Scott Adams and Philosophy

by Daniel Yim

  Adams infers that climate science lacks an empiric foundation, but he fails to even hint at where that lack of empiric understanding lay. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), an advocate of empiricism in philosophy, believed that if you couldn’t say something clearly and in a way which could not be misinterpreted, then you’ve failed to make your point and should just shut the hell up. He may not have said the “shut the hell up” part, but that tight-assed Austrian bastard was certainly thinking it.

  Rationalism on the other hand, states that we can reason our way to an understanding of the world around us. Early rationalists felt that we were born with certain knowledge and that was why some people were smarter than others. The idea that we have been implanted with information before we were born has a strong suggestion of supernaturalism and has fallen out of favor, but having the ability to reason through something and come to an understanding of it without concrete evidence is a great description of how our brains work. Also, a rationalist would say that the (empiric) information our senses give us can be misinterpreted. Is the room dark or is the viewer suddenly blind? Therefore, rationalists aren’t as strict as empiricists about what constitutes adequate warrant.

  Epistemic Responsibility

  William Clifford (1845–1879) was a mathematician and a philosopher of science. He was concerned that when scientists say they know something, it’s because they worked hard at making sure it was accurate. It’s called epistemic responsibility, and it is important to all of us. Good science is good because of this drive for accuracy and truth. We depend on it for medical treatment and airbags in cars and food that doesn’t kill us. Of course, the methods necessary to provide epistemically responsible results are sometimes ignored—maybe due to ego or greed—but the concept itself is research bedrock.

  Clifford tells us that whether harm from incorrectly held beliefs occurs or not, “It is wrong always and everywhere for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” He would go on to say that even if we did not share our unfounded conclusions with others—like in a blog or on YouTube, Twitter, or Periscope—people will be influenced by our wrongly-held beliefs through our actions, our words, or our comic strips (if by an off chance we are lucky enough to have any). He would say that it was not okay to bloviate about things you don’t fully understand, things that you could know but choose not to, like climate change. He would tell Adams that his self-described habit of “sampling” television news is a terrible way to become informed and that he should either learn the science or shut the hell up. (Sorry about that last bit, Clifford had Wittgenstein’s moxy but he was a Cambridge educated British gentleman and would never have said it. It was just fun to write.)

  The Scientific Method

  Karl Popper was a philosopher who began his career in the early twentieth century. He looked at the scientific figures of his day and saw two basic approaches. One was to propose a theory and then look for information which confirmed it, which was the way Sigmund Freud worked.

  Despite Freud’s having revolutionized the understanding of mental illness, this approach led Freud to make some very dubious claims about its nature. The problem is that when you have already decided your theory is true—like how women’s problems are all due to their wanting a penis—it becomes easy to think you’ve found data which confirms it and to ignore data which might disprove it. This tendency is called confirmation bias, and it also happens to be one of Adams’s favorite terms of abuse. He uses it like a club to attack opinions he disagrees with, despite his love for his own “predictive power.” If one of Adams’s theories appears to predict a future event, Adams takes that “predictive power” to be evidence that he’s correct. If a theory opposed to Adams’s view appears to predict future events, well now that would just be confirmation bias.

  Falsifiability, Why Science Works

  The other approach Popper looked at involves a thing called falsifiability, which isn’t about telling fibs. It means that if an idea holds up to testing which could prove it false, then it must be good. Another scientist Popper was watching was Albert Einstein, who advanced his theories on physics and then waited for the results of experiments that could potentially disprove, or falsify, them. He was then able to revise the parts of his beliefs that were flawed, based on that new evidence. In a hundred years of attempts to refute Einstein’s work, those theories have flexed somewhat but overall have held up remarkably well. Popper felt that falsifiability was the best way to improve knowledge. Many smart people agreed with him, and it has become the foundation of what we now consider good scientific method.

  Criticisms of Falsifiability, Other than Adams

  Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994), a philosopher of science, had a great deal to say that Adams might agree with. In his book Against Method, Feyerabend proposed, as Adams has also suggested, that language has limitations and even when scientists were being careful about how they described their findings, their use of language would be influenced by their beliefs. He argued against falsifiability as a single best method and instead offered an idea described as epistemological anarchy, where any method could be used for research provided it got results. Later in his career he softened his views and even completely reversed some of his argument against falsifiability, understanding that he may have simply provided an alternative that was novel, but was as restricting as he felt falsifiability to be.

  Reproducibility

  An important part of research is the idea that data gathered by one scientist should be reproducible by another scientist using the same method. One sign of epistemic responsibility in research today is the response to false claims made in high-profile studies, particularly in psychology and prescription drug research. Loose methods motivated by several things, including a desire to get published and, in big pharma, the need to move product, caused researchers to manipulate their findings to create the illusion of advances where there were none. Called the reproducibility crisis, it has created a drive for accountability among researchers and has caused greater scrutiny of research results in general, producing new systems to ensure that methods and data are standardized and made available for others to build on.

