Scott A. on Scott A. on Scott A.
Scott Alexander has put up one of his greatest posts ever, a 10,000-word eulogy to Dilbert creator Scott Adams, of which I would’ve been happy to read 40,000 words more. In it, Alexander trains a microscope on Adams’ tragic flaws as a thinker and human being, but he adds:
In case it’s not obvious, I loved Scott Adams.
Partly this is because we’re too similar for me to hate him without hating myself.
And:
Adams was my teacher in a more literal way too. He published several annotated collections, books where he would present comics along with an explanation of exactly what he was doing in each place, why some things were funny and others weren’t, and how you could one day be as funny as him. Ten year old Scott devoured these … objectively my joke posts get the most likes and retweets of anything I write, and I owe much of my skill in the genre to cramming Adams’ advice into a malleable immature brain.
When I first heard the news that Scott Adams had succumbed to cancer, I posted something infinitely more trivial on my Facebook. I simply said:
Scott Adams (who reigned for decades as the #1 Scott A. of the Internet, with Alexander as #2 and me as at most #3) was a hateful asshole, a nihilist, and a crank. And yet, even when reading the obituaries that explain what an asshole, nihilist, and crank he was, I laugh whenever they quote him.
Inspired by Scott Alexander, I’d like now to try again, to say something more substantial. As Scott Alexander points out, Scott Adams’ most fundamental belief—the through-line that runs not only through Dilbert but through all his books and blog posts and podcasts—was that the world is ruled by idiots. The pointy-haired boss always wins, spouting about synergy and the true essence of leadership, and the nerdy Dilberts always lose. Trying to change minds by rational argument is a fools’ errand, as “master persuaders” and skilled hypnotists will forever run rings around you. He, Scott Adams, is cleverer than everyone else, among other things because he realizes all this—but even he is powerless to change it.
Or as Adams put it in The Dilbert Principle:
It’s useless to expect rational behavior from the people you work with, or anybody else for that matter. If you can come to peace with the fact that you’re surrounded by idiots, you’ll realize that resistance is futile, your tension will dissipate, and you can sit back and have a good laugh at the expense of others.
The thing is, if your life philosophy is that the world is ruled by idiots, and that confident charlatans will always beat earnest nerds, you’re … often going to be vindicated by events. Adams was famously vindicated back in 2015, when he predicted Trump’s victory in the 2016 election (since Trump, you see, was a “master persuader”), before any other mainstream commentator thought that Trump even had a serious chance of winning the Republican nomination.
But if you adopt this worldview, you’re also often going to be wrong—as countless of Adams’ other confident predictions were (see Scott Alexander’s post for examples), to say nothing of his scientific or moral views.
My first hint that the creator of Dilbert was not a reliable thinker, was when I learned of his smugly dismissive view of science. One of the earliest Shtetl-Optimized posts, way back in 2006, was entitled Scott A., disbeliever in Darwinism. At that time, Adams’ crypto-creationism struck me as just some bizarre, inexplicable deviation. I’m no longer confused about it: on the one hand, Scott Alexander’s eulogy shows just how much deeper the crankishness went, how Adams also gobbled medical misinformation, placed his own cockamamie ideas about gravity on par with general relativity, etc. etc. But Alexander succeeds in reconciling all this with Adams’ achievements: it’s all just consequences from the starting axiom that the world is ruled by morons, and that he, Scott Adams, is the only one clever enough to see through it all.
Is my epistemology any different? Do I not also look out on the world, and see idiots and con-men and pointy-haired bosses in every direction? Well, not everywhere. At any rate, I see far fewer of them in the hard sciences.
This seems like a good time to say something that’s been a subtext of Shtetl-Optimized for 20 years, but that Scott Alexander has inspired me to make text.
My whole worldview starts from the observation that science works. Not perfectly, of course—working in academic science for nearly 30 years, I’ve had a close-up view of the flaws—but the motor runs. On a planet full of pointy-haired bosses and imposters and frauds, science nevertheless took us in a few centuries from wretchedness and superstition to walking on the moon and knowing the age of the universe and the code of life.
