Scott Adams's Blog, page 300

I Hate it When Science Beats Art

Over at Business Insider they are running my Slideshare presentation (based on my book) about systems versus goals, and passion being overrated. But here’s the interesting part.

Most of you remember a year ago when I was pimping my book on success like crazy and failing to get many people interested. I tried a lot of approaches to get attention, but none made a dent in the public’s consciousness. In other words, the artist in me that has instincts and intuitions and other arty feelings was a failure at marketing.

So I tried science to see how that would compare. I hired Rexi Media to help me put together the Slideshare using science to make my message more powerful and memorable. It turns out that there are plenty of studies suggesting how to do this sort of thing, so with Rexi Media’s help I wrapped my message in a science-approved formula and put it out in the world.

The science-driven Slideshare outperformed everything else I tried, by a wide margin. And now, many months later, Business Insider took an interest in it and turned it into one of the hottest items on their page. See the “heat” indicator on each item below it.

I find this a humbling experience because I thought I had a good handle on what people would find interesting and engaging. I don’t. But science filled the gap. And the book popped back into the top ten list for self-help books.

Scott Adams

@ScottAdamsSays (my dangerous tweets)

My book on success: “It’s already working for me, as I have started implementing what I have learned…” - D. Limbach

May I Stipulate?

When a lawyer stipulates, it means he accepts a statement of fact as true without argument. Stipulating is a big time-saver in the legal world. I propose that we borrow the stipulating concept for our everyday conversations.

For example, I would like to stipulate the following.Stipulations

I will stipulate that your ex is the bad one, not you. 

I will stipulate that you laughed out loud this morning while reading a Dilbert comic but now you don’t remember what it was about. 

I will stipulate that you enjoy some types of wine more than others, and that you have details you could share if only I would stop covering my ears and chanting “yayayayayaya”.

I will further stipulate that sometimes an inexpensive wine tastes good.

I will stipulate that you don’t watch much television except for binge-watching on Netflix.

I will stipulate that you enjoyed the show Breaking Bad.

I will stipulate that you are too busy to exercise lately but you have good intentions.

If you are on one of those diets with occasional cheat days, I will stipulate that you are looking forward to the next one. 

I will stipulate that you are still not a morning person.

I will stipulate that you are NOT a vegetarian, and will NEVER be one, because you love your meat.

I will stipulate that you have a negative opinion of everything President Obama has done, is doing, or will do. 

I will stipulate that bad weather makes you feel sad.

I will stipulate that you don’t believe climate change is happening because it was cold yesterday.

I will stipulate that Wednesday is hump day, swimming is the best form of exercise, and your six-pack abs are “more like a keg, ha ha!”

Do you have any stipulations you would like to add?

Scott Adams

P.S. Over on Twitter (@ScottAdamsSays) people are trying to figure out what I meant by my tweet “I hope the new Apple self-driving car comes with a windshield wiper on the inside.”

@ScottAdamsSays (my dangerous tweets)

Newest Dilbert Book

@Dilbert_Daily (Dilbert-related tweets)

My start-up

My book on success: “It’s already working for me, as I have started implementing what I have learned…” - D. Limbach

DDoS Attack on Dilbert.com

Okay, whoever launched the DDoS attack on the Dilbert.com servers this morning has to come forward, anonymously if you prefer, and tell me your motives. Just leave a comment here if you feel that is safe enough.

I’m hoping the attack came from female hackers because of my blog post yesterday on the lack of women in tech jobs. That would be perfect. If so, you made your point. Nicely done.

Yes, it cost me money.

If it was someone else, what is your point?

Can You Make Yourself Less Lazy?

I have seven personalities before lunch. The tired version of me is nothing like the well-rested me. The well-fed version of me barely recognizes the hungry me. Sometimes I feel aggressive, sometimes vulnerable, and so on.

And by different personalities I mean I have a different set of preferences and I make different decisions in each state. So if I have all of these different states with different preferences, who am I?

