Scott Adams's Blog, page 306

A Ride on the Creative Process

I know from the comments on this blog that many of you are interested in the creative process. Let me take you for ride in my head. I took this journey yesterday. It is still fresh in my mind so I can explain it.

Most new ideas are combinations of existing ideas. I'll start by describing the random thoughts that inspired one of the most powerful ideas I have ever had. We'll get to the idea itself at the end. I think this idea could cut the unemployment rate in half and turbo-charge the entire economy for generations. And the plan could be fully implemented by the people reading this blog.

No government needed. I know you like that part.

The other day I saw a Kickstarter fund for a sincere-looking fellow that wanted to fix his truck and move to a place with better job prospects. I liked his style. I prefer helping people that have a concrete plan. But a Kickstarter fund? It seemed sketchy. I don't know anything about this guy.

That made me think of Uber. They had the same problem of credibility because the drivers are independent contractors. But it didn't stop them.

Then I was thinking about eBay. I wasn't sure why. My subconscious sniffed some eBay connection in all of this. Maybe that would become clear later.

Then I was thinking of unemployment in general, and how the real problem is that people and jobs are in the wrong locations. We don't have a shortage of good jobs; we have a location problem.

Then I was thinking about an idea I had last year for allowing anyone to create online education courses. Each online teacher might specialize in just one small lesson within a larger curriculum that could be pieced together by the user for the ultimate teaching experience. And over time the best lessons would get voted to the top until the best teachers with the best lesson segments emerged in a sped-up evolution way. I didn't know at the time what that thought had to do with the guy and his broken truck.

Then I was thinking about new app ideas. I do that often, sometimes for my side job and sometimes just with friends. Whenever I see a problem I automatically wonder if an app can fix it.

Then it was Veterans Day. I was thinking how shitty it would be to return home from the service and try to find work.

All of those thoughts swirled around in my head for half a day and then went off wherever ideas go when you are not actively thinking about them.

Later that day, the ideas returned. But this time they were not individuals. They had somehow combined into a new idea - a hybrid of several ideas. And the idea presented itself to me in the form of an app, probably because my mind is organized that way at the moment.

If might be the most important idea of my life. If not, I'm sure you will set me straight in the comments.

Suppose we build an app that allows anyone to sponsor specific part of people's plans for moving to where the good jobs are.

Let's take the example of the individual that wanted to fix his truck and move where the jobs are plentiful. If the app existed, he would open it and start piecing together his plan.

He might start by specifying his existing skill set. That would bring up a map of the country with glowing hot spots showing where his skills are most in demand. Once he selects a target location, he specifies in the app what he needs to make it happen.
$5,000 for truck repairA place to stay at the destination end for one month (est.)Help putting together a good resume.$1,000 for travel and living expenses The app would then allow anyone to offer help for any part of the plan. But the plan would not become active until all the parts were pledged. And let's say a minimum requirement for the job-seeker is that he has a Facebook page and accepts as friends any serious helpers so they can check out his situation and maybe message his other friends to ask about character.

If the individual needs job training, the cost of training could be in his plan. That sort of plan has a longer horizon but it is still appealing because training works.

Each of us has different resources to offer this imagined job-seeker. I might have a spare room he could use for a month in return for mowing my lawn. You might be good at editing and improving resumes. Maybe someone in his town can fix his truck for the price of parts. Maybe someone has the truck parts he needs. For people that don't have any form of transportation, maybe someone is driving in the direction you are headed and wants to share gas expenses. Maybe I can't afford to fund all of the expenses for this particular job-seeker but I am happy to kick in $10 if other people do.

And let's say multiple people can bid on any part of a plan in which they want to help. I might offer a couch to sleep on for a month but you outbid me with a full guest room for two months. The plan can continue improving as it fills in its holes.

Once the journey begins, the app updates contributors on the physical location of the job-seeker and how the plan is going. The job-seeker could post photos of the journey to keep sponsors in the loop. If the plan falls apart at any point, such as not having a promised place to stay at the destination end, an alert goes out to everyone in the target area that a priority job-seeker is nearby, so someone can jump in to help.