This is the point where people always say: that’s all well and good, but you can’t derive ought from is, and science, for all its undoubted successes, tells us nothing about what to value or how to live our lives.
To which I reply: that’s true in a narrow sense, but it dramatically understates how far you can get from the “science works” observation.
As one example, you can infer that the people worth listening to are the people who speak and write clearly, who carefully distinguish what they know from what they don’t, who sometimes change their minds when presented with opposing views and at any rate give counterarguments—i.e., who exemplify the values that make science work. The political systems worth following are the ones that test their ideas against experience, that have built-in error-correction mechanisms, that promote people based on ability rather than loyalty—the same things that make scientific institutions work, insofar as they do work. And of course, if the scientists who study X are nearly unanimous in saying that a certain policy toward X would be terrible, then we’d better have a damned good reason to pursue the policy anyway. This still leaves a wide range of moral and political views on the table, but it rules out virtually every kind of populism, authoritarianism, and fundamentalism.
Incidentally, this principle—that one’s whole moral and philosophical worldview should grow out of the seed of science working—is why, from an early age, I’ve reacted to every kind of postmodernism as I would to venomous snakes. Whenever someone tells me that science is just another narrative, a cultural construct, a facade for elite power-seeking, etc., to me they might as well be O’Brien from 1984, in the climactic scene where he tortures Winston Smith into agreeing that 2+2=5, and that the stars are just tiny dots a few miles away if the Party says they are. Once you can believe absurdities, you can justify atrocities.
Scott Adams’ life is interesting to me in that shows exactly how far it’s possible to get without internalizing this. Yes, you can notice that the pointy-haired boss is full of crap. You can make fun of the boss. If you’re unusually good at making fun of him, you might even become a rich, famous, celebrated cartoonist. But you’re never going to figure out any ways of doing things that are systematically better than the pointy-haired boss’s ways, or even recognize the ways that others have found. You’ll be in error far more often than in doubt. You might even die of prostate cancer earlier than necessary, because you listen to medical crackpots and rely on ivermectin, turning to radiation and other established treatments only after having lost crucial time.
Scott Adams was hardly the first great artist to have tragic moral flaws, or to cause millions of his fans to ask whether they could separate the artist from the art. But I think he provides one of the cleanest examples where the greatness and the flaws sprang from the same source: namely, overgeneralization from the correct observation that “the world is full of idiots,” in a way that leaves basically no room even for Darwin or Einstein, and so inevitably curdles over time into crankishness, bitterness, and arrogance. May we laugh at Scott Adams’ cartoons and may we learn from his errors, both of which are now permanent parts of the world’s heritage.
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Comment #1 January 18th, 2026 at 2:25 am
I don’t disagree, but notice what is unstated here:
a) the wider domain you are thinking of is politics, not, say, literature;
b) politics, which involves masses of human beings, is like science and not like literature; in fact, it is about the physical world, and hence potentially an extension of science.
On second thought, replacing ‘politics’ by ‘statemanship’ in (b) makes it into a more reasonable statement.
Notice also that, in science, things cannot be *clearer than possible* at a given stage. Einstein was clearer than Bohr, but, where they disagreed, Einstein was right and Bohr was wrong.
Comment #2 January 18th, 2026 at 3:54 am
Wow. Extremely good post and regret I knew nothing of Scott Adams and little of Dilbert until after his death. Thankfully he lives on through you and others.
Comment #3 January 18th, 2026 at 8:16 am
I too loved Scott Adams, and while I was saddened at his death, I was more saddened by the decade or so prior in which he seemed to be going nuts.
I think it’s very difficult to make sense of a world in which we are enjoying fantastic wealth, health, and access to information, that clearly came from the efforts of coordinated justice (giving credit where credit is due, responding to new evidence, etc), but also see injustice winning conflicts all around us. Adams suffered from audience capture at the end, but before that, I think he suffered from medium capture. His incentives as a comedian and entertainer were to exaggerate for effect, in ways that systematically distort any attempt to make sense of what’s going on, and this was always in tension with the rational, mechanistic attitude that underpinned much of what made Dilbert and his other writings interesting in the first place.
