Scott Adams' Blog

Job Creation

Posted September 27th, 2011 @ 8:57am in #General Nonsense

I heard a pundit say the unemployment rate in the United States for so-called educated people is about 4% while the rate for the entire country is above 9%. Education matters. That’s my first data point for this post.

I’ve been in several conversations lately in which people talked about how hard it is to get a service person to show up, or even return phone calls. Some small businesses have more work than they can handle. That’s my second data point.

I know two unemployed people who are in career-specific training programs that virtually guarantee they will get jobs when they graduate because their specific skills will be in demand. That’s my third data point.

I knew several small business owners who can’t expand because it’s hard to find employees that are both trainable and dependable. That’s my fourth data point.

The same pundit I mentioned in the first paragraph (I can’t remember who it was) said we have an “education problem” not a “jobs problem.” That sounds almost right. I would tweak that idea to say we have a “training cost problem,” not a “jobs problem.” It seems to me that almost anyone who doesn’t have a job, and wants one, would be willing to take career training if it were free and local and likely to pay off.

But if all training were magically free and universally available, it wouldn’t help the overall economy. If you double the number of hairdressers or plumber overnight, while the demand remains constant, the people who already have those jobs will see their incomes halved. So the trick is to match the training to the types of jobs that have growing demand.

My stimulus idea for you to eviscerate in the comment section is to offer full government scholarships to train the unemployed for any profession that has growing demand. And if it is necessary to relocate people to where the training is, the country conveniently has plenty of bank-foreclosed properties that can be rented as dorms.

I think we all share a common skepticism for large, wasteful government programs. So let’s imagine that this program is designed to be self-funding. Suppose graduates of the program are taxed a bit extra for several years after they take jobs in the areas for which they trained. If you combine that extra tax revenue with the government savings and increased income from reducing unemployment, I’m betting the government could come out ahead.

I think we all prefer free market solutions over government programs. But realistically, small businesses aren’t going to create training programs for the few employees that each one needs, and small businesses are the economic engine of most communities. And if you want to become self-employed, no one in the private sector has any incentive to train you. Nor can we expect private enterprise to build for-profit vocational training for people who have no money to pay for the service. Only the government has the ability to train the unemployed and recoup the cost after the fact.

As with most of my ideas, this one totally blows. The most obvious problem is that large government programs have a poor track record. But if you’re looking for someone to help you find a lost nut, and the only volunteer is a blind squirrel, that’s still your best option.

One of the more popular ideas for stimulating the economy and reducing unemployment involves funding large infrastructure projects. But I worry that there aren’t enough people with the right training to step into those positions in the near term to call the idea a true stimulus. It won’t help the economy if we create jobs for which the unemployed are not qualified.

You’d be correct to hate my idea of government scholarships for career training. But I’ll defend my view that we can best solve unemployment by seeing it as a training cost issue and an information issue, i.e. knowing which skills are in demand.

The Ultimate Peer Pressure

Posted September 26th, 2011 @ 8:29am in #General Nonsense

When professional cyclists were told they were racing against their own best times, they tended to match those times, even when the times were faster than they had ever raced. I wonder how useful that sort of influence would be if we applied it to other areas.

In a few years it will be feasible to create a CGI version of yourself - an avatar - that lives a better lifestyle in the digital world than you do in the real world. The avatar would have a healthier diet, exercises more, be less shy in social settings, more assertive at work, and perhaps have a more perfect golf game. If you spent a few minutes every day observing your avatar doing what you wished you could do, would the peer pressure motivate you to higher achievement? I think it might. In a way, this would be the high tech version of writing down your goals every day and visualizing success. The avatar would simply make the visualization easier.

Perhaps calling this effect peer pressure is not doing it justice. It might be more of a case of unlocking your potential in the same way that the first runner to break the four-minute mile unlocked the potential of those who followed. For any given task, we all seem to have a mental switch that is stuck in the “yes you can” or “no you can’t” position. Sometimes you need to use mental tricks to flip the switch from no to yes. I wonder if your avatar could help.

