November 28, 2009
in Books
The always brilliant Scott Adams on entrepreneurship:
“The Dilbert Principle observes that in the modern economy, the least capable people are promoted to management because companies need their smartest people to do the useful work. It’s hard to design software, but relatively easy to run staff meetings. This creates a situation where you have more geniuses reporting to morons than at any time in history. In that sort of environment you’d expect the geniuses to be looking for a way out, even if Plan B has a low chance of success.
Big companies with bad managers are the ideal breeding ground for entrepreneurs. Employees are exposed to a wide variety of business disciplines, and can avail themselves of excellent company-paid training and outside education. When you add broad skill development to the inevitability of eventually getting a moron for a boss, thanks to frequent internal reorganizations, it’s no wonder that big companies spray entrepreneurs into the environment like the fountains at Bellagio.”
Mr. Adams’ book, The Dilbert Principle is the last management book I read and gave me the courage to begin planning my escape from management.
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Scott Adams
From Scott Adams’ God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment:
“Well, usually it’s because some important religious event took place there.”
“What does it mean to say that something rook place in a particular location when we know that the earth is constantly in motion, rotating on its axis and orbiting the sun? And we’re in a moving galaxy that is part of an expanding universe. Even it you had a spaceship and could fly anywhere, you can never return to the location of a past event. There would be no equivalent of the past location because location depends on your distance from other objects, and all objects in the universe would have moved considerably by then.”
“I see your point, but on Earth the holy places keep their relationship to other things on Earth, and those things don’t move much,” I said.
“Let’s say you dug up all the dirt and rocks and vegetation of a holy place and moved it someplace else, leaving nothing but a hole that is one mile deep in the original location. Would the holy land now be the new location where you put the dirt and rocks and vegetation, or the old location with the hole?”
“I think both would be considered holy,” I said, hedging my bets.
“Suppose you took only the very top layer of soil and and vegetation from holy place, the newer stuff that blew in or grew after the religious event occurred thousands of years ago. Would the place you dumped the topsoil and vegetation be holy?”
“That’s a little trickier,” I said. “I’ll say the new location isn’t holy because the topsoil that you moved there isn’t itself holy, it was only in contact with holy land. If holy land could turn anything that touched it into more holy land, then the whole planet would be holy.”
The old man smiled. “The concept of location is a useful delusion when applied to real estate ownership, or when giving someone directions to the store. But when it is viewed through the eyes of an omnipotent God, the concept of location is absurd.
“While we speak, nations are arming themselves to fight for control of lands they consider holy. They are trapped in the delusion that locations are real things, not just fictions of the mind. Many will die.”
Tagged as:
God's Debris,
Scott Adams
Scott Adams thinks the calendar will be the organizing filter for most of the information flowing into our lives:
"You think you are bombarded with too much information every day, but in reality it is just the timing of the information that is wrong. Once the calendar becomes the organizing paradigm and filter, it won't seem as if there is so much."
News: "When I read the news, I'm generally most interested in how stories have unfolded across time. I want to know the "new news," as in the topics that have never been reported until today, but I also want ongoing charts and graphs about the "old news" such as wars and the economy. My understanding of the war in Iraq, for example, has little to do with what blew up today and a lot to do with the trend lines over the entire war. In other words, I see the news in terms of time."
Advertisements: "Some time ago I blogged that advertising belongs in your electronic calendar, for your benefit more than for the advertiser. That's because my interest and desire in certain products and services is linked to timing. If my calendar has a certain birthday coming up in a week, and I've checked the boxes saying the person is a certain age and gender, or has certain hobbies, my calendar can start giving me gift suggestions and recommending online flowers and e-cards and the like. In other words, advertisements can move from nuisance to valuable service just by adjusting when you see them."
I know a lot of folks who use their Outlook email in-box as their primary organizing tool. (shudder) The calendar makes a lot more sense to me, too. Especially working out of iCal that's sync'd between my desktop, laptop and iPhone.
Tagged as:
Scott Adams
“It’s not just news about your community, but also about your homeowner’s association, your apartment building, your kids’ classrooms, and the sports teams they belong to. Every family would have their own online local newspaper, assembled electronically every day based on that family’s log-in information. Your personal and super-local news would include everything from world events to school lunch menus for that day. Eventually it might even include your child’s report card. Obviously the schools have to be partners in this, and I think that could happen. Most school information is online already or heading in that direction. It just needs to feed to the newspaper’s site for aggregation.
The key is for the super-local information to come to the newspapers from volunteers. For example, every youth sport team would have a parent with a digital camera and the willingness to upload some pictures and write a few lines about the game. A simple user interface would make it easy to integrate the news about little Becky’s soccer game with news of the Lakers. They would have equal billing.”
The links above are mine, not Mr. Adams’. You can read his entire post here.