It’s *harder* to make sense of this stuff as an isolated individual, and there aren’t many people openly trying to do so, but being a public figure is additionally isolating, as it makes one a target for not only harassment but lots of relatively friendly attention that one can’t afford to respond to all of the way a normal sociable person might.
It seems like the usual thing for people to miss is the element of time. Science and justice only work when people *do* them, which is sometimes but not always, and there are cyclical as well as noncyclical elements of history, so some people live at a time when those activities were much more dominant in the recent past than in the present.
Comment #4 January 18th, 2026 at 9:39 am
“ if the scientists who study X are nearly unanimous”
That is hilarious.
X has been “eat more carbs”, “population bomb”, “lockdown / racism is the real pandemic / lab leak is impossible”, “degrowth the economy to fight co2”
It is precisely when then scientists all agree and are offering policy advice that the scientific process is most likely to have failed.
it is in those moments that scientists are tempted to trade on the credibility of science in order to promote ideas that they believe for non-scientific reasons.
On the other hand, putting fluoride in the water was a pretty good idea. Probably. When scientific advice is unanimous, but in a technocratic, quiet non-political way it is often a good idea to listen, but when scientists get political, they are just as stupid as the rest of us.
Comment #5 January 18th, 2026 at 10:45 am
My favorite Dilbert comic is the one on random number generators: https://i.imgur.com/bwFWMqQ.png. In addition to being funny, it very concisely illuminates some nontrivial insights regarding the nature of mathematical randomness (which are relevant to quantum foundations!).
Comment #6 January 18th, 2026 at 10:48 am
I think he resonated with people who don’t know how to change things.
You can definitely change things, it is just not easy, and it is not that you can change everything.
Humans are not rational on the sense he wanted, but there are rules about how people behave, and there are ways that you can convince most people to do the right thing on the most important things most of the time.
I like to sympathize with people who changed the world for the better, like MLK, despite the odds and despite their flaws, rather than with people who complain about things.
Changing the world for the better requires preventative l perseverance and sacrifice and intelligence and and courage and …
Complaining and making fun of things only requires cleverness.
Why Dilbert different succeed? He is not smart enough to align the business goals of management with the objectives he has, and if his management is really an idiot he doesn’t have the courage to leave that team and find a better team or better company or even create a new company.
If you have Dilbert’s attitude towards things, you will end up where Dilbert ends up.
Comment #7 January 18th, 2026 at 10:54 am
My fave Dilbert cartoon, published in the era of Linux enthusiasts holding free events demonstrating that with a lot of work, downloading updated drivers, etc., it was actually possible to get Linux kind of working on your PC.
The last panel had some kind of alien recounting meeting a tech person, saying approximately: “So I zapped him before he started yammering about Linux”.
Comment #8 January 18th, 2026 at 11:02 am
Regarding Trump, he might be an idiot on many things but he had two things:
1. he knows how to use leverage and whatever it takes to get what he wants, and knows where he has gone too far where he cannot win and changes his attitude.
2. he knows how to resonate and voice the frustration of many unskilled white men, where most other politicians were simply ignoring them as idiots.
I strongly recommend to my liberal friends to read JD Vance’s book, from before when he turned a Trump supporter. It will help you understand the frustration and even desperation that a lot of these folks feel as a result of the policies of the government over the past few decades.
Trump does not really have the solution for this, and he has many personality flaws, but he knows how to sympathize with these frustrated and desperate Americans and voice that. And he knows how to speak their language even if he has zero shared experience with them as a rich entitled son of a real estate developer.
A major lesson for liberals is that you can win over people you belittle and ignore their needs and dreams.
Comment #9 January 18th, 2026 at 11:18 am
Lawrence D’Anna #4: My experience in quantum computing has trained me to distinguish carefully between what the actual experts say to each other, and what gets presented to the wider world after it’s passed through the twin filters of dumbing-down and financial and political incentives. They’re often directionally related to each other but not the same. And in each of the cases you mention, after you make this distinction, I think the actual experts come across pretty well — better, the more we restrict ourselves to what is happening in the physical world and why rather than what will be the future of civilization and how should it be organized.
