To make matters worse, after “hibernating,” those lazy bastards spend the next six months, or whatever, eating shit that isn’t even theirs. That’s right: Bears are communists. They do not respect individual property rights. You think you own that ham sandwich on the picnic table? A bear doesn’t think so.

I have never trusted bears, and now I hear they are recruiting humans to join their side. In San Francisco, for example, there are men with beards and leather clothing who identify themselves as bears. They act all nice, but after two drinks you won’t believe what they suggest doing. It makes losing a picnic basket sound like a holiday. You might try it a few times just to be polite, but you always find yourself rubbing against a redwood tree afterwards just to make the itching stop.

There’s a good reason that Wall Street calls a falling stock market a “bear market.” And when you have a hard time accomplishing something you might say it was a “bear” of a time. You simply don’t see bears associated with happy events.

Well, okay, there is one exception.

Someone once asked if I had ever had sex on a bearskin rug in front of a fireplace. So I tried it a few times, and I have to say it was great. I guess that’s why the taxidermist keeps the bear’s mouth open in the roaring position. Someday I plan to add a human to the mix and see how the threesome goes.

The Power of a Word

Posted July 25th, 2013 @ 1:24pm in #General Nonsense

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy for one sort of unpleasantness or another. It is not intended to change anyone’s beliefs or actions. If you quote from this post or link to it, which you are welcome to do, please take responsibility for whatever happens if you mismatch the audience and the content.

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In reaction to my prior post about Trayvon Martin, a reader here named Happy left a comment that is so well-worded I’m going to reproduce it below. The central brilliance of Happy’s writing is that he substituted an unloaded word for a loaded word and it transformed the argument. I even like his choices for line spacing and pacing. And check out the word economy; nothing wasted.

I’m not endorsing Happy’s opinion. I’m just impressed by the persuasiveness of his writing. In Happy’s words…

“When I buy a can of Coke, I see the label, and I know what to expect.

Stereotypes are wrong of course. But brands are good.

So if there are a bunch of people that dress a certain way, and act a certain way, they are creating a brand for themselves.

There’s a nerd brand. There’s a metro-sexual brand. There’s a jock brand, a cheerleader brand, a gothic brand… I can go on but of course you know what I mean.

Then there is a gangster brand.

This may be shocking, but if you dress like a gangster - talk like a gangster - and ride around in a car like a gangster, people are bound to pick up on the brand you’re showcasing.

I suppose it could be related to race - but I don’t think so. I can have the above stereotypes in any race - no problem.

If you want to be treated like a nerd, dress like a nerd. You want to be treated like a gangster, knock yourself out, and dress and act like a bad-ass.

But when you do, don’t get upset when people react to the brand you’re pushing.

Does that make it right for someone to beat you up because you’re a nerd, or shoot you in cold blood because you look like a gangster? Hell no - of course not.

But on the other hand - if you dress like a respectable member of society, the chance of getting treated better is certainly going to be higher.

So why bother acting like a bad-ass?

I don’t get it.

I’m not going to get into the specifics of this case - that’s not the point. The important thing to remember for us and our families is that it’s important to portray the right, positive brand. It won’t hurt to make the world a better place, now will it?

So put away the gangster image. Don’t do it - and don’t let your family do it. The world will be a better place for it.”

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Someone famous once said, “You’re not a writer until a writer tells you you’re a writer.” You’re a writer, Happy. But I suspect you already do that for a living.

A New World Record

Posted July 16th, 2013 @ 1:47pm in #General Nonsense

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy for one sort of unpleasantness or another. It is not intended to change anyone’s beliefs or actions. If you quote from this post or link to it, which you are welcome to do, please take responsibility for whatever happens if you mismatch the audience and the content.
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It’s hard to measure this sort of thing, but I nominate the Trayvon Martin protests as the least effective protests in modern history. They might qualify as some sort of world record. And that is a tragedy on top of a tragedy.

You can Google Trayvon Martin if you’re not familiar with the case. I assume it’s not getting much coverage overseas.

My understanding of the Trayvon Martin protests is that the participants would like the public to stop believing that young African-American males are crime-prone. The strategy for accomplishing this involves holding largely peaceful protests in which a small number of young African-American males are likely to be filmed by news crews wearing masks, breaking store windows, threatening innocent motorists, and getting arrested. That’s exactly what I watched on the news last night as Oakland was starting to heat up.

The trouble-makers are a small percentage of the protesters - maybe 1%. The problem is that the 1% gets the lion’s share of news coverage, thus reinforcing the racial bias that the peaceful protesters are trying to combat. In terms of managing the public’s impressions, the protests are an epic fail.

On a related topic, I’m fascinated by the way humans reflexively group things. In this case, most observers see this as a racial situation: black versus non-black. And yet no one believes Zimmerman would have made the same boneheaded moves if he had seen an African-American woman in his neighborhood instead of a man. Or an African-American child at age ten. Or even a middle-aged black dude in a sweater-vest. The fact that Trayvon was young and male was at least half of what made him seem suspicious to Zimmerman, one presumes.

As a male who was once young, I can confirm that most of my offenses against humanity happened in my early years. My testosterone was high and my frontal lobes were only partly formed. That’s a recipe for trouble, and I caused my fair share. I also grew out of it, right on schedule.

The most effective type of protest I can imagine after the Trayvon Martin verdict would involve demands for greater science literacy. That sort of movement doesn’t attract too many vandals and it effectively puts racists in the “ignorant” box instead of the “evil” box. That’s a game-changer. In the year 2013, perhaps the African-American community needs fewer leaders who are ministers and more who are scientists. Just a thought.