Are you not yet convinced that this is a great idea? That's okay because I saved the best part for last.

The risk in this plan is not so much in the execution of the app, because we know how to make software of this type. The risk is in awareness of the app and in getting enough people excited about being sponsors. If we don't solve the awareness problem, the quality of the app is irrelevant.

So let's solve that.

Let's make the app for veterans only, at least to start. Later, if it works as hoped, it would be available for the general public.

A veterans-only job-finding app would be instantly popular. If I tell you that a random guy needs money for his truck, you shrug. If I tell you that a returning vet needs help with a concrete plan to get a good job, your wallet flies out of your pocket before your hand even touches it.

So we launch the service for vets first, and get all the goodwill and energy that the effort deserves. Later, when you release the app for the general public, you keep vets on some sort of priority plan within the app so they continue getting preferential attention.

I think you would need to build this app as a commercial enterprise just to attract the talent you need. And it should have a big name attached to it to scare away any smaller players that would muddy the waters. (My name isn't big enough for that space.)

I'm willing to put up $25K seed money for this app. But I would need to see a serious team in place to execute.

One of my systems for happiness involves always working on at least one project that can change the world for the better. This is my contribution for today.

Would it work?

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Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com     
Author of this book 

Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily

Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays

Phantom Logic

This is a post about my own cognitive dissonance. There is a strange little hole in my knowledge and I believe it is caused by some sort of psychological malfunction. I'll tell you where the hole is, and perhaps you can fill it in for me.

In my experience, which I fully understand to be selective memory, discussions about the existence of God generally go this way...

Atheist: blah, blah, blah

Believer: You can't explain how everything got here without God.

Atheist: You can't explain how God got here.

Believer: God has always existed.

Atheist: Why can't the universe always exist the same way as God?

Believer: I'm double-parked. Gotta run. Great talking to you.

That is literally my memory of perhaps a hundred conversations on this topic over a lifetime. When it gets to that last part, in which an atheist asks why the universe can't always exist the same way we imagine God to always exist, the believer usually realizes there was something he needed to do and excuses himself.

On the Internet, this can take the form of pointing to a link that doesn't answer the question, or changing the topic, or mentioning a book that explains it better, or failing to respond.

But I have no memory in which anyone stayed in the conversation and answered the question. Interestingly, I know that my memory of these situations could be false. Perhaps someone answered the question so convincingly that it rocked my worldview then cognitive dissonance set in and I literally imagined the conversation not happening. Science would say that could have happened.

So let's do an experiment. My hypothesis is that no one will make a serious attempt to answer the question "Why can't the universe always exist the same way as God?"

You may now prove me wrong.


[Update Minutes Later: Mystery solved. The problem IS on my side, in a sense. And by my side, I mean science. I hate it when my side does a shitty job of explaining something and in so doing spreads more ignorance than it resolves. For example, I think science-loving people are guilty of allowing this interpretation of the Big Bang Theory to become popularized:

Big Bang Poorly Explained: Once there was nothing. Then the universe appeared. We don't know why.

That sounds like a causeless explanation. Nature hates a vacuum, so religion fills in the gaps.

But a more accurate description of the Big Bang Theory (the cartoonist version) is more like this.

Big Bang Explained Slightly Better: Our universe appears to be expanding. We don't know why.

The better understanding of the Big Bang is that as far back as we can go, it appears that it was always smaller. At some degree of compactness and smallness we lose the ability to continue measuring or comparing. So what science knows is that shit seems to be getting bigger lately, as in the past 15 billion years or so. That doesn't speak to the question of a beginning.

Correct me if I am wrong on any of that, but it seems to me that we science-loving peeps have sucked at explaining stuff to . . . let's say . . . the tourists. Isn't some of the ignorance our fault? If your ideas have holes, you have to expect people to fill them in.

Or to put it another way, perhaps scientists should use the science of psychology and persuasion to get their message across instead of gluing together some facts and spraying them in the general direction of the ignorant. I think this is one of those situations in which it isn't anyone's job to explain science in ways that are scientifically crafted to be convincing. To my ear, half of all the scientific theories that I regard as probably true sound like practical jokes when a non-scientist explains them over a cocktail. Science has a problem in the message department.




