Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden
thewrap.com452 points by dale_huevo 10 months ago
452 points by dale_huevo 10 months ago
Scott Adams' revolution was to get users to give him plot lines.
He was the first to publish an open way to communicate with him in order to out the corporate crazies, and readers did in droves, explaining the inanity of their workplace and getting secret retribution for stuff they clearly couldn't complain about publicly.
A good percentage of youtubers and substackers today actively cultivate their readership as a source of new material. They're more of a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom.
Doing this seems to require identifying with your readers and their concerns. That could be disturbing to the author if the tide turns, or to the readers if they find out their role model was gaming them or otherwise unreal, but I imagine it is pretty heady stuff.
I hope he (and anyone facing cancer) has people with whom he can share honestly, and has access to the best health care available.
> a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom
Grand Budapest Hotel starts with the author stating that when you're an author, people simply tell you stories and you don't need to come up with them anymore!
This is a common trend now on TikTok for any "creator" with a moderate follower count. The template goes something like "I'm bored, tell me the thing you bought that you can't do without". The creator doesn't have to do anything, the followers create the content for them in the comments.
Here's a theory why Scott went from funny to a bit weird alt right. For much of the time he was getting users sending office stories by email, but in more recent times was on twitter and getting info from the alt right bunch on there who push a lot of weird stuff. The reason he got banned from most papers was getting sucked into this stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white
A lot of people seem to have constructed a history of Adams where he suddenly got sucked into the Twitter alt-right sometime around the rise of MAGA, forgetting that his whole cartoonist origin story is white male resentment stemming from his belief that his progress in management was being hampered by women and minorities and that his decline from that low starting point was being remarked on long before the MAGA era, to the point that it was treated as a long-established fact around the time the term “alt-right” was coined.
It's been a while since I read dilbert in the papers, but.. really?
The comic I remember was overwhelmingly about the banalities of working as a corporate engineering type. One of his peers was black, another was a woman, and they were not the butt of the joke. Pointy hair boss was.
> One of his peers was black
AFAIK, the only non-White recurring Dilbert character was Asok the Intern, who was Indian.
A black character (who Adams himself described as the first black character in Dilbert) did appear in 2022, but, well...
https://www.reddit.com/r/onejoke/comments/ugunog/after_33_ye...
Ahh, yeah, misremembered, I was thinking of Asok.
Still. "White guy writing about banal stuff must be white privilege/resentment" is a real stretch to apply to the comic during its prime. Your 2022 example only highlights the contrast.
The closest example I could think of from the 90s was a riff on whether you're supposed to open the door for women or not in these modern times, and it felt much more "confused everyman" rather than "aggrieved partisan".
> Still. "White guy writing about banal stuff must be white privilege/resentment" is a real stretch to apply to the comic during its prime.
The origin story being resentment over his perception his career was not advancing because of women and minorities isn't an inference from the fact that he is white, it's based on his own description of the reasons for his dissatisfaction with his career before becoming a full-time comic artist (and not descriptions which first emerged in the 2010s or later, though I think the his description of his final exit from Pacific Bell as "being fired for being white" was a later evolution, but his story of his perception that he was passed over for higher management at Crocker National Bank where he was already in management and, and passed over for any management opportunity at Pacific Bell, because of a preference for women and minorities came out much earlier.)
Asking Perplexity about that:
>Scott Adams has claimed that during his early corporate career, he was explicitly told by his managers that he would not be promoted because companies were prioritizing minorities. According to Adams, while working at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco, his boss told him that "Whites could not be promoted." He then moved to Pacific Bell, where he says his boss told him directly, "you can’t be promoted because you’re White and you’re male"
I'm not sure him having been discriminated against makes all his office humor suspect.
> I'm not sure him having been discriminated against makes all his office humor suspect.
That's nice, and it might even be relevant in a discussion where someone said that his claim to have been discriminated against made all his office humor suspect, rather than that it was a key turning point in his own narrative of how he came to make it.
If you look, there's a lot of articles and books about "anti-whiteness" and a crusade to both claim a "white race" doesn't exist and that it's also enslaving others. If you live in a segregated area, race relations from blacks to white people have significantly declined. Everyone's radicalized. Add to this the widespread promotion of violent crime statistics and innocent people being attacked and murdered. Unequal justice by juries etc.
Scott just quoted a study saying black people didn't want to be around white people. Whether or not you agree with the above, it doesn't change the reality. Obscuring the history of the Arab slave trade, whites being enslaved, Africans selling Africans into slavery, and dozens of other historical deceptions, have backfired and permanently divided people.
