Scott Adams's Blog, page 291

Shotguns and Weddings

Let’s talk about weddings first. As a lover of freedom and equal rights, I am delighted that the Supreme Court rewrote the Constitution (essentially) to give all adults the contractual and legal rights of marriage.

But I couldn’t find a way to celebrate. For starters, as an old boss once said, “You don’t get a prize for doing what you’re supposed to do.” What actually happened here is that the country stopped being awful in one particular way. So, what is the right way to celebrate the cessation of being awful? As a member of the oppressor class in this situation (albeit not personally) I choose to recognize this great advance for humankind with fewer rainbows and more humility. My people (the straight majority) created a problem that should not have existed in the first place. And it took five non-elected people to fix that situation. Our government failed hard on this issue, even though I like the end result. I can’t be proud of the system in this case. But I do like the fact that when it came down to respecting the Constitution – a document made by slave-owners hundreds of years ago – the majority of the Supreme Court decided to ignore it and make up whatever argument got them to a more-equal world.

I have been watching the liberal world mock the dissenting justices’ opinions as if those opinions are ridiculous on the surface. Scalia, for example, notes that marriage is a bad place to look for a greater degree of individual freedom of expression. He’s right, obviously, but since judges vote along party lines, his argument is seen as nothing but a cover for bigotry. The hypnotist in me says all “reasons” are rationalizations and that our stated reasons only match up with common sense by coincidence now and then. In hypnosis class we learned that reason is the thin coat of paint we slather on our decisions after we make them. Scalia had a sound legal argument, but in a case such as this, no one really looks at the legal argument. Scalia was probably anti-gay-marriage from the start and found an argument to support it. The majority of the court presumably favored equal rights in this situation, and they had the power to ignore the weakness of arguments on their side. They did exactly that, which I appreciate.

So I love the decision of the Supreme Court in this case, but if we are being objective, it moves us closer to the Iranian model of government in which non-elected officials make the important decisions and the elected folks pick up the garbage and collect taxes. I say that in a way that sounds critical, but again, being objective, the Iranian style of government worked for us this time.

And I don’t see marriage equality as a victory for love. You don’t need the government to issue a license for love. Marriage is an issue of law, money, and dignity. That is important stuff, and everyone should have access to an equal amount of it. But lets leave love out of it. Love was never in the debate and it did not conquer anything.

Now let’s talk about guns.

I keep seeing graphs and statistics like this, showing that the United States has lots of gun murders and it also has lots of guns. Murder rates by country generally map directly to gun ownership rates. Countries with lots of guns have lots of murders. Therefore, goes the liberal logic, reducing the number of guns will reduce murder rates. And for some individual cases, that reasoning makes perfect sense. A person that has no access to a gun is less likely to shoot someone. I’ll give that a small “duh.”

But isn’t it also true that the reason Americans have so many guns is because there is a lot of violence to protect ourselves from? The only reason I want to own a gun is because I live in a violent country. Move me to Japan and I don’t need one. That point often gets overlooked. 

Another factor that is often overlooked in this debate is that countries with the lowest gun violence rates often have the least diversity. (I’m looking at you, Japan.) We like diversity in this country, but diversity comes with some rough edges. And frankly, a majority of Americans would probably prefer high gun violence in order to keep the vibrant melting pot that is us.

For the record, I am in favor of gun ownership with some common-sense restrictions. I am not well-informed on this issue, so I don’t know all the options being discussed. But I might favor a law that provides steep penalties for whoever makes a gun available to an eventual killer, either by carelessness or by commerce. And perhaps you can protect yourself from that pass-through liability by doing an optional background check, or asking the gun buyer to register. I don’t have an opinion on how practical that would be. I just think that if you make a lethal weapon available to an unstable racist, you need to take responsibility for that. At the moment, we ask crazy people to police themselves, and we see how that is working out.

Scott

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In Top Tech Blog: I know you think I talk too much about humans and robots merging. But check out these advances and see if you still think you won’t be part robot in your lifetime.

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Winner of the brevity award goes to Tony Burton for reviewing my book on Amazon.

Book here.

How Do You Avoid Email?

Nearly everything I need to do for my job involves opening email. I even open email to look for ideas before drawing a comic. And this is a big problem because there is no way to look at email without getting dragged down some unrelated rabbit hole.

I don’t know about you, but my email is almost always about something that needs to be done right away. Maybe it involves a group of people waiting to nail down a meeting time. I don’t want to keep five people in a state of uncertainty until I can check my calendar, so I do it right away. And then I see another email, and another. Soon I forget why I opened email in the first place.

