Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the Astral Codex X podcast for the 21st of January, 2026. Title, Highlights from the Comments on Scott Adams. This is an audio version of Astral Codex X, Scott Alexander's Substack. If you like it, you can subscribe at astralcodex10.substack.com. 1. Should I have written this at all?
Several people said that since my opinion of Adams was mixed at best, it was unkind to write it just after his death. For example, Saint Paramaribo writes, quote, Scott writes, I appreciate this perspective and debated it with myself before publishing.
The considerations were, I think it is bad to insult someone just after they die, but I also think it is good to remember and memorialise people just after they die.
and a vapid post that just said, Adam Shaw did write some funny cartoons, without really digging into who he was, would have been less good as a memorial, both in the sense of truly engaging with him, and in the grubby, prosaic sense of having anyone read it. And I'm not a good enough writer to write something equally powerful that was limited entirely to his good qualities.
The compromise I worked out with myself was to let myself publish as long as it ended on an overall positive note and emphasised his good qualities. Here's a comic strip. Dilbert asks, Do you have any long-term goals? A colleague replies, Just death. Death isn't a goal. It's the best kind. This way, I can go out as a winner. With my last breath, I plan to do a fist pump and yell, I did it!
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Chapter 2: Should I have written this at all?
What's your long-term plan? Dilbert replies, I plan to use brain imaging technology to map my mind. Then I'll create a digital copy of myself to live forever in a software simulation. Unless I already did. Colleague replies, give yourself a fist pump, just in case. Scott writes, this is my second time having this argument. The first was my elegy for John McCain, which failed much worse.
Basically everyone thought it was unfairly negative to him and inappropriate just after his death. That was eight years ago. I don't think I've done any more posts, positive or negative, on people's deaths since then, and I felt ready to try again. For what it's worth, I still like the elegy, and I'm glad I memorialised McCain in some way.
This became more awkward after I found out that Adams had said several nice things about me. Sandeep writes, quote, Among the numerous intellectual gifts I have received from reading Scott Adams is that I started reading Slate Star Codex on his recommendation, which then had a huge influence on me.
I'd known about Slate Star Codex even before, but it was Adams' recommendation that gave me the energy to overcome my reading inertia and start pouring through long articles of Alexander. End quote. Scott writes, I think I'd heard that Adams recommended me at one point, but forgotten by the time I wrote this post. Here's one of his articles saying nice things about me, Lincoln Post.
Someone else dug up a kind tweet, though it was in response to someone else's deleted message and I couldn't see exactly what he was praising. I don't want to have a blanket policy of never criticising anyone who's nice to me. It seems corrupt in the sense of replacing my journalistic judgement with a policy of praising anyone who gives me favours.
On the other hand, the deepest circle of hell is supposedly reserved for people who betray their benefactors, and this makes game theoretic sense. Without having a general solution to this problem, in this situation, I mainly considered the point above. I don't think this was a fully hostile article, and so I didn't run my full is-it-appropriate-to-write-a-hostile-article-about-this-person check.
But secondarily, I think Adams linked my blog post as part of the usual blogosphere activity of recommending interesting links, not as a specific attempt to kindle a friendship with mutual obligations. If I were his friend, then I hope I would understand him well enough to know whether he would want a mixed memorial like this. And if not, I wouldn't do it.
Eigengender on Twitter ran a poll and found that, here's the poll, If you were a person of Scott Adams' rough level of fame and died today, would you want ACX to do a brutally honest Speaker for the Dead-style obituary on you? 70.5% respond yes, 10.1% maybe, 12.6% no, and 6.9% just wanted to see the results. Scott writes, which makes me more confident that I landed on the tone I wanted.
And several people commented that the essay seemed pro-Adams, or made them like Adams more. Joel McKinnon writes, quote, As a chronic sufferer of TDS, I've fallen into the the friend of my enemy is my enemy, and long stopped having any respect for this other Scott A. The Post did a great job of contextualising a complicated and intelligent man's life and ideas.
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Chapter 3: Was I unfair to Scott Adams?
A country where 25% of the population is chomping at the bit for race war is a place where you should use high sophistication for race-related statements. And yes, I agree that woke people also fail at this and are blameworthy. And the word for when people in that particular country instead use culpably low-resolution and unsophisticated statements is racism.
And although in general I try not to use it so I don't have to get into interminable debates like this one, I don't think it's wrong to use it here. Back to the text. Does that mean Adams should have been cancelled and lost his livelihood? I'm against this sort of cancellation full stop, so I say no.
