Dilbert One

…”scientists” zero:

…in a sense, the video doesn’t even refute the straw man it set up. It’s not that climate science consists only of models: obviously there are observations too. But all the attribution claims about the climatic effects of greenhouse gases are based on models. If the scientists being interviewed had any evidence otherwise, they didn’t present any.

When you can’t even knock down your own straw man, you don’t have much of an argument.

So how did the video do refuting Scott Adams’ cartoon? He joked that scientists warning of catastrophe invoke the authority of observational data when they are really making claims based on models. Check. He joked that they ignore on a post hoc basis the models that don’t look right to them. Check. He joked that their views presuppose the validity of models that reasonable people could doubt. Check. And he joked that to question any of this will lead to derision and the accusation of being a science denier. Check. In other words, the Yale video sought to rebut Adams’ cartoon and ended up being a documentary version of it.

They would appear to lack self awareness.

14 thoughts on “Dilbert One”

  1. I said this before, but I did not find the Dilbert cartoon in question to be funny. It is a polemic, and there is a place for that, but bending satire into the service of polemics is no longer funny, much like Gary Trudeau long, long stopped being funny. Dilbert is almost the only comic strip in the newspaper that I find funny at all, at Dilbert can be side-splitting funny, but this particular Dilbert cartoon may be incisive, it may have an important point, it may get all the right people upset with it, but it is not funny.

    The thing is that Dilbert managed to get a lot laughs out of almost every other hot-button issue from (yes) feminism, diversity, to H1B visas. It did this in the unique Dilbert absurdist way that disarms any attempts to take offense at what Adams is poking fun at.

    Maybe the Dilbert Way is that everything in the corporate-commercial world is so divorced from any reality, so absurd, so devoid of any reasoning that whether it is Marketing or Quality Control or some serious societal concern, all of these things crumble under how the Pointy-Haired Boss wants to conduct the implementation.

    I think that when Adams was initially predicting Mr. Trump’s triumph when everyone else was going “you’re kidding”, he was saying that the real world was the Dilbert Absurdist world from which Mr. Trump was another absurdist Dilbert character from the business world. For Mr. Trump to win was supposed to be a joke, but the joke was on us because the world had turned into the Dilbert World.

    That Mr. Trump actually won and is still the president even though half the country and much of the world is still shaking their heads in either dismay or disbelief, I think this has gotten to Mr. Adams’ head that he is skilled at predicting things, hence his foray into the Global Warming controversy in an uncharacteristically un-Dilbert like way.

      1. From: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/160989114746/the-time-i-nudged-climate-scientists-into

        “If you have been reading this blog and following me on Periscope, you know I announced I was going to use my own powers of persuasion to nudge climate scientists into doing a better job of communicating their side of things. The climate models are the least-credible thing scientists do, and yet scientists have been using their models as their featured evidence. No matter which side you are on with the climate change debate, you don’t want either side using their weakest argument. You want both sides to do their best so we can accurately judge who has the strongest thinking. To that end, I framed the “climate models” as being necessarily incomplete because you really need economic models to decide how to react to climate change, not scientific models. And long-term economic models have zero credibility. Even scientists would agree on that point.”

        The real problem is not that their science is bad or wrong, it’s that then they assume that they, and only they, can offer up solutions to the problems they claim to have found. And in every case, their solution is the imposition of some new variation of 19th Century economic Lysenkoism that caused tens of millions of deaths last century. But with them in charge, this time everything will be okay, because they’ll keep the mass murder to a minimum.

    1. I think that when Adams was initially predicting Mr. Trump’s triumph when everyone else was going “you’re kidding”, he was saying that the real world was the Dilbert Absurdist world from which Mr. Trump was another absurdist Dilbert character from the business world. For Mr. Trump to win was supposed to be a joke, but the joke was on us because the world had turned into the Dilbert World.

      You can go read his blog posts about why he made the prediction. They were very interesting and insightful into Adam’s views of human nature. The gist of it is his “moist robot hypothesis”, which revolves around humans thinking they make rational decisions when they really make decisions based on emotion and then rationalize them afterwards. This flows into his master persuader hypothesis.

      hence his foray into the Global Warming controversy in an uncharacteristically un-Dilbert like way.

      He came at it from a persuasion perspective and noted how unpersuasive the alarmist tactics are and how they show more relation to a scam and bear little resemblance to actual science.