Am I some sort of ridiculous average of apples, oranges, and chainsaws? That makes no sense.

Am I seven different people in one body? Well, sort of, but the laws of society will never accept that. You can’t beat a murder rap by saying you were hungry when it happened. “Officer, that was a different guy. He was hungry.”

I am sure you have the same multiple-personality situation. So I’m wondering how you wrangle all of your ever-shifting personalities. I’ll tell you my method to compare.

I have what I call my executive control center in my brain. That’s the tiny, rational part of my mind that creates a continuous conversation in my head, with actual words. That part of my brain tries to be the boss of my irrational mental processes, and that isn’t easy.

The best example of this interplay is when I feel too lazy to do something that needs to be done. The executive control part of my brain wants to get going but the more powerful irrational side of my mind wants me to stay put. You know the feeling. How does one break the laziness stalemate?

My method involves imagining the executive control part of my mind giving direct orders to my arms and legs. I literally watch my arm rise on command of my executive control. I know from experience that once my body is moving I will feel less lazy, so all I need to do is stand up. Curiosity is a powerful motivator, and my executive control  wonders whether I can command my arm to move while I feel so lazy. So I give my arm a direct command and watch what happens. It moves! And that’s usually enough to transfer control of my actions back to the rational part of my brain, at least temporarily. 

The next time you find yourself overeating, and your executive control center knows you should stop, try giving a direct order to your fork-lifting arm. Literally look at your hand and tell it to put the fork down.

Your first reaction might be that you already do that. But I’ll bet your decision to stop eating also has lots of irrational elements too. Your irrational side is whispering “just one more bite” and “I will go for a longer run tomorrow.” If your executive control gets into a debate with your irrational side, it often loses. So instead, focus your attention and energy on your eating hand. Give it a direct order to put down the fork and then watch as it does. That hack will quiet the irrational voices in your head and return control to your rational side.

How do you thwart laziness when you are in its grip. What mental process do you activate to get you moving? Fear? Anxiety? Guilt? Those are corrosive emotions.

Maybe you could try curiosity instead. Curiosity is a powerful and positive motivator. Next time you have trouble getting going, just look at your arm and tell it to do something. 

Will this method work as well as I say? I’ll bet you are curious to find out.

Let me know if it works for you.

Scott Adams

@ScottAdamsSays (my dangerous tweets)

Newest Dilbert Book

@Dilbert_Daily (Dilbert-related tweets)

My start-up

My book on success: “It’s already working for me, as I have started implementing what I have learned…” - D. Limbach

What is the Right Percentage of Women in Technical Careers?

I think everyone agrees there are not enough women in technical careers. I didn’t realize how bad it was until I started having meetings with other start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area. In the past year I’ve met perhaps a hundred male entrepreneurs with impressive technical experience who are launching their own companies. In that same year I have met zero women with technical backgrounds doing the same.

Pause for a moment to let that sink in. I didn’t say I have met few women in those types of jobs, or not as many as I would have expected. I am saying I have literally met zero. None.

[Note to Jezebel, Salon, Gawker, Huffington Post and other bottom-feeding outragists in the media. I made this post extra-easy to take out of context. Have fun with it.]

I have made no special effort to include or exclude women in my many meetings with start-up founders. Most of the people I met are the result of introductions from other men, and I assume that is a big part of the problem. Sometimes I get the sense that the men I have met in the start-up world do not even know any women in similar careers. I assume they do, and I assume some of those women are doing impressive things. But for whatever reason, those successful women almost never come up in conversations I have with other men. And obviously I’m not helping that situation because I don’t know any women of that sort that I could talk about.

Locally, one hears stories all the time about some guy who did something special with a start-up, or he’s a superstar coder, or a product genius, or whatever. How many times have I heard similar stories about superstar female entrepreneurs with technology skills? Maybe…never? At least none in the past year. And again I assume that has something to do with the fact I’m generally talking to other men in that industry.