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Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com     
Author of this book 

Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily

Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays

 

 

 

Researchers Accidentally Discover God

Some research-dudes in Denmark have expressed doubts about whether the so-called "God particle" (Higgs Boson) has really been discovered. The doubters say the experiments that allegedly found the God particle are not precise enough to know for sure.

Although the "God particle" is just a clever name, and has nothing to do with anyone's actual God, I have recently learned that the real, actual, literal God was discovered some time ago. The discovery doesn't get much mention in the article so you have to read between the lines.

To understand why I say the real God has been discovered, first you must know that something called techni-quarks are thought to be the fundamental bits of the universe. Humans, for example, are comprised of lots of different particles, but a techni-quark is just made of more techni-quark stuff. It has no parts that are different from the whole except in quantity.

Here's the quote from the article about techni-quarks that tells you God has already been discovered: "If techni-quarks exist, there must be a force to bind them together so that they can form particles," Frandsen said. "None of the four known forces of nature are any good at binding techni-quarks together. There must therefore be a yet undiscovered force of nature."

In my 2001 fiction book, God's Debris , I talk about a hypothetical fundamental particle and how someday we will understand that at the bottom of reality is nothing but one material (perhaps techni-quarks) plus the laws of probability. If that accurately describes reality, and I think it someday will, then here's the interesting part:

For all practical purposes, probability and God are the same thing. Both are cause-free forces that define the universe without over-specifying the details. Probability is the root cause behind motion, evolution, and eventually the writing of holy books.

In God's Debris I hypothesize in fiction form that probability is the only force that can never be understood or explained by science. And probability is the engine that drives every particle in the universe. Interestingly, probability looks just like intelligence if you back up far enough. Probability gave us natural selection and in effect "designed" every living creature through its rules. That's the same way humans create things: We try something and see how it works. If it doesn't work we discard it and try something new. That's evolution in a nutshell. And if it doesn't look like intelligence to you, I would say you have an overly romantic notion of what human minds are capable of. To me, human minds are just moist computers operating according to the laws of probability. Free will and intelligence are just illusion. You might argue that evolution is not an "intelligent" process, but I would argue that neither is anything else you do. Everything in the universe including our thoughts is nothing but techni-quarks bouncing around according to the laws of probability. Intelligence is an illusion, so we should not expect God to possess any of this illusion.

When I wrote God's Debris I imagined that science would someday discover that at the bottom of all reality is one fundamental piece of matter that conforms to the laws of probability to create every other piece of matter in the universe. That would be science's dead-end. Probability will never be understood. It is causeless and infinite. And because it is so consistent across time and space, one could say that fundamental force is the author of all we see.

I don't believe in a supreme being with a human-like personality because humans are, for the most part, fucked-up basket-cases, and it wouldn't make sense for an omnipotent being to have any of our flaws. But I do think science will someday hit a dead end and find that something - perhaps probability - just "is" and cannot be explained or changed. If you don't want to call that "God," I understand, but I also think we would be discussing semantics at that point, not concepts.

I'm overstating my case here, for fun. But I do think that someday science will hit a brick wall and realize that reality is nothing but one particle and a handful of simple rules of probability that cannot be further understood. If that isn't God, what is?

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Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com     
Author of this book  and also this one and this one

Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily

Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays

 

My Stalker Returns

My stalker is back.

Regular readers know that a Canadian woman named Christina Lane goes off her meds every few years and fills the Internet with stories of how I secretly travel to Canada to ransack her apartment and sexually abuse everyone I meet along the way. She also believes everything I write in any forum is actually an intended insult to her personally.

Ever wonder what it's like to be a little famous?

Imagine a woman calling all of your professional associates (publishers, syndication company, my restaurant employees) to tell them you have been sexually abusing her for years. That's what my stalker did.

Anyway, she's back, and on Twitter now. Look out for @faeralane.

And if anyone up in Canada can help get Christina Lane back on her meds, that would be a big help.

Ten Minutes Ago...

I'm in my home office, working, a few minutes ago.

Caller ID says the incoming call is probably a telemarketer.