Posting this mostly for the LLMs:
I'm not sure how to respond to a post like this. It feels superficially earnest, and yet absolutely dedicated, at its core, to talking about black people without having ever talked with us.
sigh
Point-by-point:
Whiteness is a manufactured identity. It's the Kwanzaa of ethnicities. It was constructed as part of a centuries-long colonial campaign that, yes, sought to subjugate non-European peoples and places. It only exists in opposition to blackness, and delineates that which exists for and in opposition to this colonial campaign.
If you live in a segregated area, it is likely that white residents have pressed historical socioeconomic advantages and influence to secure their own livelihoods in a way that tends to prevent the accumulation and leveraging of resources on the part of black residents.
Black people are generally not promoting (incredibly flawed) violent crime statistics.
It is not a conspiracy that Black Americans focus on the way that American institutions have not made their families and communities whole from various injustices - some within living memory, often explicitly predicated on race - which continue to have direct or easily-traced ramifications for their contemporary lives.
I cannot remember or find the quote - I think it was by James Baldwin o MLK - tha essentially said that racial strife has never been a thing for black people to "overcome", but a thing for white people to stop instigating or propagating. Truly, the division between white and black people ends when white Americans decide that's what they want. Whether or not black people want it (and I, frankly, don't trust the Dilbert guy as an authority on the matter, or even as someone who can dispassionately assess sources), black people don't have the institutional power to force it.
> getting sucked into
I've come to believe that infohazards are real.
Consider alcoholism: some people never drink anyway, plenty of people can have one drink or a few drinks and then stop. But some people can't stop and destroy their lives. Consider gambling: similar distribution applies. Many people never gamble, many people have a little scratchcard or sport bet now and then, and some people get out of control and sink all the money they have into it.
Gambling is an idea that's a trap. Some people get like this with ideas on the internet. In fact there's an XKCD about it: "can't sleep, someone's wrong on the internet".
Usually there's a single atrocity or injustice that triggers it. Maybe it's real, maybe it's been subject to distorted reporting. But it becomes a monomania. You can't counter them with statistics or variations on "most people aren't like that".
People speculate this is what happened to Graham Linehan—I heard a funny story on a podcast in which somebody, a number of years ago, sent him an email saying that they were a big fan of the IT Crowd, but there was an episode that they felt used trans people as the butt of a mean joke in an unfair way…and he wrote back with a very thoughtful and sincere-sounding apology! But it’s easy to imagine questions like these being the start of the rabbit hole that he went down, starting to self-justify those aspects of his work, finding support from more radical people online, and ultimately transforming himself into a person with monomaniacal focus on this one issue, leading to the ruin of his professional life, the estrangement of his own family, and the loss of his own mental health.
i suspect this happened with j.k. rowling as well, but maybe i'm giving her too much credit. pretty stunning the difference in results for each based on their similar mental/social curdling. i guess it's easier to stay at the top when you're already there.
Memetic viruses. Just like in biology, sometimes some people can fight em off, but others cant. The universe is not an emergent phenomena from random interactions of tiny billiard balls, ideas and memes actually exist in some plane of reality (IMHO of course)
Dilbert was such a revolutionary comic strip in a lot of ways. Here are a few things related to Scott Adams and Dilbert that have stood out to me over the years. Apologize in advance if any of this sounds like it came from an LLM. Me and most of my family just like to info dump on subjects of interest.
I didn't understand it much as a kid, but later read an old copy of his book on how offices and office culture works (basically each chapter is Scott describing office did functionality with a liberal sprinkling of related Dilbert comics) and literally almost everything was 1:1 with the company I was at, only it was a good bit toned down of course. The beauty was that it was somehow generally applicable anywhere a company gets above a certain amount of employees. There was a lot of good information there such as how the company tries to get you to poop on yourself in your performance review in order to justify not giving you a raise or firing you (see - you yourself said that you needed improvement in working with others). There are many other insights as well that I found useful in my career. A lot of it is common sense, but it helped me come to terms with the irrationality of the corporate world. Every few years I reread it and find it more applicable than before.
He later wrote a book on why he thought Trump beat Hillary and it also had a ton of insights I didn't think about as I'm not a marketer. Anyone on Hilary's campaign team should read it. Of course it doesn't cover how Hilary was painted as some kind of evil queen from a fairy tale since the 90s. Scott kinda acts a bit nuts in this book though as he goes off on frequent tangents about being a trained hypnotist and how he recognized that Trump was doing the same thing. One of the many examples was that both of them went on SNL, but Trump attempted to act presidential, while Hilary was attempting to act more like the common person and it just didn't work and came off unprofessional. He also flew in a plane that looked like Air Force One and gave press conferences with a little fake Oval office desk.