      I could agree that the comic was the wrong venue to express this. It is just a pictorial manifestation of what he has talked about in depth on his blog. He has another cartoon, robots reading news (or something), that could have been a better venue but with a much smaller audience.

      1. I fully concur with Scott Adams’ blog post on Global Warming and Persuasion. I also think that the introduction of Dilbert-World Michael Mann could have been a funny Dilbert cartoon if Scott Adams had concentrated on what makes the Dilbert World interesting — humans as moist robots thinking they make rational decisions but instead acting on emotions and rationalizing later.

        But I saw real-world Scott Adams’ opinion of real-world Michael Mann rather than a Dilbert-World Michael Mann. I think there is a entertainment-world word for that — jumping-the-shark.

        1. I go back and forth about this. Sometimes its done well and others not. Sometimes I like it and sometimes not, regardless of execution. But no matter how well its done, it will always turn off part of the audience.

          You have a good criticism of the comic. Hopefully, it is a one off and wont be a recurring thing for him.

  2. “For Mr. Trump to win was supposed to be a joke, but the joke was on us because the world had turned into the Dilbert World.”

    Amazingly, a cartoon that skewers the GW Cult becomes another Trump’s Fault ™ discussion…

    It is obviously totally okay that you don’t find the cartoon funny. There are obviously a lot of people who don’t find it funny, hence the knee-jerk-in-the-eye attempt to bat it away. That’s okay too. 😉

    1. I suppose you find Gary Trudeau funny? I no longer find him entertaining or his cartoon anything I want to bother looking at.

      Skewer the GW Cult? I thought Minnesotans for Global Warming was both plenty funny as well as properly skewering with their parody song Hide the Decline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMqc7PCJ-nc

      I think the knee-jerk attempt is to find the Dilbert cartoon in question funny when it is outside what make the Dilbert World funny. Mr. Adams is using Dilbert as a soapbox for promulgating is opinions, but then the cartoon is no longer funny.

      One of the points Scott Adams long stressed is that he Scott is not the Dilbert character. Dilbert is perhaps a composite of people Scott worked with over the years, Scott is an outside observer bringing us the Dilbert World. The cartoon in question inserted a Scott character posing as Dilbert.

      Do you still read Gary Trudeau?

      1. I wasn’t addressing the relative amount of humor in Scott’s cartoon, or whether or not it deviated from “Dilbert canon” or something. My point was that you tried to turn it into yet another referendum on Trump’s Fault ™ by complaining about how Scott had fallen from the purer faith due to Trumpian hypnosis.

        Scott’s cartoon, regardless of it’s subjective humor quotient, told a pretty accurate tale of how the warmistas practice their faith. Trump wasn’t required.

        As for Doonesbury, you’ve obviously got a hangup with that dreck. I have read it only a handful of times in my life, and it’s always been shallow and generally unfunny.

  3. Sense of humor bypass, Paul?
    I think the Dilbert cartoon was exactly on target and hilarious, but then I find the whole GW conjecture/industry/panic so absurd as to defy description. Great way to destroy a technical civilization though, which is really the point isn’t it?

  4. Humor derives from the unexpected. There is nothing unexpected, at least to me, in the talking points expressed by the Dilbert-World Michael Mann character in the cartoon. These talking points may be wrong, they may be absurd, but they are quite old and tired and thoroughly familiar to me, hence I see the cartoon as a thinly disguised polemic, however the particular viewpoint is justified.

    Foregoing one’s trademark humor to editorialize in a comic strip leads to the Doonesbury side of the Comic Force. Don’t give in to editorializing in a comic strip and crossing over to the Doonesbury side.

    1. “Foregoing one’s trademark humor to editorialize in a comic strip leads to the Doonesbury side of the Comic Force. Don’t give in to editorializing in a comic strip and crossing over to the Doonesbury side.”

      Wow. You’re actually EMBRACING this pseudo-religious rationale?

      Scott Adams is not turning to evil because he wrote a comic strip that you personally found unfunny.

  5. I didn’t find it funny either. He’s done this better in the past. It’s not the first time he inserts a real world person in the strip. Jeff Bezos has been there more than once for example. It’s not the first time he points out the stupidity in an argument either. I think it was a decent subject to cover as well. It was just the delivery that kind of failed. There wasn’t this crescendo of stupidity as usual.

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