Scott Adams's Blog, page 328

About the Bear Thing

More than a few of you wondered if I wrote the prior post about bears.

I did.

Was I drunk or on drugs when I did it?

No, but that's a great idea for next time.

Was it some sort of social experiment?

Well, sort of.

My general approach to life goes like this:

Try something --> Observe results --> Learn --> Try something else

I'm well-suited for drawing comics and writing blog posts because I can erase/delete/adjust a thousand times before the public sees it. I'd be bad at, for example, walking a tightrope across a canyon or doing brain surgery. Those professions don't respond well to "oops."

I use this blog to practice my writing, try different styles, float ideas, and generally get into the heads of the public. It's a bad idea in my profession to assume I know what other people want to read. I can only know for sure what is in my own head. And as a general rule, the people who go into my line of work don't think like normal citizens, for better or worse. So I take a business approach to writing; I test different styles and topics, observe the reactions, and adjust accordingly.

With the bear post, I wrote it as a character instead of my normal personality, and imagined the reader being a particular type of person who would drink beer - lots of it - with that character. That's what produces the different style. And now I know your reactions to it. Thank you.

In October you'll hear a lot about my upcoming non-Dilbert, non-humor, non-fiction book. The approach I took in the book comes from what I learned after trying different topics here and observing which topics and styles had the biggest impact on people.

I appreciate all of you for putting up with me. Truly. I hope my new book returns the favor. It is designed to do just that.

Bears: Worst Mammal Ever

I hate bears. They're fat, oversleeping, furry assholes. And can they leave a frickin' picnic basket alone for one minute? I don't think so. Bears have no emotional intelligence. None.

Try petting a bear. That's a no go. I mean, you can try, but that bear will claw your nads off like they were two blueberries in September. And they will not apologize for that. They'll just keep pawing through your trash like nothing even happened. Bears don't give a shit.

Speaking of shit, the forest is full of it. That bear you see is 10% bear skin and ninety percent intestines. When a bear eats your potato salad from the campsite, the salad barely has time to turn brown before it's getting pinched off on some innocent bush in the forest. And what did the bush do to deserve that? Nothing. You don't see humans do that sort of thing. No human ever says, "I think I'll drop a deuce on the cat." We humans respect nature. Bears don't. They pollute and they don't give a hoot.

And what does a bear do when it has an itchy ass? Does it buy some ointment and suffer silently like a proper mammal, or does it find some majestic redwood tree that is minding its own business and use it as an ass-scratcher? These questions answer themselves, folks.

Sometimes you hear of a trained bear in a Russian circus, riding a tiny bicycle, wearing an undersized hat, and you think how cute. But you only hear of those trained bears in Russia. Oh, there's a reason. It's because Russian men are not metrosexuals. That bear is actually a guy named Boris who hasn't trimmed his eyebrows or shaved his back in forty years. The circus doesn't even pay him. They just hand him a little hat, a little bicycle, and a pitcher of vodka. The rest just happens. So don't tell me how trainable bears are. While Boris is riding that tiny bike, bears are trying to break into your camper to eat your kids. Bears suck.

I'm afraid of anything that sleeps half the year without dying. Bears call it "hibernating" because it sounds better than lazy. That's nothing but good marketing. Those furry bastards even managed to become California's mascot, or state animal, or whatever-the-fuck. What kind of message does that send to our kids? If the state mammal can't get its furry ass out of its den for six months, how are we supposed to get the kids to school by 8 AM? I want my state animal to be a wise owl, or perhaps a porpoise that saves a surfer from a shark. I think I speak for all Californians when I say we don't want to be associated with bears. It makes the whole state look bad.

To make matters worse, after "hibernating," those lazy bastards spend the next six months, or whatever, eating shit that isn't even theirs. That's right: Bears are communists. They do not respect individual property rights. You think you own that ham sandwich on the picnic table? A bear doesn't think so.

I have never trusted bears, and now I hear they are recruiting humans to join their side. In San Francisco, for example, there are men with beards and leather clothing who identify themselves as bears. They act all nice, but after two drinks you won't believe what they suggest doing. It makes losing a picnic basket sound like a holiday. You might try it a few times just to be polite, but you always find yourself rubbing against a redwood tree afterwards just to make the itching stop.

There's a good reason that Wall Street calls a falling stock market a "bear market." And when you have a hard time accomplishing something you might say it was a "bear" of a time. You simply don't see bears associated with happy events.

Well, okay, there is one exception.

Someone once asked if I had ever had sex on a bearskin rug in front of a fireplace. So I tried it a few times, and I have to say it was great. I guess that's why the taxidermist keeps the bear's mouth open in the roaring position. Someday I plan to add a human to the mix and see how the threesome goes.

The Power of a Word

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 reaction to my prior post about Trayvon Martin, a reader here named Happy left a comment that is so well-worded I'm going to reproduce it below. The central brilliance of Happy's writing is that he substituted an unloaded word for a loaded word and it transformed the argument. I even like his choices for line spacing and pacing. And check out the word economy; nothing wasted.

I'm not endorsing Happy's opinion. I'm just impressed by the persuasiveness of his writing. In Happy's words...

"When I buy a can of Coke, I see the label, and I know what to expect.

Stereotypes are wrong of course. But brands are good.

So if there are a bunch of people that dress a certain way, and act a certain way, they are creating a brand for themselves.

There's a nerd brand. There's a metro-sexual brand. There's a jock brand, a cheerleader brand, a gothic brand... I can go on but of course you know what I mean.

Then there is a gangster brand.

This may be shocking, but if you dress like a gangster - talk like a gangster - and ride around in a car like a gangster, people are bound to pick up on the brand you're showcasing.

I suppose it could be related to race - but I don't think so. I can have the above stereotypes in any race - no problem.

If you want to be treated like a nerd, dress like a nerd. You want to be treated like a gangster, knock yourself out, and dress and act like a bad-ass.

But when you do, don't get upset when people react to the brand you're pushing.

Does that make it right for someone to beat you up because you're a nerd, or shoot you in cold blood because you look like a gangster? Hell no - of course not.

But on the other hand - if you dress like a respectable member of society, the chance of getting treated better is certainly going to be higher.

So why bother acting like a bad-ass?

I don't get it.

I'm not going to get into the specifics of this case - that's not the point. The important thing to remember for us and our families is that it's important to portray the right, positive brand. It won't hurt to make the world a better place, now will it?

So put away the gangster image. Don't do it - and don't let your family do it. The world will be a better place for it."

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Someone famous once said, "You're not a writer until a writer tells you you're a writer." You're a writer, Happy. But I suspect you already do that for a living.

A New World Record

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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It's hard to measure this sort of thing, but I nominate the Trayvon Martin protests as the least effective protests in modern history. They might qualify as some sort of world record. And that is a tragedy on top of a tragedy.

You can Google Trayvon Martin if you're not familiar with the case. I assume it's not getting much coverage overseas.

My understanding of the Trayvon Martin protests is that the participants would like the public to stop believing that young African-American males are crime-prone. The strategy for accomplishing this involves holding largely peaceful protests in which a small number of young African-American males are likely to be filmed by news crews wearing masks, breaking store windows, threatening innocent motorists, and getting arrested. That's exactly what I watched on the news last night as Oakland was starting to heat up.

The trouble-makers are a small percentage of the protesters - maybe 1%. The problem is that the 1% gets the lion's share of news coverage, thus reinforcing the racial bias that the peaceful protesters are trying to combat. In terms of managing the public's impressions, the protests are an epic fail.

On a related topic, I'm fascinated by the way humans reflexively group things. In this case, most observers see this as a racial situation: black versus non-black. And yet no one believes Zimmerman would have made the same boneheaded moves if he had seen an African-American woman in his neighborhood instead of a man. Or an African-American child at age ten. Or even a middle-aged black dude in a sweater-vest. The fact that Trayvon was young and male was at least half of what made him seem suspicious to Zimmerman, one presumes.

As a male who was once young, I can confirm that most of my offenses against humanity happened in my early years. My testosterone was high and my frontal lobes were only partly formed. That's a recipe for trouble, and I caused my fair share. I also grew out of it, right on schedule.

The most effective type of protest I can imagine after the Trayvon Martin verdict would involve demands for greater science literacy. That sort of movement doesn't attract too many vandals and it effectively puts racists in the "ignorant" box instead of the "evil" box. That's a game-changer. In the year 2013, perhaps the African-American community needs fewer leaders who are ministers and more who are scientists. Just a thought.

New Hiring Methods

I keep reading that the big tech companies, most notably Google and Facebook, are finding that job performance isn't highly correlated to an employee's college grades or even the reputation of the school attended. And I also understand that tech companies are less inclined to ask interview questions such as "Why are manhole covers round?" Apparently the answers to those questions don't predict future employee success.

So now Google and Facebook and perhaps others are using secret new methods of collecting information on the Internet to identify great candidates they can poach from other companies.

BEEP BEEP BEEP

Sorry, my bullshit detector just went off.

I think what is really going on is that employee success in the tech industry is most correlated with luck. But if you work in Human Resources, and your job involves identifying good employees before they do something great, you need some sort of flavorful bullshit to make it seem as if there is science to what you do. Whenever I hear that someone has a secret algorithm, or they discovered something while data mining, I get highly suspicious.

In my experience, people who managed to get good grades from prestigious schools are indeed far more effective than people who didn't. I expect a Stanford grad to do be smarter and more effective than a Chico State grad at least 80% of the time.

But there have also been studies showing that the worst kind of work group is one that has too many smart people. Ideally, you want one smart person and several competent followers on a team, or so the studies suggest. So it doesn't surprise me that Google or Facebook could be hiring geniuses and experiencing project gridlock as the brainiacs stand around arguing. So that might be the problem.

I wonder how anyone can identify a great employee working for another company when that employee has only worked on teams. Often it is the team dynamic, the timing of the project, the chemistry of the group, the effectiveness of management, and a hundred other factors that create success. Most of it looks like luck.

I can see how a "Moneyball" approach works in the limited case of baseball. A batter is a member of a team, but the team has little influence on how he hits. A player's batting average is all about his own skill. But how do you evaluate, for example, an employee whose every move is part of a larger collaborative effort? You can't moneyball that.

I think the secret sauce that makes some groups successful is the chemistry of the team, along with luck, of course. And, as I mentioned, good team chemistry might mean having one smart person and several followers. The problem is implementing that system. Could a manager really get away with organizing teams by brightness level? "Okay, team. Susan is the smart one and the rest of you are . . . the other ones. Go do something awesome."

 

 

Economic Signs

Apparently the economy in California is doing well. My personal economic indicator revolves around how hard it is to buy ordinary goods and services. At the moment it is very hard.

For starters, the lines everywhere are longer, and the traffic is notably worse than a few years ago. If you can get to a physical store, they don't have your size in stock, or the popular model is already sold out. At best, the salesperson might try to order your item from another store if you can wait a week. With the exception of grocery stores and pharmacies, physical stores are empty shells waiting for the Internet to deliver a head shot.

Apple stores are exceptions. They generally seem to have every model in stock and the staff is excellent. But I won't buy anything at an Apple store this summer because I'm quite certain they have new and better stuff coming soon. Apple trained me not to buy their products today if they might come out with something better soon, and they are always coming out with something better soon. I've been staring at my old and defective iPad for six months wishing there was something I could do about it.

Online shopping isn't much better. Let's say I realize I need to replace some sort of broken item in my house, which is a process that happens a lot. So I go to a web page that carries that product and use the contact link to find the email address for the company. I type out a simple question about the product and wait for a response.

And it never comes.

What kind of company doesn't bother answering a customer who already has his credit card in his hand? Answer: One that has too much business already.

Buying clothes online works unless you want a size that fits. Those sizes are generally not available, even online, which I find puzzling. And if heather grey and navy blue aren't your colors, you're usually out of luck.

And what's up with taking two weeks to deliver an item you purchased online? Which part of the supply chain is doing so well they can't keep up with the business?

I hired a locksmith recently to fix a broken bathroom door locking mechanism. He worked on it over the course of three separate days, including trips back to headquarters to get parts. When he was done, he proudly showed his work. The door handles were back on the door and functioning! The only problem was that the door would never again lock, because he didn't have the right parts for that. He's a locksmith who doesn't think the "locking" part of a bathroom door is terribly important. Apparently his boss was having a hard time hiring qualified employees. That was a bad situation for me, but a good sign for the economy.

I realize this is all anecdotal, but how hard are you finding it to buy normal goods and services compared to a year or two ago?

Snowden Dilemma

Suppose the government of the United States gets its hands on Edward Snowden and brings him to trial. Have you wondered what happens then?

I've predicted that no jury of Snowden's peers will convict him, regardless of how clear it is that he broke laws. I would be highly disappointed in my fellow citizens if they sided with the perpetrator (the government) over the victims (themselves) and decided to screw the whistleblower (Snowden) who is on their side. But let's consider the alternative.

If Snowden gets convicted, many of the citizens of the United States will go all Egyptian and take to the streets. It was bad enough that the government was collecting all of our private communications. But convicting the guy who blew the whistle? That's throwing a match on the gasoline. So I believe the government doesn't want to see him convicted, or at least the top people don't. It's too risky to the system.

On the other hand, the government has an absolute legal obligation to pursue criminal charges against Snowden. Society doesn't work if people think they can break laws whenever they have good reasons.

We also know there is big money involved in domestic surveillance. And while I'm late to the party on this, all evidence suggests that the government is controlled by corporate interests. So one presumes the government needs to punish the whistleblower to satisfy its corporate overlords and to keep the domestic surveillance cash cow mooing.

This puts the government in the awkward position of trying to avoid some sort of accidental competence that ends up convicting a martyr and sparking a popular uprising. They need to put Snowden on trial to satisfy their corporate sponsors. But they need to fail in getting a conviction to satisfy the public.

I think there is a 100% chance that some dark department of the government, along with its foreign proxies, is planning an "accident" for Snowden before he reaches the United States. Putin would probably do it in return for secret concessions. He might need some of his own spies freed, for example. In the end, I don't think the U.S. government will authorize a hit on Snowden because it would be too obvious. But you know they discussed it. That much seems certain.

If I were President Obama, I would start seeding the media with the idea of a trial and conviction followed by a presidential pardon. You'd want to float that idea and see what the public thought of it. A conviction and a pardon are as close as you can get to a "tie" in this situation, and that would be the best case scenario for the public. We want to know that lawbreakers are dealt with, but we also appreciate justice.

If Snowden gets a lot of attention during a trial, and somehow gains his freedom at the end, I wouldn't be surprised to see him run for President in a few years. This is the sort of situation that gives a person instant legitimacy. If Snowden ran on a platform of exposing corporate control over the government and preserving individual privacy he'd be a credible player on day one.

Things will get interesting when Snowden reaches our shores, and I'm fairly sure that will happen.

Slippery Slope to Freedom

Some politician - and it doesn't matter which one - recently said that allowing gays to marry is a slippery slope to the day when assholes like him no longer have the power to tell you how to live your personal life. At least that's how I heard it.

Actually, I think he said something about gay marriage leading to *GASP* polygamy. And so I asked myself what's wrong with polygamy, assuming there aren't any child brides and cult overtones? I couldn't come up with an argument against keeping polygamy illegal. I'm not sure I've ever heard one.

Polygamy always gets conflated in the media with some sort of child-endangering, brainwashing, cultish pit of evil. But what if polygamy is just, for example, two dudes and one woman who work well as a trio? How does that hurt anyone?

Employee benefits, such as healthcare, would need to be adjusted in a polygamous world. You can't have one worker automatically qualifying for employee-paid healthcare for seven spouses. But that sort of thing is easy to tidy-up with legislation.

If anyone knows of an argument against polygamy, based on science as opposed to holy books, please let me know in the comments. And remember that polygamy can include one woman with multiple husbands. And just to keep things clean, assume the polygamous arrangement is based on practicality and not a religious belief.

This line of thinking made me wonder how one might organize society if there were no laws, customs and culture already in place. In other words, if no one had ever heard of traditional marriage with two people at the head of a nuclear family, what would be the most natural way to organize society? Are traditional marriage and polygamy even in the top five options?

I remember reading that people in arranged marriages were just as happy as those who married for love. That says a lot. And so I wonder: If you looked at every human society, past and present, and studied their marriage and social organization, would you find one model that just sticks out as working best? And what would it be?

Who knows the answer to that?

Snowden

The Edward Snowden case has been fascinating from the start. It has spy stuff, a man on the run, embarrassing government secrets, international gamesmanship, a model girlfriend, legal maneuvering. Wow.

But you haven't seen anything yet. Snowden isn't running and he isn't hiding; he's waiting. And he's reportedly negotiating the terms of his return through his dad. When he's ready, and it's safe, he'll come after the U.S. government in a public trial. He's the real deal. And he's on your side, even if it doesn't feel that way.

Is he a traitor? Yes, absolutely. But so were Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Franklin, and Jefferson, to name a few. If you think being a traitor is always bad, no matter the circumstances or motives, you're officially too dumb to vote.

I'm wondering how you find a jury that would convict Snowden. On the first day of the trial his lawyer will explain to all twelve jurors how the government spied on them personally. Every potential juror is also a victim. Good luck getting the victims to side with the perpetrator, which in this case is the government.

I think there's some sort of law that says I can't make a public statement in favor of jury nullification. Jury nullification is when jurors agree that the accused broke the law, but they feel the law itself is wrong, or that a conviction would be overkill, so they find the accused innocent. I predict that will happen. I don't recommend jury nullification because I'm not sure I have freedom of speech in this regard. I simply predict that nullification will happen.

My personal view is that if the government had asked citizens for permission to collect all communications in the country, or had stated its intentions without asking for permission, I'd be okay with it. It seems like a great tool for combatting domestic terrorism, and I don't think the government cares about my browser history.

But the government didn't ask my opinion before it collected my personal communications data. I can't give a free pass for that. And I am available for jury duty.

 

The Paula Deen Context

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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I hadn't heard of Paula Deen, the so-called Southern cooking star, until her recent string of "controversies." Now I'm all in. This is one of the most interesting stories in a long time, from a psychology point of view.

I was casually following the headlines last year when it came out that Deen was promoting less-than-healthy food while she developed Type 2 diabetes, presumably from eating similar crap, while secretly negotiating a promotional deal with Novartis to pimp their diabetes drug. None of that sounds good.

The diabetes issue got her on the front page. But the recent "racism" controversy has pretty much ended her career, I would expect. That stain doesn't go away.

So I thought I would wade in and offer some context because I haven't gotten myself in enough trouble lately. My personal view of Deen, based on incomplete knowledge, is that she was a product of her environment, just like the rest of us. She did things she rightfully regrets, was honest about it and took responsibility, learned from her experiences, apologized in ways that looked sincere to me, and evolved. Hollywood makes movies about that sort of thing: Flawed person learns lessons the hard way. So now that Deen and her critics are on the same side, in terms of both healthy eating and race, that's the end of the story, right?

Not in this world. And that's the part that fascinates me.

I was watching some low-budget entertainment show the other night on which so-called "media personality" Keli Goff was ripping Deen apart while grinning in a most disturbing way. Goff, if you don't already know, is your signal that something is wrong with the context of a story. She's associated with the bottom-feeding media that includes The Huffington Post and the like. Those outlets don't just report the news; they create it by leaving out context. So, when I saw Goff, I got interested. And I wasn't disappointed.

The show I watched went like this. The host played a clip of Deen issuing an emotional, raw, awkward apology that literally included begging for forgiveness. The host and the pundits talked about Deen's apology at length. Five minutes later, on the same show, with the same pundits, the conversation turned to Deen's lack of an apology, as if they had not just watched and discussed that very thing.

Let me repeat that. They played a tape of Deen's apology, discussed the apology then complained that there had been no apology. I watched carefully to see if they meant the apology was lacking a necessary element, but that didn't seem to be the case. The apology looked sincere and heartfelt to me, albeit awkward. The problem, said the pundits, was that the very thing they just watched and discussed didn't actually happen. You rarely see confirmation bias play out that vividly. Once it had been decided that Deen was a monster, it couldn't also be true that she issued a sincere apology even if you just finished watching it. The whole thing was fascinating.

I don't know what is in Deen's soul, and I certainly don't know all the facts behind the allegations, so I neither support nor defend her. But I'd like to add some context because the bottom-feeding media is doing the opposite.

1.      Every alleged example of Deen's racism involves either a good friend of hers who is African-American, an African-American chef or general manager that she or her brother hired for their restaurants, and in one case a preference for hiring African-American servers for a particular event. (More on that later.) That's a strange pattern for a racist.

2.      I owned two restaurants. Restaurants are unusually fertile breeding grounds for bogus lawsuits and employment claims. You can't compare restaurants to other businesses in that way. You should assume 90% of employee discrimination claims in the restaurant industry are complete bullshit even if the stats are opposite in the standard corporate world. That's the context in which you should view the employee claims against Deen. Remember, she's an easy target, and any lawyer would know she has deep pockets and a need to settle quickly. I don't know the facts in her case, nor do you. I'm just giving context.

3.      Deen claims her use of the N-word was in the context of jokes long ago and not representative of her current thinking. I don't know where her critics grew up, but during my youth in upstate New York it seemed as if all jokes were at the expense of one ethnic group or another, blonde women, farmer's daughters, lepers, dead babies, and folks with disabilities. The wrongness of the so-called humor was the whole point. That was the style of the day, as despicable as it seems by today's standards. When Deen admits to being part of that culture, and evolving out of it, that sounds more like naïve honesty than racism. If you didn't live through that era, you are missing some important context.

4.      One of the most damning allegations is that Deen once suggested a slave-themed event that would feature only professional servers who were African-American. To me that sounds laughably implausible. It's the sort of thing one could only believe if you already bought into the idea that Deen is a racist, diabetes-promoting monster. It reminds me of the recent Internet hoax showing a photo of Heineken banners over a dog fight. A lot of folks on the Internet believed Heineken was advertising at a dog fight, as if that was even slightly plausible. (The Heineken signs were left over from some earlier event at the same location.)

I'll reiterate that I don't support Deen, or condone anything that she did, allegedly or otherwise. It's not my job to judge anyone. I'm just adding context.