Scott Adams and Philosophy
As cartoonist, author, public speaker, blogger, and periscoper, Scott Adams has had best-sellers in several different fields: his Dilbert cartoons, his meditations on the philosophy of Dilbert, his works on how to achieve success in business and all other areas of life, his two remarkable books on religion, and now his controversial work on political persuasion.

Adams’s two most recent best-sellers are How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (2014) and Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter (2017). Adams predicted Donald Trump’s election victory (on August 13th 2016) and has explained then and more recently how Trump operates as a Master Persuader, using “weapons-grade” persuasive techniques to defeat his opponents and often to stay several moves ahead of them.

Adams has provocative ideas in many areas, for example his outrageous claim that 30 percent of the population have absolutely no sense of humor, and take their cue from conventional opinion in deciding whether something is a joke, since they have no way of deciding this for themselves.

In Scott Adams and Philosophy, an elite cadre of people who think for a living put Scott Adams’s ideas under scrutiny. Every aspect of Adams’s fascinating and infuriating system of ideas is explained and tested.

Among the key topics:
  • Does humor inform us about reality?
  • Do religious extremists know something the rest of us don’t?
  • What are facts and how can they not matter?
  • What happens when confirmation bias meets cognitive dissonance?
  • How can we tell whether President Trump is a genius or just dumb-lucky?
  • Does the Dilbert philosophy discourage the struggle for better workplace conditions?
  • How sound is Adams’s claim that “systems” thinking beats goal-directed thinking?
  • Does Dilbert exhibit a Nietzschean or a Kierkegaardian sense of life? Or is it Sisyphian in Camus’s sense?
  • Can truth be over-rated?
  • “The political side that is out of power is the side that hallucinates the most.”
  • If there’s a serious chance we’re living in a Matrix-type simulation, how should we change our behavior?
  • Are most public policy issues just too complex and technical for most people to have an opinion about?
  • In politics, says Adams, it’s as if different people watch the same movie at the same time, some thinking it’s a romantic comedy and others thinking it’s a horror picture. How is that possible?
  • Does logic play any part in persuasion?
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Scott Adams and Philosophy
As cartoonist, author, public speaker, blogger, and periscoper, Scott Adams has had best-sellers in several different fields: his Dilbert cartoons, his meditations on the philosophy of Dilbert, his works on how to achieve success in business and all other areas of life, his two remarkable books on religion, and now his controversial work on political persuasion.

Adams’s two most recent best-sellers are How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (2014) and Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter (2017). Adams predicted Donald Trump’s election victory (on August 13th 2016) and has explained then and more recently how Trump operates as a Master Persuader, using “weapons-grade” persuasive techniques to defeat his opponents and often to stay several moves ahead of them.

Adams has provocative ideas in many areas, for example his outrageous claim that 30 percent of the population have absolutely no sense of humor, and take their cue from conventional opinion in deciding whether something is a joke, since they have no way of deciding this for themselves.

In Scott Adams and Philosophy, an elite cadre of people who think for a living put Scott Adams’s ideas under scrutiny. Every aspect of Adams’s fascinating and infuriating system of ideas is explained and tested.

Among the key topics:
  • Does humor inform us about reality?
  • Do religious extremists know something the rest of us don’t?
  • What are facts and how can they not matter?
  • What happens when confirmation bias meets cognitive dissonance?
  • How can we tell whether President Trump is a genius or just dumb-lucky?
  • Does the Dilbert philosophy discourage the struggle for better workplace conditions?
  • How sound is Adams’s claim that “systems” thinking beats goal-directed thinking?
  • Does Dilbert exhibit a Nietzschean or a Kierkegaardian sense of life? Or is it Sisyphian in Camus’s sense?
  • Can truth be over-rated?
  • “The political side that is out of power is the side that hallucinates the most.”
  • If there’s a serious chance we’re living in a Matrix-type simulation, how should we change our behavior?
  • Are most public policy issues just too complex and technical for most people to have an opinion about?
  • In politics, says Adams, it’s as if different people watch the same movie at the same time, some thinking it’s a romantic comedy and others thinking it’s a horror picture. How is that possible?
  • Does logic play any part in persuasion?
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Scott Adams and Philosophy

Scott Adams and Philosophy

Scott Adams and Philosophy

Scott Adams and Philosophy

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Overview

As cartoonist, author, public speaker, blogger, and periscoper, Scott Adams has had best-sellers in several different fields: his Dilbert cartoons, his meditations on the philosophy of Dilbert, his works on how to achieve success in business and all other areas of life, his two remarkable books on religion, and now his controversial work on political persuasion.