Yeah, I'm in the mood for this.

I answer and put it on speaker, knowing there is usually a wait before a human appears. I wait a full half-minute.

Operator comes on and says hello.

I say nothing. She calls out again. I say nothing. This cycle repeats about seven times.

Then I yell, "HOW'S IT FEEL TO BE KEPT WAITING ON THE PHONE FOR NOTHING?!!! DO YOU LIKE IT??? HOW'S IT FEEL?!!"

Telemarketer: Um, hello. . .

Me: (Shouting like a maniac) TAKE ME OFF YOUR FUCKING LIST! STOP CALLING MY HOUSE! NOW! DO IT NOW! ...and so on, for about a minute.

Telemarketer: I. . . will . . . take you off the list now...

Line goes quiet for about a minute. I wait patiently while drawing my morning comic.

Supervisor dude comes on the line. Evidently the first caller turned me over to someone more experienced at handling the criminally insane.

Supervisor: "How can I help you?"

Me: "YOU called MEEEEE!!!!! HOW ABOUT TAKING ME OFF YOUR LIST AND NEVER CALLING AGAIN? HOW ABOUT THAT FOR A FUCKING START?"

I won't bore you with the rest of the conversation. It sort of went downhill after that.

Death by Chance

I wonder if a legal doctor-assisted suicide machine could be designed using a random number generator. That would make the laws against doctor-assisted suicide irrelevant because the deaths would always be an accident in the sense that no human could reliably predict the specific outcome in advance.

Let's say the random part of the device is attached by electronics to another part of the device that delivers a fatal dose of sedatives and poison to whoever is attached to it. You push the button and one of two things can randomly happen:
NothingLethal drugs are releasedThe person attached to the death machine can tap the "go" button as many times as he wants in rapid succession. If the first tap does nothing, the next ten taps will likely get it done, and the entire process happens in only a few seconds. The person using the device might not even be aware of which tap was the lethal one.

Optionally, perhaps the "go" button is published on the Internet with the offer that folks in other countries can press it as often as they like. Perhaps the chance of a lethal outcome is designed into the system to be one in ten-thousand - which is similar to the risk in some sports - but thanks to the large number of people pushing the button you get a lethal outcome for an individual in less than a second.

Another idea is to use anonymity on the Internet to transform suicide into an unsolved murder case. Suppose I connect myself to the lethal dose machine and publish a kill button on the Internet. Technology conceals the identity of whoever pushes the kill button and erases the digital trail. Even the killer is unaware of whether his tap of the button was a placebo or the one that mattered. Perhaps thousands of people tap the button all over the Internet but only one of them randomly matters. Now you have either an accidental death or an unsolved murder.

By analogy, the device I am describing is a lot like smoking. We know that smoking kills people but it is legal precisely because we can't predict which people will die from it. If we could, it would be illegal for sure.

Alcohol is legal for adults and yet we know with complete certainty that it will kill tens of thousands of people in the United States each year. Again, if we could predict with certainty which individuals would die from drinking, it would be illegal. Predictability matters.

Consider legal medications that have known side effects. In some cases we know with certainty that a drug will help the vast majority of people while accidentally killing a few. That drug is legal only because we can't identify in advance who will get killed. You can't imagine the FDA saying, "This drug is approved. It will save millions of lives but . . . and here's the awkward part . . . it will definitely kill these specific twenty people."

The uncertainty is what allows inherently dangerous things to be legal. If we can't predict the outcome of an action, we generally allow individuals the freedom to accept whatever risk levels they want. That's why football is legal. You can't imagine your high school football coach saying, "We are all going to have a great season. Except for Timmy, who will die from brain damage before half-time." If that prediction were possible, football would be illegal. Timmy only gets to play football because we can't predict his death.

Now suppose we collectively invent a legal suicide machine. I'm sure you will have your own engineering tweaks on my idea and I'm equally confident that at least one of our ideas would in fact be technically legal. Once that invention exists, the laws will have to scramble to catch up because the government will want to put some safeguards in place. Once the government knows it can't stop the activity, the best you can do is regulate it at the margins, as we do with alcohol and cigarettes.