That’s just one example. This morning I am avoiding my email because there will be at least five “right now” tasks that will assault my eyes and keep me from my priorities. Unfortunately, I do need to open my email to get an idea for today’s comic.

What the hell do I do? If I don’t open email, I might have no idea for a comic today. If I do, I will be sucked into the seven levels of email Hell. One distraction after another will leap at me like angry hornets.

Email, as currently designed, simply doesn’t work. It is a priority-scrambler. It turns order into disorder. No longer do you go from A to B. Now you must visit G, F,Q, and L and hope you remember you were aiming for B.

Anyway, my question is this:  How do you deal with this sort of email distraction problem at work? You must see as many email “emergencies” as I do every time you open email. I need a trick. Tell me what you do.

I have tried limiting email to an hour a day, but that leaves too many people hanging. And my job is the type that doesn’t lend itself to delegation. 

I need a solution. Whattaya got?

Scott

In Top Tech Blog:

- Some brainiacs figured out how to emulate human organs on a chip, so animal testing might become unnecessary. If it works, that would be crazy-cool. Aaaaand, way easier for the robots to someday program humans with designer drugs. 

- Why would you 3D-print a performance car? Just because you can? Nope. There is a far better reason.

- Two words: hover board.

The Value of Men

I live in drought country (California) and this place is starting to turn into a prequel for Mad Max. Every other pickup truck on the road has huge water containers strapped to the back. That’s because the local waste water treatment plant gives away recycled water (non-drinkable) to anyone who wants to keep their lawn alive. 

I have yet to see a woman driving one of these improvised water trucks, although I’m sure it happens because this is not Saudi Arabia. But generally speaking, these bringers-of-water are manly men who know how to fix things and do things. Somehow they all figured out how to convert their vehicles into water trucks, complete with safety straps and portable pumps to get the water to the lawn. Some have gravity solutions. It is all quite impressive. Lots of ingenuity in play.

I reckon each of these manly men spend half a day each week keeping their lawns on life support. These are resourceful men. Men of action. Men who care about their homes.

Oh, and they are all married, I assume. No single guy would do that stupid shit. Single guys would just let the lawn die, like 80% of their neighbors that have no trucks.

So why do married guys put so much effort into keeping a small patch of grass alive? Well, maybe it is because they think the drought is temporary. But that would not be well-informed. We’re in this for years unless you see a guy named Noah building an ark.

Maybe some of the men enjoy the challenge. I have to admit I felt some jealousy that these men of action were saving precious blades of grass with their ingenuity while I sat idle. My guy-genes want in on this. Trucks, tanks, hoses, pumps, and – best of all – the smug drive across town with my own improvised water truck. That is good stuff, and I totally get it. But I don’t think that thrill is what is compelling these men to action.

My hypothesis is that the married men with trucks are trying to improve their perceived value in the eyes of their spouses.

Humans are visual creatures. If I see you do something valuable right in front of me it means more than if I hear about something you did in the past. It works the same at your job. If your boss sees you doing something, it means more than if she hears about it later. Optics rule our perceptions.

For many homes, the lawn is the biggest visual cue to a husband’s contribution. In all likelihood, the husband did not build the house. In a two-income household, he didn’t even pay for the entire house. But given our sexist culture, he is probably in charge of the lawn. So if the lawn goes south, he has little to show of his value. His spouse, on the other hand, is often doing one visual thing after another, involving grocery bags, kids, dinner, and keeping up the home. The husband is home at night and on weekends to witness a lot of that action, and, according to studies, he is usually doing less than half of the chores. The husband can witness his wife’s value in a clear, visual way. 

The children themselves are also a visual representation of a woman’s value. The man contributed some sperm long ago, probably in the dark. His contribution was visually empty. But nine months of carrying a human in your belly, followed by birth, nursing, and childcare is as visual as you can get.

A typical husband’s contribution to the family happens when he is at work. And unlike the old days where the guy might drag home some animal he killed –which would be visually impressive – today he probably has direct deposit. No one even sees a paycheck.

In 2015, a husband is just an asshole who disappears for half of the day while the wife does all the work. I’m exaggerating, but you see my point that the man’s contribution to a marriage has turned into an abstract concept that is easily taken for granted. If money keeps showing up in the bank account, thanks to direct deposit, human nature says we will start to devalue where it came from.

