(1) It doesn't give Adams enough credit for his work on WhenHub. I was reading Scott Adams's posts about WhenHub contemporaneously as he worked through the startup's various pivots. He had a really good idea that people would want to see a map with a little live-location icon of where their friends & acquaintances were on the map and he pushed really hard on different ways of getting this idea towards reality. We have this now (in various other social map apps) and he showed good product sense.
(2) It gives Adams too little credit for the sincerity of his views.
> There’s a passage in the intro to one of Adams books where he says that, given how he’s going to blow your mind and totally puncture everything you previously believed, perhaps the work is unsuitable for people above fifty-five, whose brains are comparatively sclerotic and might shatter at the strain. This is how I feel about post-2016 politics. Young people were mostly able to weather the damage. As for older people, I have seen public intellectual after public intellectual who I previously respected have their brains turn to puddles of partisan-flavored mush. Jordan Peterson, Ken White, Curtis Yarvin, Paul Krugman, Elon Musk, the Weinsteins, [various people close enough to me that it would be impolite to name them here]. Once, these people were lions of insightful debate. Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
This is not fair. Adams knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what he was getting into for all of 2015-2026. He was an extremely smart guy. We should treat him seriously, not infantilize him. He was not a Nobel Prize winning chemist or Fields Medal winning mathematician coming up with wacky perpeutal-motion machines or cranky Riemann Hypothesis solutions that everyone politely agrees to ignore. His hypnosis stuff and all the rest were genuinely what he really believed -- it's not like Sir Michael Atiyah's Todd function.
Adams was in the prime of his life, he was doing what mattered most to him, and we should take him at his word that he genuinely believed what he said and we should judge what he said on its merits.
(3) I don't really have a disagreement but I am fascinated by the implication in the last 1/3 of the eulogy slatestarcodex view that Scott Adams was trying to establish a guru cult community - in convergent evolution with the sort of thing that the squishy half of TPOT tends to sprout in the East Bay. It's an interesting observation which tells me something about what is going on with Bay Area rationalism, though I don't know quite what.
I thought that many of the things that happened to Adams -- especially his family troubles with his stepson, but also his illness -- were really sad. I'm sorry things didn't turn out differently and grateful for the cartoons.
TPOT is "this part of Twitter", a loose community of (roughly) post-rat affiliated people; the "squishy half" is presumably referring to the fact that a substantial number of such people end up quite big into woo of various sorts.
Wow, I read the linked case ( https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ewhc/kb/2025/3063 ) and the High Court judge's ruling has a remarkably strong and thorough discussion of both modern Internet forum culture and the law. Really interesting writing.
Watched a fantastic film about this on the plane a few years ago, "Liar Game - Reborn". There is some fairly sophisticated logic puzzling and scheming going on (see e.g. sample illustration https://imgur.com/a/0AOb67G from an interlude about 50min in where there are 3 groups of people who mutually distrust each other, each know a secret collection of 3-4 integers unique to their group, and want to deniably pass share integers with each other which are "not my team's". Another participant watches what happened and realizes in retrospect this is how the info was shared.)
Gergely Orosz, whose writing is influential in tech spheres and fun to read, has been a loud proponent of the theory that TCJA's elimination of the immediate expense of R&D research cost was the skeleton key explaining technology sector layoffs.
It seems to me to that many technology-industry trends are driven by vibes:
* People seem to love reading articles in any kind of media source about their company's products and are remarkably credulous of them / influenced by their content. Not just PR generating roundup reports of media coverage, this is also engineers and leaders who follow any coverage of their firms quite closely.
* There really does seem to be a sort of contagion effect with layoffs where, once one firm began doing it, everyone did (layoffs.fyi has a lot of data supporting this kind of hypothesis)
* Among founders and engineering leaders, there does seem to be a common set of ideas - not just the group-chat consensus that helped kill SVB, but just an overall whisper network of facts that everyone knows is true - which guide their choices.
Overall it seems reasonable for software-industry employees to hope a narrative takes hold like "we had to lay off lots of people because their headcount didn't pencil out during the annual FP&A cycle under the new TCJA R&D rules, but now that the new law has restored immediate R&D expensing the formula is going to make the opaque headcount number higher, and jobs will be more stable". The idea might even become true if enough people believe it.
Personally I think the layoffs are better explained by another phenomenon, superpersuasion from AI. (My niche view is that the first superpersuader success story was when the chatbots convinced business leaders to reallocate resources to buying more GPUs and LLM tokens and lower investment in the rest of their lines of business.)
I think it's worth reading both the 2015 OIG report on the topic ("Title: Numberholders Age 112 or Older Who Did Not Have a Death Entry on the Numident", A-06-14-34030) and also the 2023 followup you submitted. I left a comment over on that submission after reading both.
