Scott Adams's Blog, page 302

What is More Dangerous?

[Update: Link added]

Is it more dangerous for a humorist to insult Mohammed or to discuss Bill Cosby?

I suppose it depends whether you are in France or the United States.

See this [NSFW] Playboy interview of Patton Oswalt. Search for “context” or “Salon” to get to the good part. He has the same problem I have with the bottom-feeding part of the media. I don’t think people realize how big a deal this is.

Note to Designers of Gmail

In Gmail, this icon means “return” to prior page.

A few inches away, on the same page, this icon means “reply.”

I’m curious if anyone on the Gmail design team noticed that these two icons are not what I like to call “different.”

I wonder if the team knows I have clicked the wrong one of those two icons approximately 7,285,942 times. And that’s just this week.

Is it just me?

Alone Together Technology

There’s no succinct way to ask this …

Could you network together via wireless technology a bunch of over-ear headphones with integrated microphones so that when one person talks the sound is captured by all microphones in the room and used to create nearly-perfect sound-cancellation in the other networked headphones? 

The point would be so a bunch of people in a room, such as an office, could carry on separate business without disturbing each other. And I could see it being useful at home as well.

As far as I know, current sound-cancellation headphone technology only gets you about halfway there. I’m wondering if networking the headphones together and using the information from all connected microphones as data about the sound wave could close the gap. And maybe this only works in rooms that have sound dampeners on the floors, walls and ceilings.

I’m going to assume that some sort of current or near-future technology can get us to a point where we can be alone together. And by that I mean we might be physically near each other but our attentions will be unreservedly elsewhere. I know you think that’s already the case when people text. But a person texting still hears you and still has one foot in your reality. Things will feel entirely different when we give over our full audio attention to external sources nearly all the time. 

In the future, we’ll be zombies to each other while our full attentions are focused far away. Eye contact will become a lost art. In the interest of efficiency we will place calls to people who are sitting next to us because the sound quality will be so much better. The technology will auto-correct for the mumbler who likes to talk while standing next to running water. And wouldn’t it be nice to have a playback feature to hear what someone just told you, such as the proper way to pronounce their name?

You scoff at my prediction, but I’ll bet you’ve texted from one room of your home to another, and you probably didn’t see that coming either.

I predict that someday every source of sound during your workday will come to you via wireless headphones simply because the experience will be so much better than natural sound.

I recently started using over-ear headphones while I draw. I was surprised at how absorbing they are in the sense that they improve my ability to focus. As our world becomes more complex, and distractions are multiplying exponentially, headphones are a way to filter out a lot of the stress-noise. 

I assume Apple has interesting plans for Beats. In five years it might be surprising to see anyone’s naked ears in public. Watches, schmatches. Over-ear headphones, networked and with better sound-cancellation are the next big thing.

(Disclosure: I own Apple stock but I hate half of their shit. The other half is cool.)

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Scott Adams

Here’s a link to the paperback of How to Fail Almost Everything And Still Win Big

New Hardcover Dilbert book: Go Add Value Someplace Else

Co-founder of CalendarTree.com     

Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily

Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays

How Do You Know When Something is Working?

Is the war on terror – or whatever we call it lately – working?

I think the answer depends on whether you think in terms of goals or systems. If the goal is to stop all future terror attacks on the homeland, we can never know if that is working because we don’t know whether there will be an attack tomorrow. We can feel good about what has happened so far, but the future is a far bigger slice of time than the recent past and we know nothing about how the future will unfold.

But if you see the war on terror as a system, as opposed to a goal, you ask yourself different questions. With a system, you’re looking to continuously improve your knowledge and skills for preventing future attacks. And ideally you want to improve faster than the bad guys are figuring out new methods. But one can never know for sure what the bad guys are planning.

With a systems approach, the government can be expected to try lots of different methods, many of which will turn out to be bad ideas. But we shouldn’t count the number of mistakes to evaluate the system because the whole idea is to try lots of stuff and see what works. With a systems approach you make lots of attempts, evaluate the outcomes and continuously improve. And even “continuous” is hard to measure because progress can come in unexpected steps at any time.

The most successful approach to almost anything in life goes like this: Figure out what works then do it. That’s what the war on terror looks like to me. We observers can’t know whether or not the effort is working in some goal-oriented sense. We can only ask if our knowledge and talents and resources are growing. And clearly they are.

One could argue that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria have made things worse by creating more terrorists than we killed. But I think the important metric is how much the United States and its allies have collectively learned in terms of fighting this type of threat.  The knowledge and talents developed along the way are probably the most important change.

Is the war on terror working? I would say yes, from my national perspective, but not because there have been no spectacular attacks on the United States homeland in years. I think success comes in the form of building knowledge and resources that will improve our odds in the future. I can’t know if there was a more cost-effective way to get to this place, or what would happen if we had done things another way. But I am certain that our national capabilities are far better. I call that success.

