My Scott Adams story

Scott Adams is the author of the comic strip Dilbert. I read his new strip every day on the web. He has recently started his own blog, which is fairly amusing and I occasionally take a look at it. In it he often betrays good insight, and often deep ignorance of a range of issues, particularly in science, and ignorance he sometimes gives the impression he is proud of. However, the context is usually that he's making a joke, so the fact that he's talking crap seems like part of the joke. Who cares?

Well, a lot of people cared when he started weighing in to the evolution vs 'intelligent design' debate. Not only did he effectively misrepresent the Darwinist theory, but he claimed that since scientists had a vested interest in their work, they could be trusted just as little as the IDers. This caused a lot of hoohah. I'm not going to go into the debate here. I'm sure I will be publishing plenty on the subject of ID over time. And I'm not going to try and discuss the arguments over Adams' posts either. If you want to know about it, go to his blog, find the November 2005 archives, and scroll almost to the bottom to 'Intelligent Design Part I', where the first post happened.

My purpose for bringing this up is that I've had a run-in with Scott Adams' seemingly over-exaggerated opinion of his level of knowledge before. (Actually, Adams continually puts in provisos that he's stupid and probably talking rubbish but I intend to illustrate that this is a bit of a sham.) It has to do with his non-Dilbert book "God's Debris". Fascinated by Scott Adams' opinions on philosophy, I bought this back when it first came out, ooh, about 4 years ago.

I hated it. I hated the fact that it was full of factual errors about science (including evolution). I hated the fact that its conclusions were variously illogical, unoriginal, and idiotic. I hated that it had an air about it that Adams was trying to pass it off as serious philosophy rather than just woolly thinking combined with a willingness to comment on things without research, combined with the use of fame to get something published that would otherwise never have been published. But most of all, I suppose, I hated that online, on Amazon and on discussion boards, so many people thought it was the most mind-blowing thing they'd ever read. I felt I had to put these people right.

On amazon.co.uk I wrote a pretty scathing review ("Flawed 'fact' and poor logic sully a book with potential", November 2001), and I copied it to amazon.com. It quickly generated heated 'debate' on amazon.com (not that you can get much debate on amazon's review board), and eventually similar comments were made on co.uk too. Apparently, according to these other reviewers, I had failed to read the book properly because Adams has a disclaimer at the beginning warning people that the book is just a 'thought experiment' and there will be bad facts and bad logic in there.

Rereading my review, I feel I make it pretty clear that I did read that; my questions were aimed at whether it was possible, as Adams requests, to assume the old man in the book knows everything, when he is talking palpable nonsense; and whether the 'thought experiment' could be expected to succeed when it was relying on misinformation. Adams may have been getting people thinking, but in my opinion, if you weren't aware of the true facts then he'd be getting you to think total bollocks, which hardly seems like a success. My attempt was to review the book, to tell people whether or not they should read it. I assume that most people reading non-fiction want to learn something, not mislearn something.

My other point was that any valid points Adams had made were to a large extent as old as philosophy itself, and if people wanted to learn that stuff they'd be better off reading the work of people who have really thought things through. I did also make it clear that to the extent that Adams was getting people into philosophy who might never otherwise have thought about it, it was a good book. I still think the review was fair.

Anyway, enough of defending my review. My antagonistic stance on the book has softened quite a lot since then and I'll comment on this at the end of this post. On with the story.

Some time after I posted my review on amazon.com, Scott Adams himself posted a 'review', responding to mine. Basically, he said the same stuff about me not getting the point, except being even more scathing than some of the other reviewers had been about how stupid I clearly was. He also, I seem to recall, got upset about the particular point I made about magnet fields. In my review, as an example of false facts in God's Debris, I point to his comment that no matter what object you put in a magnetic field it has no effect, and I say that that is simply false, which it is. His review denied that was true.

Intrigued both by his vehemence, and by the fact that he'd wanted to respond to my review at all, I emailed him. Now I'm afraid that I'm an idiot, and somehow I've let those emails go missing over the years. It is dreadfully frustrating because I'm going to have to drag what was said from memory and that is probably a bit unfair on Scott Adams. But you'll get the gist.

My email basically said that I was curious why he'd responded to my review and said it was irresponsible reviewing, and pointed out that every material has some magnetic conductance, including air, and makes a miniscule or large effect depending on this property. Some materials are 'ferromagnetic' which means, I recall, that its internal magnetic monopoles have a tendency to line up in a magnetic field, which means it will have a stronger effect on the field it is in, distorting it. Anyway, don't take my word for it, I suggest you take a look at the Wikipedia pages on magnetic fields and magnetic permeability to find out more.

His response was both truculent and completely unexpected. He said that my review was irresponsible because, since I had not properly understood the nature of the thought experiment, I was giving potential readers a misleading idea of the book. He said that a lot of business for the book was going to come from amazon, and that I would be responsible for losing him a lot of buyers.