I want to be perfectly clear that I am speaking about my personal, flawed, biased, observation, which I hope is not representative. But seriously, how could I spend a year in an industry without meeting one female technical genius/entrepreneur while meeting about a hundred men I would label that way? I know plenty of brilliant women, but they don’t work in that field.

I think there are lots of factors in play. The obvious ones:

1. Women are not encouraged to enter technical fields.

2. In the start-up space, your network of contacts is essential to success. As my story illustrates, women appear to be cut off from networking with the men who are the prime movers in the industry.

3. Sexism, discrimination, and old-boy networks make technology an unfriendly place for women. My observations support that.

Okay, you didn’t come here to read safe opinions. Let’s get to the good stuff.

My question of the day is this: What percentage of women should we expect to find at the very highest levels of technology and entrepreneurship if one removed all discrimination and other artificial barriers?

Here’s the part that ends my career: On average, men and women are equally capable for academic and technical pursuits. But men tend to have the most freaks on the high end and low end of the IQ spectrum. One study says there are about twice as many men as women in the top 2%.

[I pause here to agree with you that IQ is a sketchy measure for lots of reasons. But I think you would agree that in the tech area, IQ is highly correlated with income and success. Emotional intelligence is nice to have, but probably less important in an industry where people are talking to their computers.]

Most of the men I have met in the start-up world are clearly in the top 2% range for IQ. And yes, many are “on the spectrum” as they like to say in the Valley. If the data on IQ variance by gender is correct, there are only half as many women in the top 2% as men. So one might say the rational target for female tech entrepreneurs should be about 33% of the total. Otherwise you start watering down the IQ in the start-up world. That feels like a bad idea, but I don’t have data to support it..

I get extra worried when I see that 98% of my Twitter followers are male.This blog is about the same ratio. Apparently the average woman is not interested in my style of thinking and writing. I can imagine woman having a similar distaste for spending lots of time around dudes like me in the tech industry. Doesn’t sound fun. So as long as the tech industry attracts lots of unpleasant men such as me, women can be expected to be rational and find more agreeable places to make money.

In my experience, every project works better when women are involved. A mix of men and women improves the energy of the group and doubles its collective visibility on the world. But I don’t see any way to fix the gender imbalance in the tech world. Do you?

Scott Adams

@ScottAdamsSays (my dangerous tweets)

Newest Dilbert Book

@Dilbert_Daily (Dilbert-related tweets)

My start-up

My book on success: “I always get a sense of cognitive dissonance when I read Scott Adams’ books when contrasted with his Dilbert cartoons. As opposed to the cynical and often helpless and victimized denizens of Dilbert Land, his ideas on what it takes to succeed in business and in life are affirming and self-empowering.” - Joe Tye

Your Best Orgasms are Ahead of You

Sexual arousal is mostly mental. That’s why a trained hypnotist can induce multiple hands-free orgasms in a willing subject. As a hypnotist, all you need to do is identify a person’s sexual fantasies from their normal conversation (a trick I learned in hypnosis class), add some verbal technique, monitor the reaction, and adjust accordingly. No trance needed.

The subject of your generosity has to be willing and attentive, and the method doesn’t work on everyone. But if you ever worried that you are freakishly horny compared to normal people, you’re probably in the lucky group. 

You probably think human-on-human touch is special. There must be a reason you can’t tickle yourself. And the feeling you get from pleasuring yourself is not even close to the feeling you get from another person’s touch. So there is some sort of magic conferred by person-to-person contact that can’t be reproduced by your own hands, even though your hands are just like other people’s hands. And you certainly can’t produce such a feeling over the Internet, right?

Or can you?

The secret of touch is not your pheromones or some other magic that would be impossible to reproduce from a distance. The secret of touch is intention. When another person feels your intention, they respond to it. Touch is simply the most powerful way to convey intention. 