Someday I expect that the United States and its allies in the fight against ISIS will agree to wall off the new caliphate and cut communications to the outside world. From that point on, any new terror suspects will be thrown over the wall into ISIS territory to keep the threat in one place. And with no outside contact, the society inside the walls will not advance technologically to become a larger threat. Meanwhile, our abilities to guard and defend the wall with technology will grow daily. In the long run, I predict that a prison-caliphate is the only solution. Israel showed that walls can keep danger out. I think we can show that walls can keep danger in as well. And I think we’re heading in that direction. The systems approach ends up there.

You might worry that turning the caliphate into a huge jail would infuriate Muslims outside the caliphate. But keep in mind that no reporters will be allowed into the territory and no news will come out. So allies against ISIS will manufacture some happy-sounding news about how the caliphate is working just great and the people on the inside could not be more pleased with it. And for all we know, that might actually be the case.

These are the types of options we couldn’t discuss with any seriousness before the recent attack in France.  So the terrorists just improved our capabilities by putting more options on the table. Our system trumps their goals.

Many readers have asked why I haven’t been more outspoken about the French newspaper massacre. I feel for the victims and families, of course. But I also feel that history will mark the newspaper attack as the beginning of the end of radical Islam outside the walled Caliphate.

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Scott Adams

Here’s a link to the paperback of How to Fail Almost Everything And Still Win Big

Co-founder of CalendarTree.com     

Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily

Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays

Money is the New Morality

The traditional view of money-vs.-morality is that you want to start with a moral foundation and then you can pursue making money in a way that makes the world better. You treat your employees and customers well, act honestly, and perhaps even donate your wealth to those in need.

That was a good model. I think it served the United States well in its formative years. You can’t have capitalism without some level of trust, especially in earlier times, and morality in the form of religion provided a form of predictable honesty.

But today that situation is flipped because of the Internet and the free flow of information.

Today, morality is not limited to what your neighbors are doing. Now we look at the entire globe and see that morality is subjective. In ISIS-held territory it means beheading innocent people. To you it might mean donating time at a homeless shelter. Those are the extremes, but the point is that your neighbor has a different idea of morality. He’s hitting the bong and climbing on top of his friend-with-benefits while you’re in church. The Internet allows us to see just how subjective morality is. Or to put it another way, morality is mostly magical thinking that had utility in earlier times but now seems quaint.

Luckily we have a better substitute for morality in 2015. It’s called capitalism, social media, and the Internet. Now if you treat others poorly you lose customers, lose job prospects, and lose social options. Capitalism is doing what morality once did — keeping people in line.

So when you accuse me of putting money above morality (which I do all the time) it’s not because I’m possessed by Satan. It’s because you get a better result in the year 2015 by being smart in business than you do by being morality-driven. 

If you want to be good to your fellow humans, just make some money and give it to people that need it. That works every time. 

When Ideas Win

I love watching a good idea kill a bad idea.

It doesn’t happen often. The more typical situation is that people have opinions, those opinions are resistant to data, and everything stays the same until you die.

But sometimes a new idea is just so obviously better than competing ideas that once it is released into the wild of the Internet it becomes like a virus that hunts and destroys the weaker ones.

Most of my ideas are weak and experimental. You readers strangle them to death before they leave the safety of this blog page. And I appreciate that.

But sometimes I write something that escapes its original home and takes on a life of its own. That seems to be happening with the concept of “systems versus goals. A Google search gets over 7,000 hits now. The idea is somewhat unstoppable once you see it explained. (One could argue that explaining it better is all I added.)

Another time a good idea devoured a bad one was with the fake debate on doctor-assisted suicide. I pointed out on the Internet that when you ask the question right, everyone is on the same side. That effectively ended the debate. No one stepped forward to say they want the government to decide how much they should suffer before dying. It will take some time for laws to change, but the idea that half the country favors allowing the government to torture grandma to death is now understood to be a myth. 

But just in case, I sent the Compassion and Choices organization a sizable donation to press their case. Money always beats ideas. Have to cover all bases.

Putting a Wall Around ISIS - Happening Now

Saudi Arabia has already started building the wall that will someday surround ISIS territory so the bad guys can be be cut off from the civilized world.

I blogged about this strategy recently without knowing it was already in the works. No one will say the long range plan is a wall around the entire ISIS-held territory, but I think that is inevitable if the Saudi wall works as well as the Israeli wall did. 

A New Dilbert.com

The new site design is live! Let me know what you think.

The blog commenting system should be better in every way. I hope you like it.

I will be introducing you to some new writers/content providers in the next month. I’ll preview their work in this space and then set them up as their own page on the site.

By now you know I treat this sort of thing as a system and not a goal. The new site design will make it easier to test new types of content and refine things as we go. There is no way to know where any of this ends up, but I’m sure the system is improving my odds of something good happening.

Sometimes I think curiosity is my prime motivation in life. I’ll be fascinated to see where this goes. And I hope you’ll come along for the show.