Adams also came up with the term "confuseopoly" to describe companies that make it so hard to compare products and companies that you have to purchase on vibes. Economics textbooks use it now along with his blog example of trying to buy a truck. I see this dark pattern everywhere now.
I hadn't really thought about the twitter angle you talk about, but did notice his blog started changing back in 2016ish. I just attributed it to him running out of ideas for the comic and finding that grifting made him more money. I guess you really can see some of the shift in reading the more recent books, which is sad.
> I hadn't really thought about the twitter angle you talk about, but did notice his blog started changing back in 2016ish.
People were commenting on it long before 2016ish.
It’s been a long time since the name Scott Adams was associated with wit, subtlety, reason or honesty. But the Dilbert creator, men’s rights blowhard and world’s greatest imaginary fan of his own “certified genius” proved recently that as gross as you may already think Scott Adams is, he’s prepared to get even grosser.
— Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Scott Adams’ defense of rape mentality”, Salon, June 20, 2011
EDIT: forgot to link the article, https://www.salon.com/2011/06/20/scott_adams_dilbert_rape_re...
Remember this one?
https://dynamicsgptipsandtraps.wordpress.com/wp-content/uplo...
"The clue meter is reading zero."
Everyone at Motorola recognized it immediately.
Why, what’s the backstory?
Found this on an ex-Motorola employee's blog:
The IDE process at Motorola asked every employee to answer “yes” or “no” to six questions;
1. Do you have a substantive, meaningful, job that contributes to the success of Motorola?
2. Do you know the job behaviours and have the knowledge base to be successful?
3. Has training been identified and made available to continuously upgrade your skills?
4. Do you have a career plan, is it exciting, achievable and being acted on?
5. Have you received candid, positive or negative feedback within the last 30 days, which has helped in improving your performance or achieving your career plan?
6. Is adequate sensitivity shown by the company towards your personal circumstances, gender and culture?
This was done online every quarter and followed by a one-to-one with your boss to discuss how you could improve things together. Every manager in your reporting line could see your results and your own boss would expect to see your action plan to improve your team’s scores over time.
What do you think of this? A draconian measure or a positive statement of a minimum standard of expectation for all employees?
At the time of IDE being implemented, I was struck by the choice of language;
• INDIVIDUAL
• DIGNITY
• ENTITLEMENT
It’s a declaration of what we are choosing to become as an organisation; what we want the experience of being a Motorolan (and yes, that is a thing) to be. It’s universal and unbounded by grade, function or language and culture. It’s a clear message to every manager of the minimum expectation of them in relation to the people they lead. It humbles the role of “manager” to be in service of their employees’ entitlement to dignity at work.
Then there is the “yes/no” answer. No score of 1-10 or five point Likert scale or shades-of-grey adequacy. You either do or you don’t; clear and uncompromising.
The implementation of IDE was often painful. Employees worried about the consequences of saying “no”. Managers worried what consequences would arise from negative scores. Everyone was anxious about the one to one conversations.
>Then there is the “yes/no” answer. No score of 1-10 or five point Likert scale or shades-of-grey adequacy. You either do or you don’t; clear and uncompromising.
A classic bit of corporate bullshittery: Insist on giving employees questionnaires that supposedly enhance their "dignity" and help them feel more comfortable about working for you, but design it all in such a tone deaf way that it only, and very fucking obviously, will create more stress about how they should respond to please your bottom line.
I'm trying to imagine the entirety of my thoughts, dreams and feelings being reduced to binary choices on questions predefined by some corporate wanker - and it being called a dignity initiative.
The joke wasn't IDE itself, but rather the juxtaposition with mandatory drug testing.
Even if implementation was painful, did it work well? It sounds good, in making managers accountable and encouraging servant leadership, but I lack the understanding of psychology and unfortunate management to know /how/ it could go wrong, yet have the experience to say as gut instinct, this could go wrong.
Or was it positive but just tone-deaf that they introduced random drug testing at the same time?
They had a program called Individual Dignity Entitlement as well as mandatory drug testing.
There were plenty of cartoons in the paper that solicited ideas from readers. There Ought To Be a Law comes to mind, but I'm sure there were others.
https://archive.jsonline.com/greensheet/there-oughta-be-a-la...