I’ve written before on the topic of how often successful people seem to have had meaningful interactions with other successful people prior to making it big themselves. That could be a case of coincidence or selective reporting, but I suspect causation. When you get to know a famous person, your mind says, “If that idiot can succeed, how hard can it be?” That flips the switch in your mind to “yes I can.”

I also wonder if programming your avatar to smile or laugh would immediately put you in a good mood. I think it would. I think your avatar could also improve your table manners, help your posture, and move you in the right direction a hundred different ways.

At some point in the future of humanity our avatars will be so well-programmed with our preferences and memories that they will live on after our deaths and have no idea they are not the real us. And since that future will last forever for the avatar, perhaps in a continuous loop, while your mortal life is limited in years, the statistical reality suggests it already happened and you are an avatar of someone who went before. (Yes, you knew I was going there.)

Going Back to the Sea

Posted September 22nd, 2011 @ 9:18am in #General Nonsense

The most important technology for the next hundred years will be high speed Internet for ocean vessels. Once that technology becomes widely available, you’ll see people abandoning their failed land-based countries and forming independent nations on the sea. Here are some floating island concepts to fuel your imaginations.

The rich will be the first to move to the sea to escape confiscatory levels of taxation in their countries of origin. The tax savings alone could be enough to pay for floating island homes for the wealthy.

Perhaps the most compelling reason for taking to the sea is climate change. It might someday become necessary to live on moveable ocean structures just to avoid hurricanes, floods, droughts, blizzards, earthquakes, and tsunamis.

I can imagine security being better at sea too. You’d have pirate problems, but that might seem manageable compared to the risk of nuclear war, traditional war, terror attacks, violent crime, and civil wars. Traditional armies and even terrorists rarely attack anyone without one of these reasons that wouldn’t apply to floating islands:

1. Hey, you’re on my land!
2. Hey, you’re defiling my holy land!
3. I want your oil!
4. You’re harboring terrorists!

The Best Way to Kill Creativity

Posted September 20th, 2011 @ 9:16am in #General Nonsense

I wonder if the best way to kill creativity is to encourage it. This notion will take some explaining.

Creative people literally can’t stop themselves from creating. It’s a form of OCD. If you plug one hole, the creativity finds a way out of another. There’s no way to stop creativity unless you kill the people who have it. Creators will change jobs, defy the government, move to other countries, and do whatever they need to let the creativity out. That’s my first point: Creativity is like a hurricane. You can’t stop it from forming and you probably can’t change its path.

My second point is that there’s no such thing as “stimulating creativity.” The people who have the creative gene (figuratively speaking) can’t stop themselves from creating, and those who don’t have it can’t get it.

What about R&D labs? They don’t generate creativity per se, but they do allow ideas to be researched, tested, and developed. They allow happy accidents to happen, and they provide a way to fund all of that activity. But there’s a reason they aren’t called Creativity Labs: Scientists don’t know how to make more creativity - at least not the good kind that makes the world a better place.

I’ve noticed that creativity so often springs from hardship or pain that I wonder if it’s a precondition. That would make sense from an evolution perspective. Humans don’t need to come up with new ideas when everything is running smoothly. We need creativity when we’re threatened and all of the usual defenses are deemed inadequate. In other words, the best way to generate creativity is to induce hardship on humans, which would be unethical. Conversely, the best way to reduce creativity is to - wait for it - make things nice and comfortable for creative people. In other words, any ethical attempt to encourage creativity will have the unintended effect of killing it. Happy creators are not productive.

The media has often noted the correlation between genius and insanity. My hypothesis is that insanity, or insecurity of any sort, puts an individual in a continuous state of feeling threatened. For those folks, the creativity gene - if they are lucky enough to have it - is locked in the ON position as they reflexively search for an escape from discomfort.

I was thinking about this because of the latest MacArthur Foundation “genius grants” that have no strings attached. The foundation gives so-called geniuses in various fields $500,000 to do whatever they want, with the notion that some of them will go on to do great things they couldn’t otherwise do. And perhaps it works. I haven’t seen any statistics about the success rate of the grants, if such a thing can even be measured. But I wonder if the money has the unexpected effect of reducing creativity in this same bunch of geniuses because it makes their lives easier. That’s not a criticism of the grants because they aren’t designed to generate creativity.