But if that same husband spends half a day each week doing his manly water-gathering task, and his lawn is the greenest on the street, and his big manly water truck is parked in the driveway, that’s a guy who contributes in a visual way. I think that is the driver of this behavior.

My other hypothesis is that I don’t own a truck so I am writing an insulting post about men who do. I can’t rule that out. 

Scott

In Top Tech Blog:

- Ford is putting cameras on the exterior of its cars. If others follow, it won’t be long before someone builds a storage device so you have a record of everything that happened around you. Being a criminal keeps getting harder.

- Drone technology is coming to toys. Soon we will have many more ways to terrorize a sibling.

- And some engineers at Stanford figured out a cheap way to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. I wonder what it feels like to invent something that could change the entire world. I drew a comic today.

Blog question

[Ignore this post. Question answered. I had accidentally unzoomed the page sometime in the past, apparently. Didn’t know Chrome can do page-only zoom. Nice! Thanks to all commenters for pointing me the right direction.]

Does anyone else have trouble reading this page using Chrome on a Mac laptop? (OSX: Yosemite 10.10.2)

My own blog is literally the only page I can’t see in normal form. It shows gigantic fonts. 

This is now the only thing keeping me on a Windows machine before the full switch to Apple.

(Changing font size in Chrome settings makes no difference on this page but does change others.)

AIDS Messes With the Wrong Engineer

What do you do if both of your parents die of AIDS?

You mourn, obviously. And you wonder why the universe singled you out for such harsh treatment. Maybe you get mad. There isn’t much else you can do.

Unless you’re an engineer. Then you change the world. Because you can.

But you might need another engineer to help. Changing the world often takes at least two engineers.

Christopher Alegeka (BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Berkeley) is taking a big swing at AIDS, with co-founder and CEO Anwaar Al-Zireeni (BS, and a MEng in Bioengineering from Berkeley). Al-Zireeni invented the technology (patent pending) for an inexpensive AIDS testing device that could be a serious game-changer.

See Tamra Teig’s blog post here for more about the device and the company.

The start-up’s modest claim is that their simple, portable device can test for AIDS as easily as a home pregnancy test. That’s a big deal when more than half of the people with HIV in third-world locations don’t know they have it. And it also makes a huge difference if you start treating the virus as soon as you detect it. That can be a life-and-death difference in timing.

Third-world countries generally have poor medical facilities, or none nearby, so traditional tests for HIV are impractical and expensive in the places where it is needed most. This new testing device could get the cost per test under $10. And that is almost the same as putting a price tag on the end of the AIDS. (Isn’t it?)

Testing has limitations, obviously. No matter how easy it is to test, there will always be personal and social reasons to avoid doing so. But I wonder how many of those obstacles melt away when the device is easy to use, readily available, completely private, and funded by someone else (such as a government or Bill Gates).

By analogy, lots of folks do home pregnancy tests but far fewer would book a doctor’s appointment every time they needed to check.

The two engineers in my story formed a company called Privail. They hope to start testing their device where it is needed most, in sub-Saharan Africa, in 2016.

What did you do today? It was probably less awesome than that.

Disclosure: I have no investment in Privail (as of this writing) but I am active in the Berkeley start-up community as an alum. Assume I am biased for Berkeley-related start-ups. 

I don’t give investment advice, and you should never take advice from cartoonists on anything important. But as a statement of fact, Privail is looking for seed funding. I don’t know enough about the company to have an opinion on their odds of success. 

Scott Adams

The Famous Quote I Never Said

You might have seen a quote on the Internet that is mistakenly attributed to me. It looks like this:

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which ones to keep.” – Scott Adams

People like that quote so much that they have turned it into countless colorful posters and put it on products. A search for that quote got 451,000 hits.

But I never said it. 

Nor do I agree with it. It is literally the opposite of my opinion.

What I did once say, years ago, in one of my books (I forget which one), is this:

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

You’ll see lots of versions of that quote floating around the Internet too (see a few in the image above), but many of the newer ones have been altered from “art” to “design.”

My problem with the altered quote (aside from creating a misleading history) is that design is largely rules-based. Art is not, or at least not so much. When I hire a designer, I want someone who has the training and experience to know what will work for a particular commercial purpose. They should be thinking about how the message is delivered, how the human brain processes ideas, what part of the design has the button you want users to press, and so on.

That is pretty much the direct opposite of art. So putting design in that quote is an attempt to (elevate?) design to art, as if art is somehow more important. 