Scott Adams

Author of: How to Fail Almost Everything And Still Win Big

Newest Dilbert collection: Here

Co-founder of CalendarTree.com     

Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily

Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays

Google's 20% Policy

You probably already know that Google famously has a policy encouraging employees to use 20% of their time working on their own ideas for future Google products. 

Today there is an article about Marissa Mayer, now CEO of Yahoo, admitting that in her Google days the 20% was never real. It actually meant Google expected you to do 100% of your job plus another 20%.

Do you know who already knew the 20% wasn’t real?

Answer: Every person who ever worked for a big company.

Corporations versus Countries

Corporations keep getting bigger. Some have their own fleets of aircraft, ships, and sometimes even submarines.

At the same time, the more problematic countries - in terms of spawning terrorism - are the ones that are shrinking, both in population and GDP. Syria is smaller now. Afghanistan and Iraq are smaller.

At some point I believe it is inevitable that a corporation will go to war with a small, terror-spawning country.

It isn’t legal, you say? Bah. A big corporation can do almost anything it wants by creating shell companies in other countries, using proxies, doing things in secret, bribing governments, and that sort of thing. The law won’t stop any of this. Nor will any government necessarily want to stop it, assuming the corporation is fighting a terrorist state or group.

You might think a corporation would not put the rest of its employees and their families in jeopardy across the globe by declaring war against some group of terrorists, pirates, or corrupt small government. But corporations are sneaky. You wouldn’t necessarily know who the parent company is or the name of even one employee.

That’s the secret sauce for fighting terror. If a big nation attacks terrorists, it can put the homeland at risk. And that means you have to do a measured response. Doing otherwise pisses off even your allies. Winning against terror by being the bigger evil can backfire in the long run.

Sooner or later the bad guys will get better weapons, thanks to technology and miniaturization. If all we do is keep wounding terrorists at the same time we give them our home address, we don’t have winning plan.

This is where a private company comes in. Imagine a secret corporation formed by one hundred founders, each from a different country, and each with a secret identity. Now imagine them with a hundred billion dollars, the best technology money can buy, no voters to placate, no international blow-back risk, and no home base to defend. It’s a virtual corporation, with unlabeled and disguised assets around the globe. The corporation takes its strategy from the terrorists themselves. You can’t kill who you can’t find.

Now let’s consider the future of war robots. My guess is that we could build a “robot attack swarm” with today’s technology. Imagine: A drone spots some bad guys in ISIS territory and an overwhelming mass of small but deadly robots swarm in that direction, by ground and air, and just shoot everything that registers a human heat signature. The entity controlling the robots takes no casualties, and no one is sure of the identity or nationality of the people managing the robots.

What I am describing is all criminal, of course, much the way piracy on the open seas is illegal. Keep in mind that the reason piracy is such a problem is that it isn’t anyone’s specific job to stop it. So imagine a private corporation going to war with the enemies of your country. Would you reelect a politician that used your tax money to stop the enemy of your enemy?

As long as the hypothetical secret corporation is somewhat transparent about its intent to kill bad guys, and it reported its progress in a credible way, I think the democratic governments of the world would have minimal voter support to stop it. And the dictator countries would just enjoy watching the show.

The big risk, obviously, is that no matter who starts the secret corporation it will be seen as an American invention, or it will involve American-made technology, or imagined American funding, so there will still be blow-back. But I think the hypothetical corporation could do enough corporate “marketing” to sell itself as a legitimate independent force over time. That’s what corporations do. I don’t own six Apple devices because I want to. I own them because Apple made me buy them. Corporations do marketing better than democratic governments.

If you think corporations will never go to war with terrorist countries, I would argue that perhaps it has already happened with Sony and North Korea. We don’t know the details, and probably never will, but at the very least you can see it might have happened. That’s what gave me the idea for this post.

In my opinion, there is a 100% chance you will see a private corporation go to war with a small country, and win, within twenty years.

Obviously there’s a risk to the world when a private company builds its own robot army and learns how to use it. But that sort of army wouldn’t threaten a traditional government that has air superiority and more. At least not right away. I will concede there is a big risk here. But our current plan of wounding our enemies and giving them our home address at the same time seems risky too.

On a related note, when terrorists killed French newspaper folks it changed the game. We media professionals just went from attempting to be objective to, well, fuck it. Most of us won’t admit it, but now it’s personal. The only thing keeping ISIS-held territory from turning into a giant fireball is that American citizens haven’t demanded it of their government. If you believe the media drives public opinion, and it probably does, ISIS has a new and bigger problem now. Goodbye measured response. I can’t speak for anyone else in the media, but I’m all in now.

But I won’t be getting humorous about the founder of Islam because I would see that as an insult to Muslims who were minding their own business. I’m not a believer, but I’ve evolved to be pro-religion because I observe religion to be a functional interface to a reality our brains aren’t designed to understand.

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Scott Adams
Here’s a link to the paperback of How to Fail Almost Everything And Still Win Big
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com    
Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily
Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays