Leave it to Scott Alexander to write the most epic Scott Adams obituary. Adding to the confusion, Scott Adams and Alexander share the same first name and initials, and I will leave it to the reader to infer which Scott I am referring to.
Scott writes:
But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams’ comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful.
I somewhat think Scott is overreading or reaching to find a deeper meaning to Dilbert, where there is none. It’s like trying to psychoanalyze Garfield. Jon exists to be tormented by Garfield, and that torment is the joke. It’s funny. End of analysis.
Dilbert was always understood as tongue-in-cheek rather than a serious artistic critique of workplace conditions. Many of the same people who pinned Dilbert cartoons to their cubicle walls would gladly crawl back to the same jobs if they were fired and later rehired. Moreover, people are working longer than ever. The idea of quitting the ‘rat race,’ save for the tiny/niche ‘FIRE movement’, never really caught on. Even Dilbert’s creator didn’t stop working until the very end, literally until the day he passed.
Continuing,
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?
I think only Paul Krugman was ever considered to be public intellectual, and is still in good standing by The Establishment. The others are pundits or were always fringe or heterodox . AFIK, the Weinsteins’ and Jordan Peterson’s views haven’t really changed much–they have always positioned themselves as heterodox. Musk was never considered a public intellectual, although his views have shifted a lot since 2024 or so.
It’s too bad to see Scott playing the racism card in what is otherwise a good piece:
Adams and Elon Musk occasionally talked about each other – usually to defend one another against media criticism of their respective racist rants – but I don’t know if they ever met.
By including this does Scott hope to earn the approval of people who tried to cancel him? It’s not racist to want to live in a better society, or to decry the directon society is headed in. I think what we’ve seen is a ‘great debasement’, describing the deterioration of public decency on either side of the aisle. This is why there is so much obsession or memes with reliving the past, whether it’s nostalgic posts of ’90s culture going viral, or gilded centurions memes captioned with ‘Retvrn’.
Another theme is coping with mediocrity:
It’s not just nerds. Everyone has to crash into reality. The guitar player who starts a garage band in order to become a rockstar. The varsity athlete who wants to make the big leagues. They all eventually realize, no, I’m mediocre. Even the ones who aren’t mediocre, the ones with some special talent, only have one special talent (let’s say cartooning) and no more.
and
For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work.
Truly talented people remind us of our mediocrity. It’s like we’re flotsam by comparison. I felt this way reading Scott’s essay. I agree Scott was motivated to create a legacy that would outlive his cartoon, and worked tirelessly at that. But I disagree with Scott’s assessment that Mr. Adams habitually failed or was a one-trick pony.
Except for obvious failures like the ‘Dilberito’, his half-successes were still fruitful. Although his TV show was quickly canceled, people still speak fondly of it. His podcast/livestream, social media presence and book sales were objectively successful, and some of his concepts (e.g. the Dilbert Principle, a reformulation Peter Principle) entered the common lexicon. But perhaps he fell short of rising to the level famed management guru Peter Drucker. But if this constitutes being mediocre, I hope to be mediocre too.
[As a digression, either principles (Dilbert or Peter) never made much sense. Why not just fire the incompetent employee? Given the massive layoffs in 2022, it seems this is the go-to route.]
But it’s hard to fault anyone for feeling mediocre. With the AI boom, which keeps defying predictions of collapse or bubble, even many outwardly successful people feels mediocre when compared to founders, early employees, or VCs in AI. It’s possible to even be a multimillionaire world-famous cartoonist and still feel small compared to the likes of Sam Altman or Elon Musk.
And finally, his health:
In 2024, diagnosed with terminal cancer, Adams decided to treat it via ivermectin, according to a protocol recommended by fellow right-wing contrarian Dr. William Makis. This doesn’t seem to me like a story about a cynic milking right-wingers for the grift. It sounds like a true believer. Scott Adams, the man too clever and independent to join any political tendency, who had sworn to always be the master manipulator standing above the fray rather than a sheep with ordinary object-level opinions – had finally succumbed to sincere belief.
Some have argued, callously, similar to Steve Jobs, that Scott brought his death upon himself by refusing conventional healthcare. This assumes the counterfactual that his cancer was curable, which we don’t know. In may 2025 he announced he had terminal prostate cancer. A prostate cancer diagnosis at an early age (60s) tends to be more aggressive than in older people, like 80s.
I am guessing he already knew it was fatal and tried different things, but given that it had already spread and was an aggressive cancer, there was nothing he could have done. Joe Biden for example was diagnosed with terminal metastatic prostate cancer despite having top medical care and preventive care. Sometimes it’s just the bad luck of the draw. Him taking ivermectin likely made no difference when it was already terminal.
Scott had so much to live for, that his premature death hit especially hard. There are other people who check out in their 50s, but not him. Being unmarried without kids afforded him abundant free time, which he never squandered, whether it was his social media presence, his livestream/podcast, cartooning, and writing, in order to create this legacy. He was always doing something. There’s something inspiring in that.