Eg, did actual nutrition experts (not in the pay of snack companies) ever tell people to gorge themselves on carbs? I think there was a genuine advance in understanding the relative danger of carbs and saturated fat, but there was always a correct understanding that fresh vegetables, lentils, etc are the best and refined sugar is the worst.
Yes, discussion of Covid origins was improperly suppressed for a while by political hacks. But the lab leak has become increasingly unlikely, given what we’ve learned over the past few years, including Covid traces in exactly the right section of the wet market and the discovery of a natural virus with the same furin cleavage site. It was probably a wet market spillover after all, as the mainstream guessed from the beginning.
On the reality of human-caused climate change and its negative effects, I think the scientists who predicted it have been vindicated. By contrast, the idea that the best response was to depopulate and degrow the human race was always a minority one among actual scientists. The idea that we should solve the problem through international treaties and technological innovation (as we did with the ozone hole) was always more standard among scientists, and I still think that idea is correct.
Comment #10 January 18th, 2026 at 11:20 am
> Yes, you can notice that the pointy-haired boss is full of crap. You can make fun of the boss. If you’re unusually good at making fun of him, you might even become a rich, famous, celebrated cartoonist. But you’re never going to figure out any ways of doing things that are systematically better than the pointy-haired boss’s ways, or even recognize the ways that others have found.
I love how you put this, and it’s exactly what I always go back to while wandering an Internet full of critics. It’s cheap and easy to find people being idiots, it’s harder to understand exactly how and for what reasons they’re getting it wrong, and it’s even harder to avoid doing so yourself when it comes to your own blind spots. Many people stop, fully satisfied with themselves, at step 1. And the more someone wallows in that state, the more repulsive, personally, they seem to become. Certainly they don’t get better at anything other than finding more people being idiots.
How much better is it to be someone who believes there are fewer idiots and more systematic blind spots, complex problems, and difficult epistemology? If nothing else it seems like a nicer way to go about living amidst other, fallible humans.
Comment #11 January 18th, 2026 at 11:28 am
Knowing what Scott Adams really thought about the world leads me to wonder how he managed to write such a good comic strip without letting his extreme point of view dominate it. He must have had a good filter.
Comment #12 January 18th, 2026 at 11:53 am
Scott, I think an important caveat to your “if the scientists who study X” heuristic is that (1) it only works in fields that are actually doing science: i.e. fields that have testable predictions, replication attempts, etc and (2) it only works on long enough timescales.
There are lots of examples of herding effects on years-to-decades timescales in the social sciences (to the extent that there are open questions as to whether (1) is even true there), and it’s gotten worse recently with research more centralized than ever in universities and various ideological capture issues in university departments…
Unfortunately, most people don’t know enough about the details of various fields labeled “science” to evaluate the extent to which (1) holds for each one.
Comment #13 January 18th, 2026 at 2:24 pm
Scott #9
That’s well said. Unfortunately scientific information is almost always dumbed down and filtered through incentives when it enters into policy debates. I don’t think that can be fixed, but it can be mitigated if scientists and scientific institutions were careful keep it professional, avoid politics when speaking as scientists,to preserve their credibility by speaking to the public with the same precision and care that they use with each other. Instead, they seem inclined to put all their credibility into a pile and set it on fire.
I’ll also say I think a lot of scientific information is produced intentionally as feedstock to the dumbing down incentives based filtering process. I don’t think the scientists are blissfully ignorant of this, and I certainly don’t believe the funding agencies are. The result is that information that might be methodologically sound, at least to the standards of the field, still serves to deceive the public and burn credibility.
Comment #14 January 18th, 2026 at 2:31 pm
Anon #8
…he knows how to sympathize with these frustrated and desperate Americans and voice that – all he is doing is putting blame on people who have nothing to do with American issues and are even more frustrated and desperate (and weaker). His entire program, his what you call sympathy, reduces to the simple Eat The Others. Yeah, this program can always find its followers, win hearts and minds. Though, it’s eye-opening how successful this program is in the wealthiest country in the world, that used to be a pillar of democracy, land of the free and home of the brave.