Devil’s Advocates will point out that I’ve previously said my best ideas come during a relaxing shower. Surely that disproves my idea that hardship is necessary to produce creativity. But I’ll bet the relaxing shower only helps creative people who feel threatened or uncomfortable in their lives outside the shower stall. And I’m just neurotic enough to feel threatened most of the time. I started worrying about retirement when I was about six years old. I can’t leave the house without worrying if there will be an adequate restroom wherever I’m heading. And I’m fairly certain the world will plunge into darkness any minute now. On the plus side, all of that makes it easier to create comics.  

Those Were the Days

Posted September 14th, 2011 @ 9:51am in #General Nonsense

Every time I see a news story about early humans mating with Neanderthals or other near-monkey species, I wonder if there were any species that our ancestors didn’t try to have sex with. And how did the conversation go just prior to the first pre-human deciding to get some Neanderthal action?

Pre-human 1: “Hey, that creature by the watering hole has two legs. I’d totally do it.”

Pre-human 2: “It’s all yours. I’ve got my eye on a tiny horse with a limp.”

I’m no Darwin, but I have a few observations of my own. My first observation is that the only species that have survived to modern times are the ones able to fend off unwanted advances from horny pre-humans. Take the giraffe, for example. Its long legs keep its naughty bits well above the pelvic thrusting level of our ancestors. Then you have your cheetahs that can outrun us, your fish that can hide underwater, your birds that can fly away, your zebras that can kick, and so on. But the poor Neanderthals and other slow-moving bipeds all got banged out of existence by our horny ancestors.

I have a hypothesis that several million years ago just about anything could mate and have offspring with anything else. For example, the modern beaver is probably the offspring of an early human and a bear that was slow to snap out of hibernation. That’s just a guess. But the next time you see a beaver standing on his back legs eating a fish, try to imagine him as a buck-toothed tourist at a sushi place. It’s easier than it should be.

Contrast the open-minded attitude of our ancestors to our picky modern selves. Now humans won’t even date someone who cheers for the wrong sports team or goes to the wrong church. And we don’t want our mates to be sporting any hair below the chin. Dating outside your species is totally frowned upon. I think maybe we’ve lost something. On the plus side, your dog appreciates your willingness to have a platonic relationship. But he still gets nervous when you give him a bath. There’s a lot of bad history there.

Systems

Posted September 12th, 2011 @ 8:16am in #General Nonsense

The other day I put on my workout clothes and drove to the gym. But when I arrived I didn’t feel like working out. This was not a huge surprise, since I didn’t feel peppy before I even laced up my running shoes. Perhaps I hadn’t gotten enough sleep that week. I wasn’t sure what the problem was. I ate lunch in the snack bar then drove home and took a nap.

Question: Did I fail at my exercise goal?

Your answer will say a lot about you. But I’ll warn you that it’s a trick question. The trick is that I didn’t have an exercise goal in the first place, so I couldn’t have failed to reach it. What I do have is an exercise system, and I was completely successful at the system. My philosophy is that losers have goals and winners have systems.

In this case, my system is that I attempt to exercise five times a week around lunchtime. And I always allow myself the option of driving to the gym then turning around and going home. What I’ve discovered is that the routine of preparing to exercise usually inspires me to go through with it even if I didn’t start out in the mood. This particular day, my body wasn’t going to cooperate. No problem. The system of attempting to exercise worked as planned. I didn’t have a trace of guilt about driving home. I’ve used this system for my entire adult life. I see exercise as a lifestyle, not an objective.

If I had a goal instead of a system, I would have failed that day. And I would have felt like a loser. That can’t be good for motivation. That failure might be enough to prevent me from going to the gym the next time I don’t feel 100%, just to avoid the risk of another failure.