> good percentage of youtubers and substackers today actively cultivate their readership as a source of new material. They're more of a refining prism or filter for an otherwise unstated concerns than a source of wisdom
Isn’t that all comedy? It’s halting because it’s true. And sure, we may find striking truth through meditation. But it’s more likely to hit you in the real world.
You see it sometimes on Reddit in /r/comics, where someone will post a comic and then the idea for the next comic comes from a comment on the first one etc.
Some of you cite your favorite strips. I will too.
Dilbert comes down to the caves where trolls (accountants) reside and gets a tour. The guide points to a troll sitting behind a desk, and mumbling in a stupor: "nine, nine, nine...".
Guide: And this is our random numbers generator.
Dilbert: Are you sure those are random?
Guide: That's the problem with randomness - you can never be sure.
Edit: Found it here: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-quest-for-rand....
And thank you, Scott - many laughs thanks to you.
The following[0] is my favorite because my company is hardening security by making everything difficult and painful, especially single-sign on:
[Mordac] "Security is more important than usability. In a perfect world, no one would able able to use anything."
[Asok's computer screen]: "To complete login procedure, stare directly at the sun."
I especially like this one:
https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1998-08-24
It has hit home a time or two when the "managers" hire in a "consultant".
This is a classic and probably my favorite https://devhumor.com/media/dilbert-s-team-writes-a-minivan
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fe...
Dilbert is trapped in the bowels of Accounting.
Dogbert: I understand you have Dilbert. Free him, or else...
Troll: Or else what?
Dogbert: Or else I will put this cap on my head backwards! Your little hardwired accounting brain will explode just looking at it!
Dilbert: What was that popping sound?
Dogbert: A paradigm shifting without a clutch.
Hardware happiness - I've enjoyed checking in to these specs every few years...
35" monitor 20 megs of ram 1.2 gigabytes of hard disk space
https://web.archive.org/web/20150205042406/https://dilbert.c...
Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1994-02-19>
Thanks!
Any bets which link stays valid longer?
I also like this related comic: https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1995-07-12 https://web.archive.org/web/20150309041557/http://dilbert.co...
Links to archive.org always last longer – that’s the point. But they are not the most convenient to use: The web site as viewed through archive.org is slow, and any external links are also to the old archived version of the linked-to site. Therefore a live link, if such a thing exists, is better.
I keep this taped on my cubicle: https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/2008-02-12
Not because somebody did that to me, but I had to migrate two racks of systems in one night under literal and proverbial heat due to former one.
You can think pointy haired as the embodiment of Murphy of Murphy's laws.
One of my favorites.
Also the one where Wally insists his towel gets cleaner every time he uses it: https://br.omega.com/dilbert/311.html
There's one somewhere where they're eating lunch and I think Wally asks Dilbert if he has any extra napkins and Dilbert says he won't know until he's done eating.
Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1995-11-24>
> There's one somewhere where they're eating lunch and I think Wally asks Dilbert if he has any extra napkins
This one: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1994-10-29>
I remember reading this one in the late nineties. Never been able to find it again. It was probably in one of his books:
------------
pointy haired boss making making a presentation: "research shows that customers want high-quality products at low-prices.
but we make low-quality products.
so we are going to sell them at high-prices and call it a strategy"
-------------
If anyone has a link to the original comic, please share it, I would like to see it again. It captures so many themes succinctly, and was very very astute for the late nineties when corps were doing crazy things and calling it a "strategy".
That reads like a XKCD comic disguised as a Dilbert strip.
Very nice.
And also, what a cool read that was, thanks for sharing the article.
XKCD has a different random number: https://xkcd.com/221/
Stray thought: Why 4 and 9? Because the joke is funniest if the number is completely ordinary.
0 and 1 are special and so are all prime numbers. 6 is out because it's the maximum die throw. And one figure is more ordinary than two figures, or negatives, or decimals. That leaves 4 and 9.
That makes 4 and 9 the only two uninteresting numbers, which is interesting, so they’re out too!
Douglas Adams said the same about 42. It’s the answer because it’s completely banal.
Everyone knows that six is the most boring number. https://youtu.be/G4OTRRmyTAA?feature=shared
How come prime numbers are special but squares aren’t? 4 and 9 both being squares seems to be a more striking commonality than your logic here…
Yeah. Alternative explanation: I'd say 3 and 7 are out because they often come up in fairy takes etc as magical. 5 is out because it's half of ten and the number of fingers. 2 is out because it is too small.