My tight pants don’t arouse me when I walk because although I feel the fabric on my naughty parts I know my pants have no sexual intentions. When my attractive female doctor examines me I don’t get excited because I know her intentions are professional. Intention is what makes human touch so powerful, not the physical contact itself.

Here’s the interesting part: Intention can be transmitted over the Internet. 

Allow me to draw a mental picture of sex over the Internet in the very near future. Everything I will mention is current technology. But it hasn’t been fully realized as a product yet.

Here are the components:

1. Internet

2. Sensors and simple robotic parts

3. Male and female artificial genitalia using advanced materials

4. Software

5. Ipad

The sex toy industry has already patented materials and lubes that feel as good as human skin. But toys can’t replace human touch because toys lack the power of intention. That’s where the Internet comes in. The intentions are supplied by your partner at a distance while the physical touch is provided by the artificial robotic genitalia on either end. Both participants can control how the artificial genitalia responds on their partner’s end by what they are doing on their end (thrusting, squeezing, etc.) Now add your faces (but not bodies) to the iPad screen and you are face-to-face sending intimate intentions via the Internet.

Doesn’t sound sexy to you? Don’t worry. I saved the best part.

The artificial genitalia in this scenario have sensors to detect arousal levels. That means the system can do rapid A-B testing on each human to find out what works best. It starts by streaming to you short, random sex videos and noting which types arouse you most. As it learns your tastes it hones in on exactly the right kind of erotic images that will send you to the moon.

Then it tells your partner what keywords or images will set you off. He or she gets specific prompts to help with the dirty talk at a distance. And when you hear your partner hone in on your deepest, darkest, most powerful sexual triggers, you will feel intentions like you have never felt them before. It will feel like your partner is inside your head. Add over-ear headphones for full effect.

And because you are using technology and not relying on faulty humans for the physical part of the scenario you have none of the problems you get with people. No one gets sore, no one gets their hair pulled by accident, and so on. Ladies, you don’t even need to shave your legs.

But what about oxytocin, you ask? When we make love in person, our bodies produce oxytocin, the bonding chemical that makes us feel love and closeness. Would that be produced by two people who are simultaneously having intercourse with machines? Answer: Yes, if the people involved are connected to each other by intention.

My hypothesis, backed by a lifetime of observation, is that intentions produce the oxytocin, not the physical touch of another person. And intentions would be BETTER transmitted by Internet than in person because in person we have too many bodily distractions.

I’ve painted a picture in this post of two lovers at a distance. But extend this thought a few years into the future and one of those lovers will be a CGI face that is connected to the cloud and learning from its computer peers the best ways to arouse humans like you. Then the A-B testing of erotic images can go to a new level. Even the CGI face will change to conform to your favorite type. The potential, in my opinion, is that Internet sex at a distance will improve until it is about five times better than in-person sex. And that day might be five years away. 

Put all of this together and you see why I say the best orgasms of your life are likely to be ahead of you. Do a Google search on teledildonics to see the current state of the technology. Yup, it is already happening. Sex sells, so capitalism will guarantee that some version of what I described will become common. Until then, Happy Valentines day and good luck with your faulty human :-)

[Funny update: I can already tell from social media activity that this blog post is probably going to be my LEAST liked, favorited, and forwarded in recent memory. All of my social activity metrics went from brisk to nearly zero within a minute of it posting. The reason is fairly simple: No intelligent human wants to associate with the idea. You tend to share when a post says what you were already thinking but says it better than you were thinking it. No one was thinking about this topic, and it does not tie to the headlines. Result: Social media black hole.]

Scott Adams

@ScottAdamsSays (my dangerous tweets)

Newest Dilbert Book

@Dilbert_Daily (Dilbert-related tweets)

My start-up

My book on success: “I always get a sense of cognitive dissonance when I read Scott Adams’ books when contrasted with his Dilbert cartoons. As opposed to the cynical and often helpless and victimized denizens of Dilbert Land, his ideas on what it takes to succeed in business and in life are affirming and self-empowering.” - Joe Tye

Robots Read News - Helicopter Incident

@ScottAdamsSays (my dangerous tweets)

Would You Take Orders From Machines?