A week after graduating college, I took my first flight in an airplane. I got in a conversation with a businessman in the seat next to me. He was CEO of a company that made aircraft screws. He told me that his career system involved a continuous search for a better job. No matter how much he liked his current job, he always interviewed for better ones. I assume he failed to get most of the jobs he interviewed for, but over time his system worked, and he became a CEO. My own system at the time involved listening carefully to the advice of anyone who was successful. I adopted the CEO’s system in my own career, moving to higher paying jobs about once per year until I started drawing Dilbert (while continuing my day job).

If I were to summarize the CEO’s advice, it went something like this: Your job isn’t to do your job. Your job is to get a better job. That’s a system, not a goal.

Coercive Charity Auction

Posted September 8th, 2011 @ 11:12am in #General Nonsense

You’ve all seen charity auctions in which the high bidder gets lunch with a celebrity or a round of golf with a famous business person, or something along those lines. I have a better idea: The Coercive Charity Auction.

The idea is that any individual can create a charity auction online that involves a famous person - but here’s the great part - WITHOUT the approval of the famous person. The idea is to create such high bids that the famous person is put in an awkward position of either accepting the deal or allowing an African village to starve, just to pick one example.

The second difference from traditional auctions is that bids would be cumulative, not individual. Your bid would be added to my bid and everyone else’s bid. There’s almost no limit to how high a bid might go.

Now here’s the genius part: Instead of lunch with a celebrity, or golf, or something the celebrity might actually enjoy, the Coercive Charity Auction would focus on activities the celebrity would hate to do. That’s what gets the auction bids so high.

For example, an individual might start an auction requesting Donald Trump to shave his head. Trump wouldn’t want to do that, obviously. But after a million people conditionally agree to donate ten dollar apiece toward curing some childhood disease, or delivering fresh water for Sudan, it will become increasingly awkward for Trump to say no. He’d be forced into it by the weight of public opinion. And if not, it would still be entertaining to make him explain in every interview why he lets people die for the sake of a haircut.

Obviously most of the auctions would be so unreasonable that no one could expect the celebrity to comply. On day one you’d see a Coercive Charity Auction for Cancer research that asks Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie to make out on live TV. It’s unlikely they would agree. But what if ten million people offer $10 apiece? Could they still say no and deny $100 million to charity?

This plan is diabolical - I know. That’s what would make it so popular. It cleverly mixes humanity’s worst instincts with their most noble charitable instincts. That sort of freak show would be hard to ignore.

Some of you will be quick to point out that I would become a victim of my own idea. The first auction created would ask me to eat a dog turd to benefit a women’s shelter. But I will argue that my contribution to the world involved thinking up this Coercive Charity Auction concept, so I have already achieved moral sufficiency.

Lifestyle Discount Healthcare Insurance

Posted September 6th, 2011 @ 10:42am in #General Nonsense

Suppose a healthcare insurance company in the United States offered a steeply discounted price with one big catch: Customers would need to maintain a healthy lifestyle and prove it on a regular basis. Would people sign up?

I’m assuming there are scientific ways to determine if a patient smokes cigarettes, abuses substances, or has a poor diet.  (Blood tests?) And let’s say there’s a GPS tracking watch that customers could use to prove they were at their gyms three times a week, or biking, or playing tennis. Or perhaps there’s a pedometer to track your running. And let’s say you don’t need to wear the tracking watch or the pedometer unless you are heading to your workout.

Let’s not get bogged down in how we could monitor a healthy lifestyle. I think it’s doable. The question is whether people would give up privacy in order to get direct cash benefits in lower healthcare costs. I think you could cut health insurance costs by a third or more for a group of people with proven healthy lifestyles.

Obviously the people who already have healthy lifestyles would sign up first. And when enough of the healthy people move to the discounted healthcare system it would drive up prices for the relatively unhealthy people who remain in other systems, thus increasing everyone’s financial incentive to lead healthier lives.

As it stands now, the people who make healthy lifestyle choices are subsidizing the healthcare costs of the people who make unhealthy choices. You might think good health is enough of a reward to cause people to make healthy choices, but evidently it isn’t. A good dose of financial incentive might help.