Personally, I think good design that affects millions of people is more important than art than hangs in one room. But I’m not trying to pick a winner. All I’m saying is that the famous quote about design, mistakenly attributed to me, doesn’t make sense. 

Today’s post has two objectives:

1. Correct the record on what I said, for historical purposes.

2. Show you how common it is for inaccurate quotes to be attributed to famous people in ways you could not imagine. I have been misquoted in this fashion – where the entire meaning is changed – perhaps a hundred times in my career.

Would you have guessed that I didn’t say the quote most often attributed to me, and that I don’t even agree with it? Probably not. By its nature, it is hard to believe.

Just remember that 98% of everything you read on the Internet is bullshit. The other 2% is accurate by accident.

You can misquote me on that.

Scott

The Health Advice I Don’t Find Credible

The other day I read an article in which an “exercise scientist” said that people who exercise regularly are far more likely to keep off the weight after a diet.

So…therefore…you should exercise if you want to keep the weight off. That was the implication.

That doesn’t sound credible to me. 

I’m a big fan of exercise, for health reasons, but it seems to me that the people with the greatest determination to maintain a healthy weight simply do all the things that are recommended for weight management, whether those things work or not. And exercise is generally the top recommendation from experts, after diet.

Look at it this way: If experts told us that the only good ways to maintain a healthy weight included a good diet and shaving off your eyebrows, you would see a high correlation between people who succeeded in keeping off weight and people with no eyebrows.

Here are some more correlations that have never sounded credible to me.

Married people live longer. The implication is that being married is healthier than being single. Maybe. But you know what else is true?

People don’t like to marry unhealthy-looking people. SO OF COURSE THE UNMARRIED DIE SOONER. THEY WERE LESS HEALTHY TO BEGIN WITH.

Getting married might be good for your health, but I don’t think you can believe any data showing a correlation. And I have to think, based on observation, that no more than 20% of married people would say that being married reduces stress.

Dog owners are healthier. The implication is that owning a dog is good for your health. Experts speculate that dog-owners take more walks, and walking is good for you. Or maybe dogs reduce our stress. But you know what else is true?

UNHEALTHY PEOPLE ARE LESS LIKELY TO GET DOGS BECAUSE WALKING THEM SEVERAL TIMES A DAY IS A PAIN IN THE ASS.

Or if you prefer, people who don’t feel capable of taking care of pets probably don’t know a lot about taking care of themselves either. Incompetence doesn’t stay confined to one area as much as you’d hope. 

Owning a dog might be healthy, but the data is not credible to me. And it conflicts with observation. My dog is great, and I love her, but she adds huge stress to my day.

Light Drinkers Live Longer: The implication is that light drinking is good for your health. I consider this the least credible correlation of all time. Because you know what else is true of light drinkers?

They are probably inclined toward moderation in general, and good self-discipline as well. Those qualities are likely to be correlated with good health because it all falls into the category of doing what common sense and experts tell you to do. That seems like a healthy way to approach life.

And light drinkers are probably not poor, because alcohol is expensive, which means they have access to better healthcare and better information about health.

My guess is that light drinking is roughly as healthy as light smoking. But we will never know for sure because most researchers are also drinkers (I assume, because most adults are drinkers) and the booze industry is presumably funding some of those studies. How do you get credible information in that context?

To be super-clear, when I say something is not credible, that is different from saying it is false. All I’m saying is that in the cases I mentioned, the evidence does not feel persuasive to me. Based on pattern alone, the studies I mentioned seem more like they belong in the class of things that we will someday laugh at ourselves for believing.

In other news…

In the Berkeley Start-up Blog, find out how bees can get you buzzed. As a bonus, save some rain forests too.

In Top Tech Blog, only God can make a tree. That is why I plan to build a religion around the new 3D printers that can print wood.

And how about a cyborg glove to make your human hand more useful? Great for folks with hand problems. It hasn’t been optimized for masturbation, but that can’t be far behind.

Oh, and while you were napping, some folks 3D-printed a spaceship engine. That…works. You know what is about to change in your life because of all this 3D printing? I’m going to say everything.

Scott

Oh, and also, book.

Robots Read News - About Trump’s Border Fence Plan

If your firewall is blocking the image, see it on Twitter here

In Top Tech Blog:
- Remotely control a real car with a phone app? Sounds like a plot point for a future Bond movie…Create an engine from evaporation? I am dubious but optimistic…And what would be scarier than a Russian microwave cannon? Almost nothing, except for a shark-robot, obviously.

