Nov. 17th, 2005

mmcirvin: (Default)
PZ Myers and his friends discover that Dilbert author Scott Adams is a raging crackpot, and get into a dust-up with Adams and fans.

I think a.r.k discovered this around the time his weird book The Dilbert Future came out. He also occasionally rags on scientists in his cartoons; he's got some scientist guy who shows up now and then and says the equivalent of "duh, I stupid, I is a scientist, nothing I say makes any sense."

While evolution is one of the things Scott Adams likes to harp on, he's not really a creationist. I think he's more a sort of extreme Fortean of the Robert Anton Wilson tendency: somebody who just plain doesn't like scientists because he sees them as pompous ivory-tower authority figures. So anyone who has the nerve to say "the scientists are all lying" gets some automatic credit with him, and he collects weird mavericky ideas and contrary anecdotes as scientist-needling material. My favorite punching bag, Michael Crichton, has a considerable streak of this as well.

It's hard to argue with these people because you can try to shoot down any particular anecdote, but they don't have an intellectual system to dismantle because they're rebelling against intellectual systems. I can sympathize with being anti-system to some degree, and it's good to challenge received ideas; but the problem with this approach is that if you start trawling the fringe for scientist-needling material, you'll get many of the same lame challenges that have been around for eons (the Paluxy man-tracks! Velikovsky! The Philadelphia Experiment!) It's a whole other set of received ideas that have the disadvantage, or advantage depending on how you look at it, of not fitting together into any really coherent worldview. These things keep coming up over and over, and there's no sense of continuity or development in the attacks, or serious attempts to answer rebuttals. After enough of this, most scientists will just get irritated and stop trying to respond logically, but the challenges still sound like legitimate critiques to outsiders, and that just reinforces the image of an entrenched establishment adhering to unquestioned dogma. I've never been quite sure how to break the cycle.



With Adams there's another common angle to it as well; coming from a software background, he has the common engineer's and programmer's feeling that engineers and programmers understand the world better than scientists do.

As somebody who got scientific training and then became a technologist, I notice this a lot. Somebody (in that comment thread? I can't find it any more) described part of the process nicely: if you have some practical training in scientific results and theories, you can get to the point where you can pick apart the logical flaws and underdescribed vaguenesses in popular science books and newspaper articles; and if you've got a particular sort of personality (which seems to be common among the clever Prometheans who become programmers and engineers) you will then jump to the conclusion that you have discovered something revolutionary that the primary sources were too thick to realize.

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