Obviously a system such as this would be too Big Brotherish if it were mandatory. But I’m assuming a disruptive small company could enter the health insurance field and specialize in insuring only the people who don’t mind having their healthy lifestyles monitored. The free market would do the rest.

 

States Rights

Posted September 5th, 2011 @ 8:08am in #General Nonsense

I’m wondering if supporters of a strict interpretation of States Rights in the U.S. are anti-science. In other words, if you believe a state can make better decisions for its residents than the federal government, what evidence do you have to support that view? Is it possible to compare the performance of a state against the performance of the federal government for the topics that are relevant to the issue of States Rights? Probably not. In that case, how does a rational person form an opinion on States Rights?

I understand the common sense argument in favor of States Rights. If a state is different from the rest of the country in a particular way, the state can design laws that fit its circumstances and desires without federal interference. It makes sense when I write it down, but where’s the data to back up this assumed advantage of state decision-making? And is there no downside, such as a higher likelihood of corruption on the state level?

I live in California. If you put me in a room with one other resident of California and one resident from another state, both selected randomly, which one would I have more in common with? I have no idea.

And how well do people judge what is good for them? If most of the residents of one state want Plan A, and the residents of another state want Plan B, how do we know for sure that they wouldn’t both be better off with one plan or the other? There’s no objective way to know.

A lot has changed since the Constitution of the United States was written. A system that made sense when the union was brittle (see Civil War), and untested, and lightly populated, might not make sense in the age of the Internet.

It seems to me that the burden of proof is never on the people who are enjoying the status quo. The people who want change have the burden of demonstrating the advantage of their proposed plan. So let’s do that today. If you have an argument supporting a stronger version of States Rights than we typically experience in the United States today, what is your argument?

And let’s ignore for today the question of what the Founding Fathers intended, and what the Constitution actually says. I’m just asking what makes sense today.

Update: Here are a few comments about your comments:

1. The federal government is not prohibited from testing ideas in particular places before deciding on a wider roll out. We don’t need fifty test labs for every topic, especially since many of the tests will fail. And left to their own devices, states will stick with their own failed systems for too long.

2. States would be better than the federal government in matching laws and budgets to the specific demands of its citizens, but what evidence do we have that people demand the right things? If one state has dumber voters than average, for example, are they better off getting what they ask for, or better off doing what the larger country decides makes sense?

Cancer Sniffing Dog

Posted September 2nd, 2011 @ 8:30am in #General Nonsense

Did you hear about the dog that can tell if you have cancer by sniffing your breath? It’s true. Apparently the dog can pick up a slight chemical signature for lung cancer.

This story made me sad because I spent years training my dog to detect bad breath by sniffing my ass. That stupid cancer dog makes my accomplishment seem less important. But detecting bad breath the way I trained Snickers to do it is a lot harder, so I still own that. And the good news is that according to Snickers, my breath is always minty fresh. Yours is okay too; that’s how good she is.

I also taught Snickers to detect the Elephant Man disease. The “all clear” signal involves humping the patient’s leg. Snickers checks out every visitor to the house. So far, knock on wood, everyone who has ever come to the house is clear. And that’s good on two levels, because I taught Snickers to attack if she detects the disease. I’m not being cruel; I just didn’t want Snickers’ signal to be something subtle that I might miss, and I hate barking.

If Snickers ever detects Elephant Man disease, it will be sad because there’s no cure. But if a patient decides to travel somewhere for plastic surgery, the least I can do is offer to help pack his trunk. Seriously, that’s literally the least I can do. Just above that is not being a douche bag, and I can’t always pull that off.

Meanwhile, my cat has trained me to detect obesity in cats. The signal is that my spine separates in four places when I try to lift her off the couch. If I lose sensation below the waist, I’ll know I have at least one spinal gap. I’m not entirely sure how I’ll know if I have the other three. I might have to rethink the whole system. But I refuse to sniff her ass. That’s just one of the reasons I could never be a veterinarian.

You might not respect all of my choices, but I don’t care because I’m comfortable in my own skin. And that’s good news for my neighbor who is about my size and doesn’t get many visitors. Perhaps I’ve said too much.