I think it's a dumb opinion, and maybe a bit evil in the complicated sense where it's hard to disentangle evil from ignorance. But many people hold opinions of approximately that level of badness, and it's not worth hating them all. Footnote. Although I don't think Adams' cancellation was fair according to normal human logic, I think it had a certain odd sort of cosmic justice.
4chan's deployment of the it's okay to be white slogan was, maybe literally, out of Adams' book. Say something completely inoffensive, make sure everyone knows it has a secret offensive meaning, then retreat back to, what? You're upset at our totally inoffensive thing? How silly, when anyone calls you out on it. This maneuver didn't fool woke people at all.
The people wearing It's Okay To Be White t-shirts got exactly as many accusations of racism as they would have gotten for wearing swastikas directly. The only person it apparently fooled was Adams, the professional not-being-fooled-by-political-manipulation expert, whose life it randomly destroyed as collateral damage. Oh well. Back to the text. 5. Other Comments
Calvin Collins writes, quote, I learned of you through Scott Adams. Think a lot of what you say is valid, but have to admit I'm one of the people whose lives he changed for the better. When I first listened, I was a 25-year-old, three times college dropout, and ten years later I have a great career and family. A lot of that comes from applying his advice.
Subjectively, I'll always love him because of what he gave me, without even knowing who I am." What helped the most were the reframes and micro-lessons. Almost every day at work or home there's a situation where one pops into my head. I'm not anxious, I'm excited. Laziness is caused by thinking about the cost instead of the payoff. And systems are better than goals.
The main idea that by changing my thoughts I can change my reality is simple but went a long way for me. It opened up my imagination to what's possible and made my thinking more positive. End quote. See another poet, quote... The phrase post-truth gets thrown around too much, but Adams fit that description perfectly. End quote.
Alex Potterack writes, quote, I just need to note you're not the only one who read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. I'm the other one. End quote. Scott writes, Dozens of people chimed in, here and on social media, to say that they did this too. Alyssa Briggs writes, quote, This is a great article, but you left out that he handed out king-sized candy bars on Halloween.
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Chapter 4: What comments were made about the substance of the piece?
But an Adams backer could justly point out that a few sentences later, he does talk about how it's unfair to make him pay an estate tax when he worked so hard his whole life. And then a few paragraphs later, he gives a different, more sympathetic story about how he thought Hillary supporters were bullies, and it was important to stand up to them.
Although he then says maybe Trump supporters were exactly equal bullies, but he selfishly was more against the bullies who were bullying him. But then elsewhere he says no, the Hillary supporters bullying was worse. Adams keeps trying to eat his cake and have it too.
He gives one pro-social altruistic explanation, so that if someone accuses him of being selfish he can show they're wrong, and then one amoral selfish explanation, so that if someone argues with him about whether it's really altruistic to oppose estate taxes for millionaires, he can say, ha, you can't get me, I already admitted I'm a cold hard realist who doesn't worry about that kind of fuzzy stuff.
This is much like how he first said Donald Trump was amazing, but didn't endorse him. Then said he was endorsing Hillary Clinton, but only for his own safety. Then endorsed libertarian Gary Johnson? Question marks in brackets. Then, when it looked like Trump would win again, he walked it back and said obviously he'd really been for Trump the whole time.
If someone else had won, he would have spun a story where his endorsement of them had been real. He admits all of this. So someone who is charitably inclined to Adams can tell a story where he's a great predictor, has always done everything for good patriotic altruistic reasons, and only teaches persuasion so that people can better understand themselves and their world.
Someone who is uncharitably inclined can tell a different story where his predictions are mostly wrong, he does everything for selfish reasons, and uses persuasion to manipulate others and enrich himself. I usually try to err on the side of charity, but Adams is wearing a metaphorical I am going to use your charitable instincts to manipulate you t-shirt.
So I'm happy to suspend charity in this case and judge him on some kind of average of his conflicting statements, or even to default to the less advantageous one to make sure he can't get away with it. So here are the updates I made based on your comments. 1.
Adams wasn't an ivermectin true believer, and although my piece very narrowly avoided saying that he was, I should have been clearer about this and avoided implying it. 2. Adams' manipulation coexisted with his being a nice person who cared about others.
I shouldn't have described him thinking of his manipulation targets as lesser humans in a way that implied this was a conscious thought, as opposed to, as I claim, a background stance his actions indirectly implied. And three, Adams' podcast was a bigger deal than I thought, and many people thought it seriously improved their lives. I should have concentrated more on this.
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