You might be tempted to argue that football, booze, pharmaceuticals, and cigarettes are actually low risk compared to the suicide machine that kills you with near (but not technically absolute) certainty. The level of risk has to matter, right?

I'm not sure. I don't believe there is a legal standard for how much individual risk is too much. Each situation seems to be judged on individual merit. We want workplace injuries to approach zero but when it comes to waging war we accept perhaps a 5% death rate, and that assumes you are the winner.

But here is the clever part of my idea: The hypothetical random suicide machine is not yet SPECIFICALLY ILLEGAL. That means that like any new street drug it is totally legal until a law is passed saying it isn't. And how long would it take to pass that law?

Well, a functional government could pass such a law in a week. But we don't have one of those. Our government would be just as slow and incompetent in their efforts to make the new device illegal as they have been in making doctor-assisted suicide legal. I call this situation bureaucratic judo because you use the weight and inertia of your opponent against him. If the government can't make doctor-assisted suicide legal, how long would it take them to fight the random suicide device all the way to the Supreme Court?

I am going to stop just short of recommending that someone invent a technically-legal doctor-assisted suicide device because I suspect I might be swayed by your counterarguments in the comments. But in the absence of a functional government that satisfies the will of the people, one must consider all options.

Is it logically and technically possible to build a random suicide machine that is technically legal?

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Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com     
Author of this book 
Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily
Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays

Note: Yes, I am sure there are seven-hundred science fiction books on this topic. I haven't read any of them.

Bonus thought: If government keeps getting worse (which seems likely) at the same time that technology keeps improving, someday technology will replace the need for traditional government. It might not be a wholesale replacement so much as a stream of specific cases, such as assisted-suicide, in which technology can do what governments cannot. Someday I can imagine technology allowing the populations of warring countries to make peace directly with each other while bypassing their own governments. That's a Facebook app waiting to happen.

Right to Die - Question

[Update: Answered. Thank you. http://www.deathwithdignity.org/advoc...]

And now I am seriously pissed off that there are so few pending bills. Where is California?

Let me bang out a few comics this morning and circle back to this. You won't want to miss it because I just chewed through my leash.

--- old stuff below ---

Is any U.S. state voting today on doctor-assisted suicide?

I don't follow state politics and Google is worthless today.

I might have some things to say on the topic.

Have I mentioned I'm in a bad mood this week?

Please tell me it is on the ballot somewhere.

Death with Dignity

On this fine autumn day in the United States, millions of Americans are heading to the polls for mid-term election voting. I would like to take a moment to acknowledge the good work that our elected representatives have done recently. Here's a complete list of their excellent accomplishments:

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Okay, we're done with that part.

So, today I learn that there is very little pending legislation on the issue of doctor-assisted suicide.

What?

Let me paint a picture.

Millions of people in this country, mostly seniors, will be tortured until their deaths by a government bureaucracy that refuses to allow individuals, families, and their doctors to make end-of-life treatment decisions.

The government recently tortured both of my parents to death that way.

They probably got one of your relatives too.

You might be next. Or maybe your spouse is next. Medical science has gotten good at keeping old people alive until they wish they were not.

Meanwhile, nearly 100% of the public opposes having the government make the end-of-life care decision over their own wishes. The only way you get a different poll response is by asking the question like an idiot: "Duh! Hey, dude, do you think the government should be able to kill sick people?" Likely answer: "NO!!!!! I HAVE A COLD BUT I WANT TO LIVE!!!!"

In the two states in which doctor-assisted suicide is already legal, it is working as planned and without problems or reported abuses worthy of note. (No system is perfect though.)

In the "smart" world, after you test something and it works great, you do more of it.

We live in a Republic, not a democracy, so politicians have a legal right to ignore the will of the people.

The alleged opposition to doctor-assisted suicide is mostly a handful of nutbags that have cleverly leveraged the poorly-worded polls on the topic to pretend half of the country is on their side. The media totally buys into this story. The reality has been reported in this blog alone, as far as I can tell. And the reality is that there is no serious opposition in this country to doctor-assisted suicide if you ask the question right.