Comment #15 January 18th, 2026 at 5:03 pm
The problem with “science works” is that nobody really knows how it works! Science itself is amazing, with its understanding of cosmology and genetics and atoms etc. But philosophy of science is pretty much a mess. Mostly it doesn’t matter, since science seems to do well enough with the shelves full of mutually contradictory operator manuals.
The danger I see is that the conditions in which science has evolved and been thriving… these conditions are not eternal. Advances in science are coupled to advances in technology and industry, to the availability of ever more power instruments etc. Progress in science is coupled to progress in society more generally.
Exactly what will put an end to that more general progress… climate change, nuclear war, pandemic, … there’s a wonderful book, The Wizard and the Prophet, by Charles Mann. The biologist Lynn Margulis is a sort of Cassandra figure in the book, asking: are humans smarter than yeast? Exponential growth is really not sustainable! Can science find a way to survive beyond the era of progress?
Comment #16 January 18th, 2026 at 5:39 pm
I found Scott Adams’ views bland yet disturbing.
I thought Dilbert was ok, not amazing. Cynical.
So I can’t understand why you’d say this is one of Scott Alexander’s greatest posts ever. The subject was uninspiring to me.
Comment #17 January 18th, 2026 at 5:43 pm
I wholeheartedly agree with you on Scott Adams. What people think of as fearless thinking is Adams treating having (in his own words) F U money as a license to say anything. I followed his 2016 posts since he seemed to have a handle on how Trump thought. I had stopped by the end of the year when his act wore thin e.g. ‘climate science has a credibility problem, but I endorse it anyway ‘. (This was expressed in a way similar to how it would be safer for him to say that he supports Clinton. I wouldn’t be surprised if his deathbed conversion to Christianity was the same vein, but had stopped following him over the years.) When his blog post was addressed here
the very act of addressing objections point-by-point was for him a sign of cognitive dissonance. As described in the NY times opinion by Joel Stein, science for him is just a different movie and there is no such thing as expertise. I recall one tweet that given the right people, he could learn anything in one hour. His later acts for which newspapers cancelled him were no surprise to me although some people are of the impression that he made ill-advised comments. Disappointed to hear of Scott Alexander’s admiration for him.
Comment #18 January 18th, 2026 at 5:48 pm
Jim Kulula #15: We could debate the extent to which we understand why science works, but in any case, my worldview doesn’t depend on our understanding it. It’s enough to say:
“Following vaguely Popperian norms—hypothesis and refutation, self-criticism, error-correction, etc.—plainly has produced more material success on a shorter timescale than has any other endeavor in the history of the human species. What’s more, following similar norms in social and political matters produced what we call the Enlightenment. So then, regardless of why this was, we have an excellent answer as to what we should take as a starting point in deciding questions of moral and political philosophy.”
Comment #19 January 18th, 2026 at 5:55 pm
I agree with you that Covid was extremely likely of natural origins. Also, it has never been suppressed in media and the simple narrative of lab leak has always captured media attention (hundreds of articles). But ‘discovery of a natural virus with the same FCS’ is not accurate. What was discovered recently was a new betacoronavirus with an ‘RDAR’ furin cleavage site as opposed to SARS2 (a sarbecovirus belonging to the larger betacoronavirus family) with an RRAR furin cleavage site. There are other betacoronaviruses with a furin cleavage site too e.g. the RSVR in MERS. SARS2 is the only known sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site. There is a greater belief that this FCS may have been picked up in an intermediate host than in a bat since the FCS may be harmful to the bat.
But there are many reasons to believe that SARS2 was of natural origin as the lab leak theory is a stringing together of various coincidences with the universe of theories expanding to explain away natural origins evidence.