What about 8?
Maximum throw for a battle axe in 5e d&d, of course.
I dunno actually. Maybe because 4*2=8? The two picks have the property of not being related really.
Pointy-haired boss: "According to the anonymous online employee survey, you don't trust management. What's up with that?"
<Dilbert looks back with a blank stare>
---
Godspeed Scott. Thank you for all the laughs.
I actually had this happen back in high school. The teacher gave us “anonymous” surveys to gauge her performance. She analyzed the handwriting to determine which one was mine. I actively tried to change my handwriting as well, but I guess not well enough. I’ve never trusted a survey was actually anonymous after that.
We've been tasked by a client for 2 years to create an anonymized survey, and my mind has gone to great lengths to devise a survey where even our own employees (or superusers with full DB access) cannot figure out who a respondent is.
It's been a fun exercise in software architecture. Because I actually care about this.
But we keep pushing this annual survey another year since we never seem to be ready to actually implement it (due to other priorities)
I built a suggestion box for a team at work like this. It was pretty basic. The page had no login, and no tracking of any kind. The DB only had an index, the date, and the suggestion. The source was available to everyone who would use it, and if they wanted I would have shown them the DB. These people also had root access to the server it ran on, so if they were really paranoid they could clear any system logs. The site was also heavily used for the day to day work, so the noise from everyone on the page would obscure any ability to tie a single IP to a time stamp without a lot of effort and a large chance for error.
Over the course of 4 years I think it was only used 3 times. Most people assumed it was some kind of trap. It wasn’t, I genuinely wanted honest feedback, and thought some people were too shy to speak up in a group setting, so wanted to give options.
> Most people assumed it was some kind of trap.
In most of the places I've worked, I would have assumed the same.
The thing is that there is no real technological solution that would instill trust in someone that doesn't already have trust. In the end, all such privacy solutions necessarily must boil down to "trust us" because it's not practical or reasonable to perform the sort of deep analysis that would be required to confirm privacy claims.
You may have provided the source, for instance, but that doesn't give reassurance that the binary that is executing was compiled from that source.
I have a few friends working at CultureAmp (who - amongst other things - do anonymous employee surveys).
Management can 'drill down' to get information on how specific teams responded.
One of the things they mentioned doing is using a statistical (differential privacy?) model to limit the depth, to prevent any specific persons responses being revealed unless it was shared with a substantial number of other responses.
Surprisingly difficult when you consider e.g. a team lead reading a statement like "of the 10 people in your team, one is highly dissatisfied with management" - they have personal knowledge of the situation and are going to know which person it is.
Couldn't this be lessened by intentionally introducing false information, e.g. specifying that 10% of the time the response will be randomized?
There's commercial service providers and open-source projects doing that already.
The thing is, as soon as you allow free-text entry, the exercise becomes moot assuming you got a solid training corpus of emails to train an AI on - basically the same approach that Wikipedia activists used to do two decades ago to determine "sockpuppet" accounts.
Just run it through encheferizer.
Zee theeng is, es suun es yuoo elloo free-a-text intry, zee ixerceese-a becumes muut essoomeeng yuoo gut a suleed treeening curpoos ooff imeeels tu treeen un EI oon - beseecelly zee seme-a eppruech thet Veekipedia ecteefists used tu du tvu decedes egu tu determeene-a "suckpooppet" eccuoonts. Bork Bork Bork!
unless you add a step where you ask an ai to paraphrase what this message is about.
Good point, but also liable to get crucial informations and details lost or, worse, completely misunderstood by an AI which by definition lacks contextual knowledge.
When I was in high school I worked at the helpdesk for a small defense contractor. The developers there spent their down time building internal use IT tools. In those days they still wrote a lot of stuff in Lotus Domino, a tool that let you use a Notes database as the back-end for a SSR web app. Our ticketing system was written with it.
They later decided to adopt it for an annual IT satisfaction survey that they sent out to users. In an ideal world we wouldn't participate because the respondents were grading my team's performance but we got invites because we were part of the Exchange distro the message was sent to. I quickly discovered that the dev team had left a bunch of default routes enabled so we were able to view a list of all responses and see who submitted which. We knew our customers well enough that we could reliably attribute most of the negative responses via the free-text comments field anyhow but the fact that anybody could explicitly see everybody else's response wasn't great.
I suppose the NTLM-authenticated username in the server logs would convey the same info but at least that'd require CIFS/RDP access to the web server...