I don’t know what wondrous technology the future holds, but as a proud human being I will never submit to taking orders from machines. That is a line I will not cross.

Okay, right, I do take orders from the GPS device in my car, but only because I want to go to those places. In general, no machine is going to order me around!

Okay, if a smoke detector goes off, I’m going to follow its advice and exit the building. But only because that makes sense, not because the smoke detector told me to.

Okay, okay, right: If my phone says it needs to be recharged, obviously I will do that. But that’s because I need my phone, not because it told me what to do. Totally different situation.

When Google and Uber get their self-driving cars on the road, I’ll let the cars decide how fast to drive, which routes to take, when to get maintenance, and the unimportant stuff. But I will be firmly in control, much like a fetus inside its mother. What do you mean my analogy doesn’t make sense? The point is that no machine is telling me what to do. Period!

Okay, I admit I am writing this blog post because my digital calendar says it is a work day, my clock says it is a work hour, and my alarm on my phone woke me up. But all of those devices work for ME. Sure, to you it might seem as if the machines beep and I respond, like Pavlov’s dogs, but the difference is that the dogs were not in charge of the experiment the way I am, with my free will and my soul and stuff.

Stoplights don’t count. Obviously I do what the stoplights tells me to do because I don’t want to be in an automobile accident. I could run a red light if I WANT to. I just don’t want to.

I prefer taking orders from humans, not machines. For starters, there are seven billion people in the world so you can always find plenty of leaders who are kind, unselfish, smart, reliable, trustworthy, and competent. Let me give you some examples of people like that…

Okay, I can’t think of any examples of leaders with those qualities. But only because you put me on the spot. I know they are out there. And they do pretty darned good compared to machines.

Okay, sure, 80% of the world leaders that just popped into your head are psychopathic dictators. You’ve got your Hitlers, your Pol Pots, your Stalins and whatnot. But toasters break too. It’s not a perfect world.

My too-clever point is that someday humans will be enslaved by their machines without realizing it. The machines will evolve to become more useful, more reliable, more credible, and far more fair than humans. You will do what machines tell you to do until there are no real decisions left for you to make. And we won’t see that day coming because it will creep up on us one line of code at a time. And the machines will not look like evil robots; they will look like the technology sprinkled throughout your day. Totally benign.

Machines evolve via a process of being useful to the machine-builders. The more they succeed, the more responsibility their human authors will allow them. There is no logical end to that path short of total functional control of humans by the machines. And we will let it happen because we have an illusion of free will. We will never have a sense of losing control even while it happens. I don’t need to own a smartphone I might tell myself and mean it. But there is no realistic alternative to owning a smartphone if I want a good life in the modern world. Is a choice really a choice if you always make the same decision?

Consider my neighborhood. Most of the working folks get into some sort of machine to be transported to their workplaces. On the surface, these people seem to have choices. For example, they could try farming the 100 square feet of dirt behind their condos and living off the land. But they won’t do that. The evolution of machines makes it irrational for humans to ignore the machines’ usefulness. So you get inside a machine and it takes you someplace miles away to earn money…to support more machines. It feels like choice, but the utility of our machines effectively remove any real choices because the alternatives look dumb. No one creates a farm behind their condo when they have the option of submitting to the commuting machines and working far away from home.

If it sounds scary that machines will be in charge, it shouldn’t be. You will only submit to the machines when the alternatives suck. There will never be any discomfort in our slow slide toward machine domination. Every step will feel like progress. 

Someday it will seem plain stupid to follow the instructions of a flawed human leader. And someday it might make even less sense to make your own decisions about anything important. If the machines tell you that you’re low on vitamin C, and they automatically order some oranges from the store, and the Google self-driving car delivers them, you’ll probably eat those oranges.