I must say, I couldn't believe it. Scott Adams seemed to be saying that it was irresponsible of an amazon reviewer to give a bad review of a book!! That by reviewing his book I'd somehow bought in to it and the author had a right not only to expect a thoroughly fair and properly researched review, but even a favourable one! And this is amazon, for goodness' sake, where the reviews are published for free, by non-professionals. We're not talking Times Literary Supplement here.

(An interesting parallel is with the eBay seller I bought my TV from. After they sent me two broken TVs, I left them negative feedback, despite the fact that the third TV worked ok. A guy from the company got very upset with me, saying he would lose hundreds of customers as a result and since they replaced the broken TVs I shouldn't have given negative feedback. I said the point of feedback was to reward good sellers and the best way for him to get customers would be not to sell broken TVs. Otherwise, what on earth is the point of the eBay feedback system?)

I wrote Adams a response, saying I hardly thought his business was hinging on my review, and that regardless I could hardly be seen as having any responsibility to his business. I'm not sure he replied to it, I think maybe it was just the two emails from me and the one from him, but there may have been a second response from him, I can't remember. Still, I do remember that it ended with him in a huff, with, essentially, an "I don't wanna talk to you no more" comment.

A while after this fracas, all the reviews from that period, including mine and his, were removed from amazon.com, presumably at the request of the author (mine is still there on co.uk). Actually, perhaps they regularly prune old reviews, I don't know, or perhaps amazon thought it was degenerating too much into a debate rather than a proper set of reviews and pulled it for that reason.

Still, there is an interesting end to the story, and a reason why I am mentioning it now. I have kept a little bit of interest in the book and occasionally checked the reviews on amazon. A little while after Adams started his blog, I saw that he was making God's Debris available online for free (see link above). So I downloaded it and have occasionally been rereading it on the odd break at work.

I haven't finished reading it yet, but I did discover that his section on magnetism has changed. He now says that if you put a magnetic object in a magnetic field, it affects the field, but a non-magnetic object will have no effect. Of course, this still isn't strictly true, every material has some effect, it's just that for non-ferromagnetic materials it is often negligible. However, it did give me the sense that I had been personally responsible for his editing his book!

Of course, what is more likely is that many people mentioned that error and he decided to change the section when republishing the book. I wonder whether he's changed the section about evolution too? I'll have a look.

I wonder what all this editing does for his story that it doesn't really matter whether the Avatar in the story is telling the truth or not, that some bad facts are in there deliberately to trip us up as part of the thought experiment? I cannot comment...

My conclusions
Since I've been revisiting all this stuff I've got it a bit clearer in my head what Adams was trying to do, and although I still think he is trying to punch way above his weight, both in God's Debris and in his blog, perhaps I did judge him too harshly. He had a bunch of ideas in his head and he thought they were interesting enough to publish. Now most of us wouldn't, not just because we're not good authors, but also because we simply don't have the time and inclination to research and reevaluate those ideas properly to make them fit for publication. But Adams could get them published without bothering with research. And, I suppose, so would we all, if we could - if not, why the blog phenomenon? He thought that as long as he told you he didn't know what he was talking about at the start, he could get away with it. But with me, that grated.

A recent reviewer of the book on amazon.co.uk put it much better than I, so I'll repeat his words:

...I realised one of the main sources of this book - 'The Way of the Weasel' - a Dilbert book. By making this a thought experiment and deliberately stating that the facts are not all true etc Scott Adams has instantly freed himself from having to do any research or have any understanding of the 'fact' and ideas explored.

It's philosophy written by Dogbert - he is basically saying 'I haven't made the effort to fully explore what I'm saying, but you can if you want.'

And in some of the reviews I can see that people are falling for the bait - they are getting upset because they are making the effort, or have made the effort, and Adams hasn't. I don't think that he has deliberately put in false facts and false ideas - I think that he hasn't checked because he knows that he didn't need to.

So, basically, Adams is guilty of being incredibly lazy, and unlucky enough to have sycophantic publishers that allow him to sell crap. So I don't, ultimately, feel bad at Adams, I just feel bad for all the people duped into thinking there's a message in God's Debris worth taking on board.

The other stuff about my 'irresponsible' reviewing, on the other hand, is pretty unforgiveable. Adams clearly needs both a reality check and an ego-deflation.

What is the moral of this story? I suppose it's that we should never risk letting people think we know more than we do about something unless we actually intend to deceive them. I'm not anal about this, I'm not like some people who think you have to have a PhD in something in order to be able to talk about it. It should just all be like Wikipedia - if you aren't talking crap then you should be able to back up what you're saying.

If anyone thinks I'm overstepping my own bounds and talking authoritatively on something I don't know about (as in, I'm clearly pretending I know more than I do), please call me on it. I admire Scott Adams' wit, but I don't want to be like him.