  Adams points out that scientists jealously guard their data, which is true. It takes a lot of work and money to generate that information and no one wants to give it away; that would be like not licensing Dilbert and letting anyone profit from selling branded product. Websites like Open Science Framework establish structures for research methods as well as access to the data generated by other researchers. Adams is right that research has flaws, he is wrong to suggest that it’s tolerated or to pass off the idea as if he’s the only one who’s noticed.

  Mama Always Said, “Stupid Is as Stupid Does”

  The Online Oxford English Dictionary tells us that stupidity is “Behavior that shows a lack of good sense or judgement.” Ignorance, however, is defined as “Lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated.” In other words, an ignorant person can behave intelligently, and an intelligent person can behave stupidly. Stupidity is not a natural state of being, it’s the ability to make poor decisions despite your education or intelligence, just like Mama said.

  In 1987, Carlo Cipolla, a Professor of Economics at Adams’s alma matter UC Berkeley, who possibly even said some of those crappy things about MBAs earlier, wrote an article for the spring 1987 issue of the magazine Whole Earth Review titled The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. It has achieved legendary status among academics because of his humorous and insightful thoughts on the nature of stupidity. It could even be considered good life advice since he was an economist, not a philosopher. Overall this is the kind of science-y stuff Adams should love, since it sounds right but isn’t overly burdened with facts. All rationalism, no boring empiricism.

  The laws are as follows:

  I.Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

  II.The probability that a certain person be stupid i
s independent of any other characteristic of that person.

  III.A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person . . . while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

  IV.Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

  V.A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

  In addition, Cippola offers the following four archetypes of behavior:

  The intelligent person is someone who acts in ways that benefit both themselves and others. For example, a celebrity who actually learns a subject before writing about it.

  The bandit acts in ways that benefits themselves but causes a loss to others. Say, a cartoonist who shills crap business advice on his website.

  A helpless person acts in ways that cause a loss to themselves while producing a gain to another. Say, the consumer who buys that crap business advice.

  Lastly and most importantly, the stupid person acts in ways that will cause a loss to themselves while causing a loss to others. For example, a cartoonist who lacks epistemic responsibility contributes to a deterioration in public discourse by posting his half-assed opinion on the Internet and as a result suffers a loss in income and reputation. Stupid.

  Why Is Scott Adams Dangerous?

  Calling it a day by using Cippola to say Adams is dangerous (Adams = stupid = dangerous) seems satisfying, and it’s certainly consistent with Adams’s methods, but it lacks a bit of that old epistemic responsibility, so here goes. Scott Adams is dangerous because of shoddy methods, a lack of integrity (disingenuously making then backing away from claims he can’t support), greed, and he has a stupid face.

  Well, maybe not because of his stupid face, but the other things definitely, and here’s why.

  Shoddy Methods

  Volume volume volume! It may be a great way to keep prices low but saying many things in a poorly defined and emotional way is the opposite of how human understanding advances. Adams’s speaking on multiple topics in a nearly constant stream makes holding him responsible for any specific idea impossible. His discussion is about winning, not about content. The advantage to argument in volume is that you never have to say you’re sorry. If you get caught in your flawed argument you just go back to that other thing you said that sounded relatively less wrong.

  Subjective use of words and terms. The list is long, confirmation bias, mass hysteria, cognitive dissonance, such as his August 17th 2017 blog line “A mass hysteria happens when the public gets a wrong idea about something that has strong emotional content and it triggers cognitive dissonance that is often supported by confirmation bias.”

  That sounds like ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag because it is. When you say one thing as precisely and simply as possible you take responsibility for your idea. While that means you may have to revise your theory as better information becomes available, it also means you get to be intelligent. When you weasel your way out of admitting a mistake you stay trapped in your stupidity. One specific example is his abuse of the word “persuasion” (his italics). Another word which better describes his intended meaning would be inveigle, which is defined as to “Persuade (someone) to do something by means of deception or flattery.” In fact, coerce might be the best choice when we consider just how often he tries to elicit an emotional response, usually on the way to pitching his latest product.

  Lacking Integrity in His Approach

  Feyerabend may have been a dope when he was running around Berkeley in the 1960s spouting his epistemic anarchy crap, but he took responsibility for his ideas and ate a great deal of criticism along the way. Also, he was able to revise his theories when they proved less effective at offering a real alternative to falsifiability.

  Adams may have read Feyerabend; he may have heard about him second hand while at Berkeley; its remotely possible that Adams is so genuinely intelligent that the ideas simply occurred to him. The difference is that Adams doesn’t propose and defend his theories so much as he suggests and retreats. His shallow and selective treatment of complex topics means that whatever valuable message may have been possible gets lost. Despite having knowledge from education and life experience, and despite having the resources to do so, Adams fails to become the educator and advocate that he could be.