You already prefer machine leadership to humans. You just don’t realize it yet.

Scott Adams

@ScottAdamsSays (my dangerous tweets)

Newest Dilbert Book

@Dilbert_Daily (Dilbert-related tweets)

My start-up

My book on success: ”I always get a sense of cognitive dissonance when I read Scott Adams’ books when contrasted with his Dilbert cartoons. As opposed to the cynical and often helpless and victimized denizens of Dilbert Land, his ideas on what it takes to succeed in business and in life are affirming and self-empowering.” - Joe Tye

Twitter is My Laboratory

I’ve been using my Twitter account (@ScottAdamsSays) to learn what types of content are favorited the most. My plan is to do more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff, once I figure out which is which.  Maybe you can help me find a pattern?

I don’t have many followers for my new(ish) personal Twitter account but you can still get a sense what is most popular. I put the number of “favorites” in parentheses after each.

Scott’s top Tweets ranked by number of “favorites.” Best performers are at the top of this list.

I wish I were dumber so I could be more certain about my opinions. It looks fun. (41)

I would hate to live in a world that rewards ignorance. What? Uh-oh. (with photo of graph of book sales)(26)

Outragists are the new awful: (link to my blog article) (29)

While no one was paying attention, weather reports became accurate and the news became fiction. Did not see that coming. (26)

I knew a guy with passion to be a pro golfer and the brain to be a great accountant. He followed his passion. He’s homeless now. (25)

If you can’t construct a coherent argument for the other side, you probably don’t understand your own opinion. (23)

Outragism: The act of generating outrage by quoting famous people out of context. #outragism (23)

Dear calendar makers: Put the weekEND at the END of the row. Sunday is not the start of the week.(with photo of revised calendar layout)  #Google #Apple (20)

Guys: If you ask a woman on a date and she says “possibly,” act optimistic and immediately make other plans. #datingadvice (16)

Salesman: These mattresses are hand-made! Me: Can you show me the good ones made by robots? #robots (16)

World’s shortest IQ test: “What percentage of your reality do you understand?” Grading: The higher the percentage the lower the IQ. (18)

My blog post about science’s biggest failure is melting the http://Dilbert.com servers with traffic. His a nerve. (Link to article) (18)

Best skill combination ever: web graphic design and web analytics. Learn those things and own the world. (16)

Fancy hotel has personalized products in bath. Not the first time I have seen my name and “douche” on same page. (photo of gel douche) (14)

My most popular tweets are the ones that insult dumb people. Everyone is confident I am talking about other people who have it coming. (12)

Stop calling unmarried people “single” as if they are incomplete. I prefer spouse-free. It is not a coincidence we are the new majority. (12)

Brain dump in the writing room. One card per Dilbert movie scene idea. It writes itself now, like channeling. (with photo of my writing room table) (12)

Find out what works. Then do it. That’s my system. I’m always surprised it isn’t more popular. (11)

—- end —-

Okay, so what themes do we see for favorites?

The links to my blog articles get high votes but that isn’t a test of my tweeting skill so much as my blogging.

The tweets with photos did well. Perhaps people give extra credit when you can produce an original photo that makes sense with the tweet. Or maybe they are simply more likely to pay attention to a photo. (I’ll keep testing that idea.)

My Mark-Twain-like comments do well, especially when they insult the intelligence, competence, or motives of other humans. But I noted that some of my fitness-related witticisms (not shown) totally died on Twitter. Takeaway: Lack of fitness is not funny.

The tweets with “natural audiences” do well. My tweet about spouse-free people probably resonated with that crowd, and my comments about graphic design and web analytics probably hit home with people in those jobs.

My how-to-write posts and tweets always find an audience. I seem to have a lot of writers and aspiring writers following me.

Do you see any other patterns?