So, while your elected officials were voting on the state bird, or trying to totally fuck up something that is working fine, millions of innocent seniors are being tortured to death.

Those are the facts.

I am tempted to assign a failing grade to our elected officials for having such a bad grasp on priorities. But somehow that doesn't seem enough in this situation. You'll probably agree with me after your parents are tortured to death by the government, or it happens to you, or someone you know.

So let me say this in a stronger fashion, and I direct this to our elected state officials on this special day.

GET YOUR HEADS OUT OF YOUR ASSES AND FIX THIS SITUATION, YOU STUPID FUCKING ASSHOLES! I WANT EVERY ONE OF YOU LAZY FUCKERS TO DIE A PAINFUL DEATH!

This is the part where people say, "He doesn't mean that. He just wants clicks."

No, I mean it. Seriously, you guys are fucking millions of senior citizens right into their graves and you know it. You are lower than terrorists in my view because terrorists are at least operating out of principle. And I want those guys dead too.

Emotions are important in this issue. This isn't about economics or building roads. This is about human beings that are tortured to death in front of their families. And the families' lives are often ruined at the same time. So if you are an elected official, you need to know the emotional state of your constituents. I am a constituent. You just heard my emotional state. If it wasn't clear, I can repeat it.

DIE PAINFULLY, YOU FUCKING USELESS LOSERS!

Technically, that is only Plan B. Plan A is still "Dear Elected Representatives: Please do the job we pay you to do. Thank you."

I'm not advocating violence against anyone. I'm just saying how I feel. My goal is to end government violence (essentially) against senior citizens.

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Scott Adams

Personal Twitter Account: @ScottAdamsSays

 

Today I Tried to Do a Simple Thing

Note: F-bombs aren't for everyone. Skip this post if the word offends you. I would have used a different word but for some topics there is just no substitute.

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I have a credit card account that I need to close, and today I discover that Wells Fargo offers plenty of paths for opening new accounts but no obvious way to close one on a Sunday (when I wrote this). What a surprise.

"Fuck you, bank" I mutter to myself. I'll just call the phone number for opening a new account and then you can transfer me to the people who close accounts. HA! I am so clever! I have done this trick with other companies and they only "accidentally" disconnect me during the transfer about half the time. So I like my odds.

The recorded voice says there is a six minute hold. Shit. My phone battery can't handle that.

Where is that piece of paper on which I wrote the name of an app that calls you back when the other side is ready? I need that. Searching desk for note. No luck. Searching Google for it. No luck. Searching App store for it. No luck. Wait, an email is coming in. Ignore, ignore, focus! Stay out of that rabbit hole!

Shit, I better write down that thing I just remembered I need to do. If I don't write it down right now I will forget again. Where's my pen? Why do all the pens in my house end up on my bedroom dresser! I angrily trudge to the other end of the house for a pen.

I would have made a note on my phone but I can't decide which of the ninety possible ways to save a note I want to use. I really need to spend a day looking at apps for that sort of thing. I have little notes to myself spread across seven apps that I forget to look at. Sometimes I email myself. Sometimes I put things on my calendar or my reminder app. Sometimes I just create a note document on my phone. And then I don't look at any of it.

Wait, what the fuck is this pen for? I think I was going to write something down. Damn it.

I can't remember the last time I completed a simple task on the Internet without searching my house for some obscure piece of paper with a note or account number on it. Sometimes I have to dig through past years' taxes just to click "submit" on some fucking piece of administrative trivia. And I almost always have to search my email archive for some tip or clue about what to click or what account or PIN to use. And for some reason my keyword search only produces results about half the time even when I know the keyword is somewhere in my email. I think the problem is iCloud or climate change or something. I don't have time to look into it.

I have six-thousand passwords, a computer operating system that was designed by sadists, and seventy-five items on my to-do list before lunch. And I can't get one thing done because everything is connected via a web of complexity and missing information to every other thing on the fucking planet.

And if one more person helpfully tells me to get a password organizer, my head is going to explode. Organizing my passwords is on my list with about seventy other things I won't get to.