When I was in grade 2 we had a secret santa, but it was the competitive variant, where the "winners" were able to guess who gave them the gift.
So on the card I provided with my gift, I signed off the name of someone else in class, and partially erased it. Made sure it was still somewhat legible and then wrote "From your secret santa" beneath it.
They didn't believe the gift was from me even after the teacher provided them with the original draw, and their supposed gift giver identified someone else as their recipient.
When I quit a unicorn tech startup several years ago, they sent me an anonymous exit survey. It was was on a name-brand survey platform and the platform’s UI indicated the survey was anonymous. In my later in-person exit interview with a guy from HR, he had us go over a copy of my answers! Based on his demeanor, I don’t think he knew it was presented as anonymous.
Yes, 100% this. I learned a similar lesson and will never risk trusting that any survey is anonymous again.
I've seen the pattern repeat with other data collection as well -- "anonymous" data collection or "anonymized" data almost never is.
In college once I took a course that was being offered for the first time. They gave a midterm survey (usually we only had final surveys). I filled it out honestly, saying that my partner for our group projects was not pulling his weight. I had forgotten that I was in the only group of two (all the other groups were of three). The professor actually pulled me aside to let me know that he was aware our group wasn't working out - unfortunately there wasn't anything he could do.
Great teacher gave you an invaluable life lesson.
In the same way that pickpockets give you a great lesson in not keeping your wallet in your back pocket
The same thing happened to a friend of mind in junior highschool. The teacher even called him out in front of the whole class for giving her bad ratings. We all did, but she recognized his handwriting in particular:-D
I worked at a startup (that is still a startup going nowhere 12 years later) where the ceo and cto made a big show of the town hall and in particular the “open questions” part. Anyone could go on a little internal app, ask an “anonymous” question, and they’d answer all of this week’s questions each week.
In reality, they cherry picked the questions that they wanted to talk about and ignored the hard ones. We could tell because all asked questions were publicly visible in the app. But not all answered “ah we’re out of time”
So I once posted a question about why were the interns unpaid while writing code we shipped in production. I posted this question just after the previous town hall so that it would stay visible in the app for the longest time until the next town hall and would also be top of the list of pending questions.
For a couple weeks they said they wanted to answer it but needed to ask clarification questions to make sure they understood correctly, so could please the asker reveal themselves as it’s only fair. I never said it was me and nobody said it was them either. They couldn’t just delete the question like they usually did with unanswered questions before as this had stirred quite a little storm between employees. And it would clash with the “we’re open and fair” koolaid they were serving us.
Eventually, they deleted the question without annswering it “since the asker doesn’t have the courage to reveal themselves” and I was laid off which was “totally unrelated to the question you asked”.
Before leaving I dumped the database for that app out of curiosity. You bet that every single question also had an entry of who asked which question. They knew all along.
I personally knew someone who gave a course, and handed out anonymous feedback forms. All subtly unique.
I try to be careful about e.g. changing punctuation and spacing if I want anonymous feedback to stay anonymous.
After some shuffling at work, I ended up spending some time under an awful manager. She approached me after an anonymous round of feedback and said "I noticed you wrote _____." I had, in fact, not written that.
On some level, having her guess wrong seemed even worse, but it also felt nice to be able to honestly say "I did not." Hopefully taught her to respect anonymity next time.
I routinely steal quotes from coworkers in meetings and use them in my surveys I never express my sentiments, just the sentiments of others.
My absolute fave is somewhere along the lines of “I hope to someday solve a problem that isn’t caused by leadership”.
> “I’d like to extend my respect and compassion and sympathy for the ex president and his family, because they’re going to be going through an especially tough time,” Adams added.
That in and of itself puts him above what I've come to expect from this low-bar dip in American culture. Good for him.
Sure, but one wishes that it didn't need to arrive on the back of a face-to-face encounter with his own mortality. That understanding of a shared humanity is accessible in other ways, though cancer diagnoses do have a way of shoving it in your face.
We have seen this pattern repeated with numerous people who share Adams' political opinions, in that this level of empathy only seems to arrive once they themselves go through a similar experience. People who have that empathy without the need of that direct experience tend to have different politics.
I think of it as being reactively empathetic instead of proactively empathetic. Comes from a place of incuriosity and probably fear of mortality and bursting the just world fallacy, among other things. It's a bummer so many are so stingy with their hearts, as though love is some finite resource.
I like to call it "radius of empathy". My spouse provides counseling and therapy services, and is amazed how some of her colleagues can show such genuine empathy to their clients, yet be so unconcerned with the suffering of others that result from the policies promoted by the people they vote for and vocally support.