Adams’s two most recent best-sellers are How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (2014) and Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter (2017). Adams predicted Donald Trump’s election victory (on August 13th 2016) and has explained then and more recently how Trump operates as a Master Persuader, using “weapons-grade” persuasive techniques to defeat his opponents and often to stay several moves ahead of them.

Adams has provocative ideas in many areas, for example his outrageous claim that 30 percent of the population have absolutely no sense of humor, and take their cue from conventional opinion in deciding whether something is a joke, since they have no way of deciding this for themselves.

In Scott Adams and Philosophy, an elite cadre of people who think for a living put Scott Adams’s ideas under scrutiny. Every aspect of Adams’s fascinating and infuriating system of ideas is explained and tested.

Among the key topics:
  • Does humor inform us about reality?
  • Do religious extremists know something the rest of us don’t?
  • What are facts and how can they not matter?
  • What happens when confirmation bias meets cognitive dissonance?
  • How can we tell whether President Trump is a genius or just dumb-lucky?
  • Does the Dilbert philosophy discourage the struggle for better workplace conditions?
  • How sound is Adams’s claim that “systems” thinking beats goal-directed thinking?
  • Does Dilbert exhibit a Nietzschean or a Kierkegaardian sense of life? Or is it Sisyphian in Camus’s sense?
  • Can truth be over-rated?
  • “The political side that is out of power is the side that hallucinates the most.”
  • If there’s a serious chance we’re living in a Matrix-type simulation, how should we change our behavior?
  • Are most public policy issues just too complex and technical for most people to have an opinion about?
  • In politics, says Adams, it’s as if different people watch the same movie at the same time, some thinking it’s a romantic comedy and others thinking it’s a horror picture. How is that possible?
  • Does logic play any part in persuasion?

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780812699777
Publisher: Open Court Publishing Company
Publication date: 08/21/2018
Series: Popular Culture and Philosophy , #118
Pages: 256
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Daniel Yim is Professor of Philosophy and Department Chair at Bethel University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He specializes in the epistemology of self-deception.

Galen Foresman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina A&T State University, and co-author of The Critical Thinking Toolkit (2016).

Robert Arp is co-author of Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Reasoning Well (2011) and editor of The X-Files and Philosophy: The Truth Is In Here (2017).

Table of Contents

The Reality of Scott Adams vii

I In Front of Your Eyes 1

1 How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Tolerate the Master Persuader Hypothesis Ivan Wolfe 3

2 Persuade Me Once, Shame on You … Richard Greene 15

3 How I Could Have Made Hillary President David Ramsay Steele 25

II Comic-Strip Kafka 35

4 Scoundrels, the Lot of Us John V. Karavitis 37

5 The Serious Point of Scott's Humor Enzo Guerra Adam Barkman 47

6 The PowerPoint Conspiracy Theory Christopher Ketcham 55

III It Tastes Better if We All Do It Together 69

7 Scott Adams's Joy of Logic Richard Bilsker 71

8 Is It a Fact that Facts Don't Matter? David Ramsay Steele 81

9 But Women Can Vote Sandra Hansmann Cynthia Jones 101

10 Intelligence and Duh-mocracy Ben Saunders 113

IV Comic-Strip Camus 125

11 Dilbert's Absurd World Alexander Christian 127

12 Dilbert Is an Asshole and That's Why He'll Never Be Happy and Nobody Loves Him Charlene Elsby Rob Luzecky 137

13 The Essence of Dogbert Elliot Knuths 147

14 Of Course It Sucks-It's Work Andy Wible 155

V Golden Age, Ready or Not 167

15 Bias Is Rational! Ray Scott Percival 169

16 Why Scott Adams Is Stupid Daniel Miori 185

17 Sweeping Up God's Debris Rachel Robison-Greene 199

18 Scott Adams and the Pinocchio Fallacy David Ramsay Steele 211

Bibliography 225

Author Bios 231

Index 239

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