Comment #20 January 18th, 2026 at 6:00 pm
DR #16 and RB #17: If Scott Alexander took inspiration from a rotting piece of garbage on the sidewalk, or a raving street loon, I expect he could produce an essay about why that would be one of the most inspiring things I’d ever read. I’d of course be less interested in the intrinsic qualities of the thing than in Scott’s relation to them.
(Having said that, I think Dilbert and the pointy-haired boss in their heyday did break major new comedic ground, before they entered the world’s water supply and became victims of their own success, just like Charlie Brown and Garfield and Bart Simpson and countless other iconic characters.)
Comment #21 January 18th, 2026 at 6:33 pm
thank you for the link to the Scott A. post on the other one..
I loved the early Dilberts then was saddened by Adam’s descent into nuttery.
The Alexander post is horrifyingly accurate about the nerd experience..
“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.”
and,
“Adams knew, deep in his bones, that he was cleverer than other people. God always punishes this impulse, especially in nerds. His usual strategy is straightforward enough: let them reach the advanced physics classes, where there will always be someone smarter than them, then beat them on the head with their own intellectual inferiority so many times that they cry uncle and admit they’re nothing special.”
That was exactly my college experience 😉
Luckily I did not lose my faith in science..
Comment #22 January 18th, 2026 at 7:39 pm
Scott, you appear to have independently generated and are on the path to amplifying the profound link between science and an ethical life that was published in the 1960’s by the mathematician and anthropologist/biologist Jacob Bronowski. I vividly remember seeing him in The Ascent of Man BBC series when I was in medical school over fifty years ago, and being so taken with his humanity and intellect that I sought out his book, Science and Human Values; encountering his thought was life-altering.
This is a man who was one of the first to be sent to evaluate the damage done at Nagasaki. He eventually synthesized a philosophy of humanism that derived directly from the values of the enlightenment and science. The chapter titles give a hint: The Creative Mind, The Habit of Truth, and The Sense of Human Dignity.
No one who viewed The Ascent of Man can forget seeing him standing in the mud in Auschwitz:
…
This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance.
When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.
…
Comment #23 January 18th, 2026 at 8:38 pm
The essential thing missed by so many people who realize that the world is ruled by idiots is that they too are idiots. The odds that they are that special snowflake who is superior to the rest of the crowd are tiny; it is much more likely that they are just another cow in the herd, smart about a few things, stupid about much else. (Yes, that includes me. Not you, obviously.)
I’m reminded of SF author James P. Hogan. His early novels were good and imaginative, and then he became a Velikovsky believer and a Holocaust denier and a general crank, and it showed in his work.
In any case, I thought Dilbert was absolutely hilarious, especially in the early days. I was a software developer, so I felt as if it spoke to my soul. There are two lines I frequently quoted over the years. One is when the gang is in a restaurant trying to figure out how to split the bill (“…but that would lead to an unpopular subsidy of Wally’s salmon…”) and the waitress thinks to herself, “Uh, oh. Engineers.” The other comes from Catbert – “Job satisfaction is theft.” For those who believe in an afterlife, they can be sure that Adams is now in the embrace of Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light.
Comment #24 January 18th, 2026 at 10:26 pm
Scott #9:
“On the reality of human-caused climate change and its negative effects”:
Agree it was always pretty likely, and is now obvious. The bad news is and always has been that nothing can be done about it.
Comment #25 January 19th, 2026 at 12:44 am
Regarding your love for science: If you have moderate tolerance for anime/manga as an art form, I’d strongly recommend giving Dr. Stone a try. Really excellent (and funny!) story about using the timeless tools of science to recover civilization after an apocalypse, with a strong humanist bent (the opposite of Scott Adams — there are very few idiots, everyone has something to contribute).
Comment #26 January 19th, 2026 at 1:48 am
Nowadays, to be painted as good, one needs to pretend believing too many absurdities. The mainstream repels independent thinkers.
So, thank you Scott A. for speaking common-sense at the price of being cancelled.
Comment #27 January 19th, 2026 at 10:29 am
I was wondering what the name Scott means, so I looked it up.
It is the name of Irish people who settled in the northern Britain, which became known as Scotland, i.e. the land of Scots.