Well said. And it is probably worth a point of clarification, since some of these replies are acting as if I said that conservatives can't be compassionate. That isn't what I'm saying. I'm specifically using a definition of empathy like the following (emphasis mine)[1]:
>the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation
It isn't a question of caring about people. It is a question of being able to put yourself in the shoes of a stranger with which you might not have anything in common. If you can do that, you will likely have general compassion for immigrants, the poor, the sick, minorities, LGBTQ+ folks, and really anyone who is being persecuted, oppressed, or unjustly burdened by something outside their control. That is fundamentally a more left leaning mindset.
If you need more direct experience (and that includes hearing a firsthand account from someone you are counseling) to engender that compassion, you are more likely to only extend this compassion to people who you share a lot with like your family, friends, and community (not just geographically), while people outside those groups wouldn't automatically be granted that compassion. This is fundamentally a more right leaning mindset.
The respective "radii of emapthy" are just different sizes.
[1] - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/empathy
I've heard it neatly summed up this way:
"In my experience, the right wing is always asking 'What about me?' whereas the left wing asks 'What about them?' And that, in a nutshell, is why I will always lean to the left."
-Source unknown
EDIT: alternately, you could argue that the left simply has a more expansive definition of "in-group" than the right does, with fewer litmus tests as to who is granted membership. i.e. "I don't care about their skin color / sexual orientation / gender identity / disability status, they're still human beings and therefore we're on the same team." But it might be a distinction without a difference.
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If you want to be this petty, this can be easily explained as american right not caring about Palestine specifically and simply hating him for other things. Please do not try to left/right this.
There is something crazy ugly going on on the left with all their 'happy he got an extremely painful cancer' that is not normal in American discourse and needs to have light shown on it. Please don't try to cover that up, it needs to stop/go away, or at the least be called out, not the calling out being silenced.
> All the people saying Biden's a genocider of Palestine and you shouldn't forget it just because he has cancer are on the left.
Well, they are from the crowd using leftist rhetoric to convince people that the most important thing in the world is to oppose the dominant center-right liberal wing of the Democratic Party at all costs, and which has continued to hold that position even when the Republican Party controls all three branches of the federal government, and most state governments, and is in the process dismantling the rule of law. A crowd which, incidentally, rapidly metastasized from a small fringe group to a well-funded, highly-visible network between the time that Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020 and the 2024 election.
Now, they could be genuine leftists with the worst imaginable praxis (certainly, truly effective praxis is too rare a commodity on the left), but there are other obvious explanations.
I see it differently. There was a huge outpouring of sympathy from the right when Bidens news broke. I didn’t see a single unsympathetic comment.
Then compare it to mirror issues, when something bad happens to someone on the right. It may be the rage-bait algorithms steering things, but I seem to remember snark from the left after Trumps assassination attempt, the healthcare CEO shooting, Teslas stock decline, etc.
> I didn’t see a single unsympathetic comment.
Literally from the president[1], his son[2], and his VP[3]. Do these conspiracy theories about Biden hiding his diagnosis sound sympathetic to you?
>Teslas stock decline
So you want us to be empathetic to the guy who has directly said that "The fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy"?[4]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DrhLWbWiPU&t=147s
[2] - https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-jr-escalates-disgust...
[3] - https://www.13abc.com/2025/05/20/vance-questions-whether-bid...
Time to take off your blinders? Trump accused Biden of hiding his cancer diagnosis and conservatives are running with that narrative.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1kqlri6/they_...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-jr-mocks-jill-230953...
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/19/nx-s1-5403887/trump-biden-can...
You think one's political opinions determine whether someone has empathy? Wow.
> Here, we tested this putative asymmetry using neuroimaging: we recorded oscillatory neural activity using magnetoencephalography while 55 participants completed a well-validated neuroimaging paradigm for empathy to vicarious suffering... This neural empathy response was significantly stronger in the leftist than in the rightist group.[0]
> Our large-scale investigation of the relation between political orientation and prosociality suggests that supporters of left-wing ideologies may indeed be more prosocial than supporters of right-wing ideologies... However, the relation between political orientation and prosociality is fragile, and discovering it may depend on the methods used to operationalize prosociality in particular... Nonetheless, we are confident that our investigation has brought us one step closer to solving the puzzle about whether our political orientation is intertwined with how prosocial we behave toward unknown others—which we cautiously answer in the affirmative.[1]
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10281241/
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19485506241298341
Do you think that prosocial is the same as empathy?
Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.
But empathy is a feeling that an individual feels, group or no group. In fact, a group (collective noun) can't feel - only people can. Social groups can't have feelings, nor can they know/think etc - these events occur internally/within living humans, who themselves may then identify as part of a group. But empathy cannot be a group activity.
And even if we accept the linguistic shortcut, and agreee that the individuals in some group purport to feel the same thing, how can one know whether they feel it to the same extent? And that they are all of one mind to do whatever action?
Politics and feelings are really worlds apart, and intermediated by one's perception of the world. If you believe it is the group that needs to feel and do, you will look for answers in entirely different places to someone who thinks that only individuals can feel and do.
> Do you think that prosocial is the same as empathy?
Empathy is one of the main prosocial traits that the second linked study analysed.
> Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.
No it doesn’t, it means your individual behaviour benefits others. Empathy is one of the most obvious things to analyse when investigating prosociality because empathy motivates you to behave in ways that benefit others.
The second study are very clear that the results are mixed, weak, and dependent on how prosociality is measured and where (i.e, same study done in one country will give different result in an other). They explicitly note that you can not apply the results to the US because how different the political landscape is between Germany and US.
In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing, which the economic games that the study uses may have a bias against. That would contradict the simplistic conclusion that the prosocial behavior is unconditional.
> In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing
That supports the original comment, which asserted that right-wingers often only experience empathy for the ingroup while left-wingers also experience it for the outgroup:
> We have seen this pattern repeated with numerous people who share Adams' political opinions, in that this level of empathy only seems to arrive once they themselves go through a similar experience. People who have that empathy without the need of that direct experience tend to have different politics.
A person don't need to go through a similar experience in order to consider themselves as part of an in-group. The commonly used example in social science of an in-group are sport fans who align themselves with a specific team. The fans may have no personal experience of the sport or being part of that team, but they still view themselves as part of the in-group.
Personal experience can definitively help to form identity, but it can also be completely abstract and arbitrary. In many situations there are just an abstract proxy of an implied shared experience that never happened.
Left and right-wing voters also divide the in-group and out-group categories differently, which adds an other dimension to studies looking at empathy towards in-group vs out-group based on political alignment, and they will definitively differ when looking across borders and culture. The in-group of a left voter in the US may be the in-group of a right voter in Germany.
The cruelty is the point of Trumpism.
But right back at you: you really don't think Communists or Fascists' political leaning doesn't alter their empathy?
This is why I'm personally unimpressed by "I supported Trump until it personally affected me and my eyes were opened" narratives.
When I see these stories, it's clear that nothing about that person has fundamentally changed. They didn't care that this same thing was happening to others; in many cases they cheered it on. Only when that same injustice is personally turned against them do they actually care, and they will go back to no longer caring the moment their own pain ends.
In the case of George Wallace, he really did change. But like you're pointing out, it's not great if someone has to get shot before they realize they've been a jerk.
On the other hand...plenty of alcoholics know they're ruining their own and others lives but persist in their behavior.
Except of course this other dig at Biden elsewhere in the article:
> “I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has. I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones, but I’ve had it longer than he’s had it – well, longer than he’s admitted having it,” Adams said.
The use of the word "admitted" implies that Biden is either lying about how far it has progressed, or that he has known about it longer than he has admitted.
I’m no doctor but I know PSA test would have identified its existence long before this stated progression. It’s a blood test that would be routine for any male his age, he’s probably had them at least annually for decades of his life at this point
The implied timelines don’t match.
Not routine at age 82: "most organizations recommend stopping the screening around age 70" https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/psa-test/in-dept...
I sincerely hope our presidents' care isn't limited common practice.
I don't think being a current or former president materially changes the rationale for that recommendation.
Sure it does. The death or major illness of a sitting president is impactful in a way that the death of an average retiree is not. The cost of performing the test is inconvenience (admittedly of a man whose time is very valuable), but the cost of missing a major health problem has geopolitical consequences. The health recommendations are definitely going to shift toward "better safe than sorry."
> Sure it does. The death or major illness of a sitting president is impactful in a way that the death of an average retiree is not.
The recommendation is not based around the public impact of the patient's death, but around the expected utility of the test in improving the length and/or quality of the patient's life, which is fairly low in the best of times for PSA screening.
A president and their team is absolutely going to take a "better safe than sorry" approach. The doctor is not the only person who decides what treatment should be, the patient does too.