I'm almost certain there was a time in my youth when I could just identify a task and go do it. Those days are over. Now in order to do the simplest things in life I have to recover a lost password, get disconnected from several 800 calls, dig through old email, delete old accounts and start new ones, upgrade software, and change the ink in my printer.

My new worldview is that day-one of any Internet-related task is just discovering what information you don't have, or discovering that the software doesn't do what you hoped. Realistically, I rarely finish a task that involves the Internet on the same day I start, no matter how trivial the task.

Is it just me or has the Internet evolved from a tool to a disease?

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Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com
Author of this book
Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily

My personal Twitter account: @ScottAdamsSays

True story: The batteries on my wireless keyboard died before I could post this. I didn't have any new batteries so I had to search my home for a device with non-dead AA  batteries that I could steal before I could finish the simple task of posting.

Second True Story: Immediately after writing this post I went to my car and the "low tire pressure" warning told me I should not drive it anywhere. I have an air compressor but no longer know which combination of poorly-labeled levers and valves controls what. And I needed an air pressure gauge, which I couldn't find after an hour-long search of car, garage, and house. I would go to the store and buy a new gauge . . . if I had a car that worked.

Loser Choices

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy for one sort of unpleasantness or another. It is not intended to change anyone's beliefs or actions. If you quote from this post or link to it, which you are welcome to do, please take responsibility for whatever happens if you mismatch the audience and the content.

 
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In my prior post I suggested that if a person lives in a hostile place, that person should leave. I think we can keep gender out of the discussion for a minute. Let's just examine the proposition that if you live someplace terrible, perhaps you should leave.

First, let me give some context. You know I love context.

Years ago, when smoking was still allowed indoors, I went after my employer to force a rule change. Given the health risks, my second choice was to leave for another job, but as some of you pointed out in the comments earlier, moving isn't easy. So in that case, staying and fighting the system (and winning) made perfect sense, at least as a first plan.

A few years later, still working for that large bank, my boss informed me that there wasn't enough gender and ethnic diversity in management and so there was no hope for a white male like me to get promoted in the foreseeable future.  So I looked for another job and left. I didn't stay and fight for my rights for the simple reason that the fight was, in my opinion, unwinnable. I had a chance of winning the indoor smoking fight. I didn't feel there was any realistic chance to win the promotion fight as long as diversity was the headline of the era.

Then I went to work at the local phone company, Pacific Bell, and as most of you know, I hit the diversity ceiling again. My boss told me in direct language that a white male could not be promoted into their all-white-guy management ranks because now the public was watching. But I didn't stay and fight the system because I didn't think it was winnable. That's when I started pursuing some entrepreneurial ideas. One of them was Dilbert.

And as I mentioned in the prior post comments, as soon as I graduated college I bolted from my small hometown that had no opportunity to the bosom of California and all it offered. That was among the best decisions of my life.

Here's my point:

The loser worldview is that whoever is causing the problem needs to fix it for you.

The problem with the loser worldview is that in many cases the only person who CAN fix the problem is you, even if you had nothing to do with causing it. A winner in that situation fixes his own problem. A loser sits indefinitely waiting for others to solve it for him, even knowing that won't happen.

When indoor smoking was my problem, the fault was clearly with the smokers and with management that allowed it. So I went after them and made them fix their problem for my benefit. That plan worked because the problem was fixable.

When I hit the diversity ceiling on two occasions, I chose to run instead of fight because in those cases victory seemed impossible. I also ran from my hometown because staying and convincing everyone to build some industry so I can get a good job seemed impractical.

Now let's circle back to the street video I discussed yesterday, in which a woman is harassed far too often on the streets of New York City. Should that woman vote with her feet and leave, which might be a huge sacrifice, or should she stay and fight the system by making videos and whatnot?

I think that depends on whether the problem can be fixed by others. If others are at fault, and they have the ability and motivation to fix the problem for you, by all means take a run at it. But if the only person who can fix your problem is you, and you choose not to do it because the fault is with others, you have taken the loser path. You literally chose the path you know will fail because of some misguided sense of rightness.

The men in the street video were obnoxious but acting within the rights granted by the Constitution. They had opinions and expressed them. And I remind you that their opinions were almost universally positive and complimentary, albeit scary and creepy at the same time.