Trick question: which country has a higher population density of Scotts?
So you are the Irish son of Arron who settled in the northern Britain. Keep that in mind for future when you want to introduce yourself.
Thought that you might be amused with this during all the crazy stuff that is going on in the world.
Comment #28 January 19th, 2026 at 6:19 pm
Scott, your post was excellent, and thank you for writing it. You are entirely correct to make one of the foundational axioms of your worldview that ‘science works’. This reminds me of G.E. Moore’s famous ‘Moorean shift’ argument for the reality of the external world against skepticism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_is_one_hand. Basically, any skeptical argument will inevitably rely on premises that are less obvious than a competing premise that there is an external world. The same could be said for science. It seems much more plausible that science is true, and that its basic methods are justified, than that the competing skeptical premises are true. My view about scientific expertise is pretty much in accord the view found here: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/on-challenging-the-experts .
Personal anecdote about the importance of epistemology and reliance on expert opinion. Once I met a Buddhist with postmodernist leanings and engaged in a dialogue. To my embarrassment–even my horror–I found I was unable to defend my ‘science works’ position against the skeptical arguments (or rather, select *questions* posed in a skeptical mood). This had the effect of shattering me for months. How could I do so poorly at defending something so basic as science itself? I needed help. This incident humbled me, but ultimately strengthened me. It forced me to look more carefully at epistemology, and how professional philosophers have developed responses to skepticism. This led me to the work of Thomas Nagel and especially, Michael Huemer. See, ‘The Last Word’ and ‘Knowledge, Reality, and Value’.)
One word about science ‘working’. There are some skeptics and scientific antirealists who would say that science works in the sense that it is empirically adequate, but belief in the objects of the various theories is rationally optional. I think this is incorrect. But notice: if I am right, this is a normative fact about what people *ought* to believe: it is not a nonnormative one! So–at least I contend–there are normative truths involved in–or at least adjacent to–the practice of science itself. I think (epistemically) one should *not* be an antirealist to merely reason as if, say, electrons and DNA are real, but actually believe they are not real (or else withhold belief). The antirealist and the realist will both say ‘science works’. But there is a fact of the matter–or so it seems to me–about whether we should take a step further to actually believe, as opposed to just acting as if we did believe. Ditto for theories like that the world was created last Thursday with the appearance of age, or that that the universe behaves radically differently in only the unobserved instances. Those theories technically ‘work’, and will make all the same observational predictions, but we shouldn’t believe them. I am relying here on intuition and a priori seemings about justifiable practices.
Concerning the ‘Is-Ought Gap’. I do not think it is rationally necessary to think that plausible starting points for fundamental ontology must only be purely descriptive, nonnormative properties and physical principles. If you start with the idea that ontology could be richer than this–that there are basic, irreducible normative as well as nonnormative properties or principles–e.g. the nonnormative state of being in pain has an essence that makes the irreducible normative property of badness accompany it–then there is no mystery and no Is-Ought gap. You don’t start with a bunch of descriptive premises and then mysteriously derive a non-descriptive, normative conclusion. You start with a normative premise. Of course, that is contested in philosophy! See the Cornell realists, who are naturalists! That is a respectable view. However, I am convinced by arguments against it along the lines that Derek Parfit and Michael Huemer provides (e.g. the triviality worry). But I may be wrong! How would the normative premise justified? The same as the nonnormative premises. This is the same way we avoid skepticism in general–through seemings and phenomenal conservatism. In other words, the normative principle is intuitive and seems to be correct, more so than a skeptical premise. (Note: phenomenal conservatism has defeasibility built into it. It does not say to trust every seeming no matter what, but only to trust a seeming until a stronger seeming overturns the previous one. This seems right…it was once upon a time rational to believe the sun was literally small and moving across the sky, until Copernicus and Gallileo provided evidence to the contrary. Phenomenal conservatism has error-correction built into it, but the error correction always comes through seemings.)
Comment #29 January 19th, 2026 at 7:38 pm
Well said Scott! That works for me as a categorical imperative, though of course not absolutely, as with everything (in science and elsewhere).
