Scott Alexander just wrote an obituary for Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. It opens with this observation:
This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all.
The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too scary to view except through humor, is that you’re smarter than everyone else, but for some reason it isn’t working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell you why. Your best-laid plans turn to dust at a single glint of Chad’s perfectly-white teeth.
Lesser lights may distance themselves from their art, but Adams radiated contempt for such surrender. He lived his whole life as a series of Dilbert strips. Gather them into one of his signature compendia, and the title would be Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting.
If your reaction is “I would absolutely buy that book”, then keep reading, but expect some detours.
Scott Alexander is a writer I respect and admire, and who has taught me a lot. His essays are insightful, detail-oriented, extremely long, very stylish, carefully constructed and supported, packed with original and often contrarian observations.
But I’ve also learned to keep my distance because in important ways he is too good — I read him regularly for a long while, but finally realized that I was being sucked in by his obsessions, not always a bad thing but overall taking up more time than the rewards (for me) merited. So I removed him from my feed, and only read him if I come across a link to something he’s written (and then only if the topic really, really intrigues me). I look forward to those moments. But I also sigh as I realize that an hour or two of my day are newly spoken for.
This obituary is an excellent example. I loved Dilbert back in the day, knew only a little about Adams’s late-career transformation into the “Trump whisperer” and cared even less. I never wondered why that transformation happened, and could have happily gone to my grave never thinking about it. But Scott Alexander’s explanation is funny, thoughtful, surprising, and I think dead on. I never would have wasted my time on thinking out a Grand Unified Theory of Scott Adams, but I’m glad that Scott Alexander did, and that he wrote it up, and that I spent an hour reading it. I laughed, I sighed, I learned a few things.
The other thing I notice: I’ve seen quite a few other postmortems of Scott Adams, and every other one is totally predictable, falling thoughtlessly into one of two camps (I’m sure you’re familiar with both). Alexander’s is the only obituary which actually engages with his subject and tries to understand him as a human being with an arc. Successfully, I think.