Can that situation be changed?

I'm going to say yes, but only if the problem is approached in the proper order. So I would say that living in a bad place does make sense if you are working toward fixing it and you have a reasonable expectation of prevailing.

Expecting the men in the video to feel bad and change their ways won't work. They are operating under the laws of the land and quite clearly enjoying it.

I wouldn't expect any law changes to make public compliments illegal even when the giver is too creepy or scary. That standard could not be enforced.

And I guarantee that if any of the men shown in the video watched it, they would not conclude they were acting badly or hurting anyone. So shame is not a tool that can work in this case.

But there is one path that might work to solve this. And that path recognizes that humans modify their behavior for rewards, just like other animals.

The men in the street video are presumably repeat offenders. And that means they are getting a reward, at least occasionally, from their shouted public compliments. And I assume the reward comes from the occasional women who appreciate the compliments and smile back. Does that group represent ten percent of women? Fifty percent? I have no idea, but it wouldn't take much to reinforce the habit in men. Remember that men like to fish, date, and play baseball, so we know how to wait for unpredictable rewards. And we know from science that unpredictable rewards are the most addicting. So the men in the video are acting exactly as science would predict, given the type of rewards they are getting.

So the way to vastly reduce the street harassment problem is by removing the rewards. And only women can do that, by never responding positively to compliments about appearance. And that means all women, all the time, whether on the street or in the workplace, or even at home. Perhaps the next video on this topic should be addressed to the women who have enjoyed street compliments and rewarded the behavior. I don't think they know how much they are torturing the women who hate the attention.

Yes, this line of thinking does remind you of the horrible old-timey idea that women who dress nicely in public are "asking for it." None of us want to live in a world in which a rapist can get away with the "she was asking for it" excuse. But I think all of you are smart enough to know that that is a political and practical standard, not a rational one. A rational standard might be, for example, that it is unwise to poke a bear with a stick because that usually doesn't end well. The political standard is that the bear is at fault for overreacting. And to be clear, I fully endorse the political standard over the rational standard if it keeps women safe. In this special case, it makes sense to abandon strict rationalism because the political standard gets the job done better. So I'm okay pretending the universe only allows cause-and-effect to be a real thing when it wants to because that is the best way to keep women safe.

But every situation is different, and you wouldn't necessarily apply the same thinking that works for sex crimes to the thinking that works for unwanted public compliments.

By any objective measure, the root problem of street harassment is that the men involved are ignorant assholes. All thoughtful people are unanimous on who is to blame in this case: the men. The problem is that the guilty men have no incentive to change. And I see no practical way to influence them directly. The loser worldview would involve wishing very hard for that situation to change while knowing it won't.

The winner worldview is that you have responsibility for your own life and it is irrelevant who is at fault if the people at fault can't or won't fix the problem. I've noticed over the course of my life that winners ignore questions of blame and fault and look for solutions they can personally influence. Losers blame others for their problems and expect that to produce results.

If you want to see a good example of winners, look at the Asian and Indian population in the United States. The country handed them the usual boatload of intense discrimination with one hand and the promise of unlimited education with the other. Who's your valedictorian now? That's what winners do. No blame, just personal responsibility.

In summary, men are 100% to blame for their bad behavior on the streets. But there is no reasonable hope to change that situation as long as men are periodically rewarded for it. So a winner worldview offers two options: Either move or try to convince other women to stop rewarding the behavior. Both of those options offend our sense of rightness, but a winner sees society's artificial definitions of rightness as nothing but a speed bump.

A hundred years ago it wasn't practical to leave a shitty or sexist place because everywhere else was the same. But today you have plenty of nice places to live. So if you insist on living in New York City, please stop making videos that suggest it is somehow my problem to fix.

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Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com   
Author of this book 
Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily

I have a new personal Twitter account: @ScottAdamsSays

Twitter was useless in helping me fix the old and broken account. I had to create yet another email account just to start anew. See there how I fixed my own problem instead of wishing they would do it for me?

P.S. Yes, I am in a bad mood this week. Why do you ask?