Comment #30 January 20th, 2026 at 7:55 am
Dr. Aaronson,
With regard to “postmodernism,” a comment from Jerry Coyne’s website posted the following Feynman quote,
“In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.”
-Richard P. Feynman
The Character of Physical Law 1965
Chapter 7, “Seeking New Laws”, p.150 (Modern Library edition, 1994)
ISBN 0-679-60127-9
Notice that the first step is called a *guess*.
Scientific knowledge claims are, in fact, a narrative of guesses. And, there is a fundamental problem when this is obfuscated by bellief that scientific knowledge claims are true (simpliciter).
This is now studied as abductive reasoning — distinguished from both inductive and deductive inference.
What distinguishes the scientific narrative is the integrity is the aesthetic of interrogating it against empirical data. Since Boltzmann’s justification for the atomic theory of matter using statistical methods, however, the sense by which scientific knowledge claims constitute truth cannot be the same as how ordinary people speak of tables and chairs in their kitchens (if they even have kitchens).
There is a burden on the scientific community to explain themselves. For the most part, they have not met it. Paradigmatically, they scream RTFM at people and call them stupid. By contrast, they are meritorious.
Not everyone, of course.
It is relatively simple to trace postmodernism to the Leibniz-Newton priority debate. Decrying Leibnizian “philosophy,” British mathematicuans sought a logical calculus in emulation of the Newtonian calculus. This may be seen as culminating in the work of Peacock and de Morgan. There are papers on the correspondence between de Morgan and Hamilton which expose the schism in intellectual thought.
Although de Morgan’s ideas did not gain lasting acclaim, they are re-introduced through Hilbert’s formal axiomatics (motivated by different reasons). This is not fully realized, however, until Skolem’s criticisms of Zermelo’s set theory and Poincare’s criticism of Hilbert’s approach to mathematical induction, whereby formal axiomatics becomes grounded in the signatures of universal algebra.
It had been arguments over mathematics and logic occurring at the time in which “scientists” forced a distinction from philosophy which led to the tu quoque employed by the anti-science community. And, you should read the introduction of von Mises’ “Human Action” to see how this tu quoque grounds the relationship of “meritocracy” to the political views with which you most assuredly disagree.
At some level, all of us are a little incoherent in our reasoning.
I have no issue with the “science works” premise. But, concern for correctness also applies to researchers in foundations who are disparaged by the science community. I now find myself explaining that the “M” in STEM refers to a part of mathematics that is hostile to the “m” contained in mathematics in its entirety.
Comment #31 January 20th, 2026 at 10:18 am
mls #30: Feynman was right. Yes, of course you just guess at first, because what else would you do? But then you test your guesses and reject the bad ones, carefully distinguishing what you know from what you don’t. In that way, you can eventually arrive at extremely reliable knowledge.
Feynman had pure contempt throughout his life, probably exceeding mine, at faux-sophisticated deniers of the possibility of scientific knowledge, including what we’d now call “postmodernists.”
Comment #32 January 25th, 2026 at 10:38 am
“You might even die of prostate cancer earlier than necessary, because you listen to medical crackpots and rely on ivermectin, turning to radiation and other established treatments only after having lost crucial time.”
Is this true of Scott Adams? i know he did radiation treatment to deal with a tumour on his spine, and he did do an ivermectin based treatment.
But did he do this while delaying other suggested treatment? I have not found any source on this.
My presumption is that he did the ivermectin treatment in consultation with his doctor, in addition to any mainstream treatments suggested by his doctor. Am I wrong about this?
Comment #33 January 28th, 2026 at 2:48 pm
„The political systems worth following are the ones that test their ideas against experience,„
This is a common misconception about politics. Politics has never been about truth seeking or system optimization. Science and engineering are about objectivity. But Politics is inherently about SUBJECTIVE interests. Political partials are NOT impartial by definition. Politics is nit about true vs. False it is about in—group vs. Out—group. (Carl Schmidt). It always amuses me how science peoples (nerds) conflate power play and group dynamics with science and and engineering. Those are completely different worlds.