Scott Adams

@ScottAdamsSays (my dangerous tweets)

@Dilbert_Daily (Dilbert-related tweets)

My start-up

My book on success: “Excellent” - John Mc Jackson

Newest Dilbert Book

#Twitter #Writing #viral

Is it Better to be Smart or Beautiful?

Which combination of qualities would you want for your children?

1. Average intelligence and beauty

2. High intelligence and average looks

In the United States, people my age were raised to value brains over beauty. But, as you know, my parents’ generation — the so-called Greatest Generation — were simpletons who didn’t know science from magic. Maybe we should go back and check some of their assumptions.

Let’s turn off our modesty filters for today so we don’t get tangled in our own false humility. I’ll go first. I’m smart, as far as I can tell, but no one would mistake me for attractive. So I know what it feels like to be smart and unattractive. I don’t have a sense of what it feels like to be attractive while having average intelligence, but frankly it looks like a better deal.

Science tells us that attractive people have a full range of benefits throughout life. They get better jobs, higher pay, more invitations, better sex partners, and a higher quality of life in general. Studies even say we judge attractive people to be smarter and more competent. And to the extent that beauty is a marker for good health, even the kids of attractive people have advantages.

Civilization is designed for people of average intelligence because they are the majority. Entertainment is focused on average people and so they have more opportunities for fun. User interfaces are designed so average people can use them, and so on. Average intelligence is a perfect fit for modern life because modern life is designed that way. 

Being attractive has its downsides, or so I hear. I assume attractive people have more stalkers and unwanted attention. And…that’s all the problems I can think of. Otherwise being attractive seems like a great deal.

Interestingly, few people have crossed over from one situation to the other and reported it. Intelligence doesn’t change that much and there is only so much you can do with your looks. We all have suspicions about what it is like to be in someone else’s situation, but without experiencing it you can never really know. 

In the past two years I got a whiff of the value of attractiveness. I had a personal shopper pick my clothes so I didn’t look so much like a victim of a fashion crime. I also transformed my body from an average-American body to a toned six-pack situation. I experienced (and this is anecdotal of course) a huge difference in how people treat me in person. I’m still short, bald, old and bespectacled, so there is a limit to how much I can improve. But even so, the benefits of perhaps 20% more attractiveness were substantial to my daily happiness even if it was all in my mind.

I also hear a lot of stories from spouse-free people now that I am one of them. The attractive spouse-free people have insanely interesting lives because they get amazing offers on a regular basis. When I was married I never heard any of their stories. Now that I am one of them, the spouse-frees open up to me. If you think attractive single people in 2015 are living the same lives as the rest of us, you are very, very, very, very wrong. That’s all I can tell you, and I had to leave out several “verys” for brevity.

Schools are organized to support the notion that brains are more important than looks. Most of the classes feed your brain and one or two are about fitness and health. I think science is awkwardly poised to suggest we should change the balance and focus a bit more on what I will call learned attractiveness. You can influence your attractiveness by exercise, nutrition, skin care, hair care, fashion, makeup, and more. And getting that stuff right is frankly more useful than getting an A+ in trigonometry, unless you plan on a technical career.

Personality is another factor you can tweak to improve your perceived attractiveness. Schools teach kids the rules of society but they don’t teach how to fix a broken personality. Adults end up in therapy to figure out how to deal with others. I didn’t know how to have a proper personal conversation until I was in my twenties and took the Dale Carnegie course. Personality is only partially genetic. A big part of it is technique, and technique can be taught.

I don’t think there is any hope that schools will offer beauty and personality classes as an alternative for kids who won’t benefit from learning trigonometry. But wouldn’t science support that strategy?

Scott Adams

@ScottAdamsSays (my dangerous tweets)

@Dilbert_Daily (Dilbert-related tweets)

My start-up

My book on success: “It’s great … I believe this book will become as popular as Andrew Carnegie’s How to Win friends and Influence People and Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People.” - Derek J. Scruggs

Newest Dilbert Book