Tagged as:
newspapers,
Scott Adams
February 4, 2009
in Books
I love the writing of Scott Adams. The Dilbert Principle played no small part in my escape from Management. His blog is one of the most thought-provoking I read. I just finished God’s Debris. Not a book for those who already have things figured out.
“Humanity is developing a sort of global eyesight as millions of video cameras on satellites, desktops, and street corners are connected to the Internet. In your lifetime it will be possible to see almost anything on the planet from any computer. And society’s intelligence is merging over the Internet, creating, in effect, a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society.” pg 53
[click to continue…]
Tagged as:
consciousness,
God's Debris,
happiness,
Scott Adams
You’ll either find this post by Scott Adams exciting and optimistic, or, as the headline of his post says, a “sign of the End Time.” I found it very positive.
“I wonder what people mean when they say the economy will recover in 2010. The only way that can happen is if another irrational bubble forms thus creating an illusion of wealth similar to our previous illusions. If you take illusions out of the equation, there isn’t anything to get “back” to. The wealth was never there in the first place.”
“I said before that I think we’re on the cusp of a change as fundamental as the industrial revolution. But this time the change will be on the consumption side, not the production side. As a society we have dabbled with recycling and such, but it has always been fairly optional. There was no real penalty for waste.”
“The coming consumption revolution won’t be strictly for the benefit of the environment. It will be an economic necessity, driven largely by the huge numbers of retired poor. There simply won’t be enough stuff for everyone if waste is allowed.”
He goes on to share some thoughts on the Internet and home schooling. My nephews and niece were home schooled and they are very well educated and socially well adjusted. The post is worth a read.
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Scott Adams
This post by Scott Adams illustrates why I think owning a smart phone is important. He makes some predictions about future applications:
WHATS-HIS-FACE: This application would let you discreetly take an iPhone photo of an acquaintance whose name you can’t remember then it uses face recognition to search for the name online. Someday everyone will have a Facebook-like web page, so searching for faces will be feasible.
DOCTOR-IN-A-BOX: Someday you’ll be able to take an iPhone picture of your suspicious moles, abrasions, fungus, or whatever and get an instant automated diagnosis and suggested treatment.
WHAT’S-IT-LIKE-THERE? Imagine wondering how long the line is to an event, or what a particular forest fire looks like, for example. You send a query through your iPhone for anyone who is in that area, according to GPS tracking, and ask for a look. A kind stranger takes your query, sets his phone to stream video, and gives you the view from his perspective. You would have eyes anywhere there are people.
BRAIN-EXTENDER: Google and Wikipedia are already brain extenders. You can find almost any information you want and quickly. But imagine how much cooler it would be if your iPhone headset was continuously monitoring your conversations and answering your questions as they arise, or whispering suggestions in your ear. That application seems likely to me.
Before dismissing these, think about how unlikely it would have sounded if someone had told you it was possible to have have your phone “listen” to a song and tell you the name and artist.
As I get more familiar with the iPhone, I find myself thinking more about my use of –and relationship with– The Web. More and more of my time is spent in “the cloud.” Typepad, Gmail, Flickr, YouTube. My laptop, desktop and phone have become a means to “get to” and interact with my stuff out there.
The iPhone makes you aware of how much time you were not connected. Even with the MacBook at my side.
I overheard some of the regulars at the Towne Grill trying to come up with the name of some actor in a TV show. I couldn’t remember either but looked down at the iPhone and thought how easy it would be to google the answer. But that wouldn’t have been in the spirit of the discussion.
Putting aside the warnings of the The Matrix, Terminator and countless other movies and books… I find myself thinking of the web as one big old computer that we all use. And when it becomes smarter than we are (and self-aware) I want to be connected. All the time.
Tagged as:
Gmail,
iPhone,
Scott Adams
Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams thinks Isreal will eventually create the technology that will make oil irrelevant:
"The oh-my-God moment came when I realized that Israel can destroy all of its local enemies by inventing solar technology that makes oil uneconomical. Such an invention would do more harm than any military attack. And it’s all legal and moral. The politicians and business people in Israel have all the right incentives times a thousand. Their very survival is at risk. Israel is one patent away from crushing every oil producing country in the world."
In his post, he links to the article that provided his ah-ha moment.
Tagged as:
Military,
Scott Adams
"In a good illustration of how media is becoming ever more conversational and interactive, United Media, “Dilbert’s” syndicate, is revamping Dilbert.com, letting the fans take up the cartoonist’s pen and tinker with, and then widely distribute, each strip.
When registered visitors to the new site click on a “mashups” tab, they can alter the text bubbles in each strip’s last panel. Soon, the syndicate says, visitors will be able to author entire strips, alone or collectively, and Mr. Adams himself will spar with fans and comment on the altered work. These new strips can be e-mailed or posted elsewhere on the Web." [New York Times]
Who gets the new web more than Scott Adams? What a brilliant move. Instead of suing people (like me) who love and "share" his strips, he’s making it easy and even more fun.
Tagged as:
Scott Adams