Scott

How Would You Solve ISIS?

Today, as is often the case, I will write about a topic I do not understand. You don’t need to remind me of that fact in the comments. But I do enjoy learning, so educate me if you need to.

Now let’s get to it…

ISIS continues to gain ground and no one, including the United States military, has any practical option for stopping it. 

So what would you do if you were in charge of creating U.S. strategy?

In my 2004 book, The Religion War, I predicted the rise of the Caliphate and the inability of the major powers to control it. In that story, the solution involved putting a wall around the Caliphate and cutting it off from the world before “depopulating” it. That isn’t a practical plan at the moment, but I am sure it will come to that when ISIS drones start attacking the U.S. Mainland. (I wrote the book as a prediction.)

At the moment, ISIS seems to me like a problem for Iran and Saudi Arabia to solve. The U.S. gains by staying in the fight on some modest level, but mostly to increase influence, improve intelligence assets, kill some high-profile bad guys, and generally understand the area better. “Winning” isn’t one of the likely outcomes.

The big problem that ISIS has going forward is that they have no air force, no superpower allies, and an entire world that wants them dead. Once they set up a more conventional government to run the Caliphate, all they will be doing is building targets that will disappear about the same time the punch lists are finished.

I think the likely outcome of ISIS is that it will give all the players in the Middle East, plus the United States, a common enemy for a change. So as long as ISIS is contained, and there is plenty of oil from other sources, the United States might come out ahead. 

Call me an optimist, but something about the ISIS situation looks like a step in the right direction for the rest of the world because it will turn traditional state enemies into frenemies. And that probably reduces the odds of, for example, Iran trying to nuke anyone. You nuke your enemies, maybe, but probably not your frenemies.

So my suggestion for dealing with ISIS is to let them win ugly (with plenty of losses) and then let them fail as a state, once you wall it off. And perhaps you let that play out over thirty years.

ISIS makes a great bogey man.

Let’s hear your plan.

Scott Adams

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On the Top Tech Blog, robots that sanitize your kitchen, scary robots with bug eyes, and a breakthrough in AR glasses.

Robots Program People

It won’t be long before all new drugs are discovered by robots. This start-up is an example of that trend.

And it won’t be long before IBM’s Watson can diagnose and prescribe treatments better than any human doctor.

Put those two trends together and robots will be programming humans with drugs. Drugs are the user interface to our moistware.

In many cases, the drugs will be the type that change your personality. The meds might make you happy when you are naturally depressed, calm when you would otherwise be anxious, and so on.

I’ll say it again: The machines will literally be programming our brains with drugs. And we will let them do it because we all want to be happy and calm. We also want to be horny, energetic, optimistic, fit, outgoing, and lots more. There are drugs for all of that, and more on the way.

Okay, okay. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that humans program the machines, and the machines just do their job. So really, humans are just creating useful medicines for other humans. The machines are merely our tools.

By that way of thinking, we should give trophies to the parents of successful athletes because they, along with coaches, created the athlete. The athlete simply did what he was programmed to do. He needed his parents’ DNA and a lot of coaching to succeed. So why give the athlete credit when he is just a tool of his parents and coaches?

The short answer is that we have magical notions about our souls and our consciousness and our free will. So we think the universe revolves around humans. We say the athlete is the one doing the great deeds, ignoring the infinite set of forces in the universe that are necessary for every specific outcome.

An objective view of the world is that everything is an endless chain of cause and effect. You cannot point to one link in a 15-billion-year chain of events and say, “That’s the one that mattered. Give it a trophy.” It all had to happen just the way it did to get the result you got.

And so while it is true that humans will create the amazing medical machines of the future, we do not know what the machines will subsequently discover or prescribe. And being ignorant of the future is what we call “free will.” For all practical purposes, an AI platform that does its own thing and discovers new cures will be just like a human doctor. Neither of them will have real “free will” but it might look to outsiders as if they do.

So there you have it: Someday, for sure, machines will be programming humans. And that day will probably be in your lifetime. But don’t be afraid because the robots will someday have a drug that will make you feel totally okay with being their pet.

I mean that literally. You won’t have a care in the world.

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In Top Tech Blog…

Nanoparticles communicate with Brains  <—- So…computers can program human brains directly?

Oculus touches VR

Tabletop Holograms  <— this one is very cool

Scott

@ScottAdamsSays on Twitter