  It’s All About the Benjamins

  Nearly every blog post and web appearance ends by referring the reader to his NEW BOOK, ON SALE NOW!!! It is the one constant and unifying aspect of his Internet presence. Although opening a discussion of the morality of advertising as provocateur is beyond this chapter, it certainly adds perspective to his science-bashing, he’s just trying to move some product.

  It’s not Scott Adams’s fault that people are interested in every stupid thing celebrities say. Also, this is a free market economy, and barring a Marxist revolution, he can use whatever guerilla advertising he likes. Unfortunately, disparaging the scientific method and the process of research goes beyond advertising, since doing so could not significantly contribute to his bottom line.

  Research provides us with the best options available given the knowledge and resources we have. The process isn’t always perfect, the advice experts give is not always one hundred percent right, but perhaps one of the miracles of science done correctly is that the advice is nearly always pretty darn good. Climate science, medicine, engineering, and every other field we stake our lives on every day is a chaotic mix of information, understanding, and probability. Accepting this fact is one part of our human experience that many of us are fortunate enough to ignore every day. In many parts of the world people are impacted by climate instability and its man-made causes, but they don’t have the luxury of debating it over coffee. They’re just trying to live through the day. We have the privilege to consider it and should.

  Ultimately the question you should ask yourself is this, do you want your doctor to treat you like Scott Adams does? If you don’t mind being talked out of proven therapies and being persuaded into some snake oil treatment that he couldn’t take the time to understand but will profit from, please buy into Adams’s skewed view of science and research. If you’d rather depend on the honest opinion of an experienced, well informed, and well-trained professional, then it’s possible you may agree that Scott Adams is stupid to undercut science and research just to sell some product, and that he’s dangerous.

  Finally, it’s clear that Adams is trying to make with the funny, but he fails. He fails because he could be intelligent, benefiting himself and others, but can’t quite seem to grasp it. He fails because his main motivation is to make money, incurring a loss to others; and because he is unable to establish any warrant for his views, incurring a loss to whatever good reputation he may have had. His self-professed ability to know things without warrant shows rationalism without the empiricism to balance it, seemingly because his gut tells him so.

  Dilbert might reply to that claim, as he did to his pointy haired boss in an October 2017 strip, “I’m curious, where do you stick your head to listen to your gut?” Samuel Clemens couldn’t make the funny when he became obsessed with attacking the Christian Science movement; Lenny Bruce couldn’t when his act got bogged down in his court battles; and if those actual humorists couldn’t be funny after losing their way, then you can be damn sure Adams can’t. Stay in your lane, Scott, keep drawing your funny pictures, cash those checks, and shut the fuck up about the rest.1

  1 Cipolla’s The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity is real but has sadly been out of print for some time, the copy used for this chapter was a PDF of a Xerox of the original. It’s hard to find but well worth the effort, even if just for the underground-comix-style illustrations.

  17

  Sweeping Up God’s Debris

  RACHEL ROBISON-GREENE

  Scott Adams’s book God’s Debris is an entertaining rom
p through the familiar terrain of some basic issues in philosophy. The premise is charming—a young man shows up to deliver a package and finds that, in fact, the package has delivered him. It brought him to the house of a man who we learn, in due course, is an avatar—a being that has reached the fifth and highest level of awareness that a human can achieve.

  In the final pages of the book, we learn (spoiler alert) that at any given time, there can be only one avatar, and that the package has delivered this humble postman to this particular house because he is destined to become the current avatar’s successor. I’ll refer to the book’s two main characters as The Avatar and The Postman.

  Adams concludes the introduction to the book by prescribing to readers, “For maximum enjoyment, share God’s Debris with a smart friend and then discuss it while enjoying a tasty beverage.” Well, crack one open and we’ll have some fun assessing the philosophical details of the story.

  Awareness Is about Unlearning

  Even if you’ve never studied philosophy, it’s likely that you’ve heard of Socrates. For a philosopher who never wrote anything, he’s stunningly pervasive in pop culture. Those who know a little about the life of Socrates know that he was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth and for failing to honor the gods of his culture. What we know about Socrates, we largely know through the works of Plato. Socrates is the main character in Plato’s dialogues.

  When Socrates pleads the case for his life in Plato’s Apology, he offers the story of how he came to be widely regarded as wise. A friend of his, Chaerephon, visited the Oracle at Delphi. He asked the Pythian prophetess whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates, and she answered that there was no one wiser. After hearing this story, Socrates was confused because he knew he had no wisdom. He took pains to prove the prophetess wrong by consulting with a number of people reputed to be wise, but concluded mournfully that they were deluded about their own wisdom. He, among all the Greeks, was wisest because he alone knew that he knew nothing. He was aware of his own ignorance.