It's nice that the hard work of investigating government inefficiency is being noticed and celebrated -- you can really see the tensions between providing reliable services and fighting fraud risk in the 2015 & 2023 reports.
If you care about finding waste, it seems like a really strange choice to summarily fire the inspectors general who have worked hard on this sort of investigation.
It was interesting to see that in the 2015 audit, a total of 13 people were found to have received Social Security benefits despite being older than the oldest known human.
It was also interesting to see that in the 2023 audit the costs questioned ended up being $0, i.e. there was less evidence of misdirected money, though in OIG's opinion strong evidence of an opportunity for fraud in other ways.
I think I understand why SSA might be reluctant to accept recommendations to bulk disable the SSNs of people who seem to be very old. If they get it wrong and a legitimate beneficiary had their benefits cut off because somebody typed in their birthday wrong, this could lead to bad press and a frustrating experience with Congressional constituent services.
Seems to me that it would be a perfectly reasonable policy choice to order SSA to implement the OIG's recommendations and take a more forceful approach to shutting down old SSNs. The odd thing here is that instead of doing that in 2025, the inspectors general were all laid off, and their recommendations about fraud are being gradually rediscovered from first principles, but without any of the institutional understanding of where the bad data come from and how to fix them.
I spent a fair chunk of the mid-90s to early 2000s on a moderately busy MUD with a group of people who, it turns out, were all about the same age. No idea in retrospect how I juggled this with school/friends/work - I guess kids just have a ton of free time.
Kind of drifted away for a couple decades during college and after, as other things filed up the time.
I came back decades later, after going to a memorial service for a friend who died untimely of a serious medical condition, and seeing that a bunch of the people there were from her online community. They talked about the MUSH she hung out on had been a real lifeline when she was bedbound for immune-system reasons -- it was really, really cool to see, and I went back and checked out my own place and met up with folks again.
During 2020 a TON of people all had the same idea and all logged in to my place again. There was a brief resurgence of activity (from dozens of people online to a hundred+). Very few new players, but very cool to see people who were all, more or less, the same cohort -- just grown up now. Folks have slowly drifted away again in the past couple years, and that's fine too. I'm glad it's there.
It's nice to have these subcritical, human-scale online communities. Not everything has to be a subreddit or even a 10,000+ person discord - you can just hang out on a server!
The chat logs show that he was quite stoic about the whole thing and treated it as a mundane business action to protect himself ("is a liability and I wouldn't mind if…"; "I've received the picture and deleted it. Thank you again for your swift action.").
Given that he is now free, and may have access to substantial cryptocurrency wealth, I think it would probably be best under the circumstances if everyone forgot about these allegations and just left him alone to live a quiet life.
(1) It doesn't give Adams enough credit for his work on WhenHub. I was reading Scott Adams's posts about WhenHub contemporaneously as he worked through the startup's various pivots. He had a really good idea that people would want to see a map with a little live-location icon of where their friends & acquaintances were on the map and he pushed really hard on different ways of getting this idea towards reality. We have this now (in various other social map apps) and he showed good product sense.
(2) It gives Adams too little credit for the sincerity of his views.
> There’s a passage in the intro to one of Adams books where he says that, given how he’s going to blow your mind and totally puncture everything you previously believed, perhaps the work is unsuitable for people above fifty-five, whose brains are comparatively sclerotic and might shatter at the strain. This is how I feel about post-2016 politics. Young people were mostly able to weather the damage. As for older people, I have seen public intellectual after public intellectual who I previously respected have their brains turn to puddles of partisan-flavored mush. Jordan Peterson, Ken White, Curtis Yarvin, Paul Krugman, Elon Musk, the Weinsteins, [various people close enough to me that it would be impolite to name them here]. Once, these people were lions of insightful debate. Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
This is not fair. Adams knew exactly what he was doing and exactly what he was getting into for all of 2015-2026. He was an extremely smart guy. We should treat him seriously, not infantilize him. He was not a Nobel Prize winning chemist or Fields Medal winning mathematician coming up with wacky perpeutal-motion machines or cranky Riemann Hypothesis solutions that everyone politely agrees to ignore. His hypnosis stuff and all the rest were genuinely what he really believed -- it's not like Sir Michael Atiyah's Todd function.
Adams was in the prime of his life, he was doing what mattered most to him, and we should take him at his word that he genuinely believed what he said and we should judge what he said on its merits.
(3) I don't really have a disagreement but I am fascinated by the implication in the last 1/3 of the eulogy slatestarcodex view that Scott Adams was trying to establish a guru cult community - in convergent evolution with the sort of thing that the squishy half of TPOT tends to sprout in the East Bay. It's an interesting observation which tells me something about what is going on with Bay Area rationalism, though I don't know quite what.
I thought that many of the things that happened to Adams -- especially his family troubles with his stepson, but also his illness -- were really sad. I'm sorry things didn't turn out differently and grateful for the cartoons.
reply