[Aside] I’m not sure how I feel about Scott Adams in general. I enjoyed his work a lot when I was younger, but he seems very prone to being contrarian for its own sake and over-estimating his competence in unrelated domains.
I was a big Dilbert fan in my mid-teens and bought all his books. In one of them (The Dilbert Future, I think), he has this self-confessedly serious chapter about questioning received assumptions and thinking creatively. As an example, he suggests an alternate explanation for gravity, which he claims is empirically indistinguishable from the standard theory (prima facie, at least). His bold new theory: everything in the universe is just getting bigger all the time. So when we jump in the air the Earth and our bodies get bigger so they come back into contact. Seriously. Even as a fourteen-year-old, it took me only a few minutes to think of about five reasons this could not be true.
I read that book in the late 90s, and I’ve read very little by Scott Adams since then. In recent years, I’ve heard a few people cite him as a generally smart and thoughtful guy, and I have a very hard time reconciling that description with the author of that monumentally stupid chapter.
IIRC, in that chapter, he also discussed how quantum mechanics (specifically the double slit experiment) meant that information could travel backwards in time...
I don’t remember that specifically, but it would be one of the less crazy things he says. There are sound theoretical motivations for a retro-causal account of quantum mechanics, although a successful retro-causal model of the theory is yet to be constructed (John Cramer’s transactional interpretation comes close).
However, I do remember Adams endorsing something like The Secret) in the chapter, where you can change the world to your benefit merely by wanting it enough. I don’t entirely recall if he sees this as a consequence of quantum retro-causality, but I think he does, and if that’s the case then yeah, the quantum stuff is batshit too.
Yes, he does. It’s not necessarily “wanting it enough,” though; he specifically instructs that you have to pick a sentence that describes what you want, such as “I want to get rich in the stock market”—specific, but not too specific—and write it, by hand, in a notebook designated for this purpose, at least 10 times each night. He claims that doing this, he did in fact make a lot of money in the stock market, and became the mostt popular cartoonist in the world by a metric he specified (some index, I don’t remember which).
Not really connected to the quantum stuff, and possibly not as crazy. I think he mentions some possibility that all it actually does is force you to focus on your goals, which subconsciously makes you more responsive to opportunities, or something.
Confession: I was taken in by that section too for a while … a long while. In fact, when Eliezer’s quantum physics series started, my initial reaction was, “oh, I wonder how he’s going to handle the backwards-in-time stuff!”
I agree in a lot of respects. But if you can cure such a major disorder when professionals, who are supposed to know this stuff, think it’s impossible, and do it by your own research … well, you have credibility on that issue.
[Aside] I’m not sure how I feel about Scott Adams in general. I enjoyed his work a lot when I was younger, but he seems very prone to being contrarian for its own sake and over-estimating his competence in unrelated domains.
I was a big Dilbert fan in my mid-teens and bought all his books. In one of them (The Dilbert Future, I think), he has this self-confessedly serious chapter about questioning received assumptions and thinking creatively. As an example, he suggests an alternate explanation for gravity, which he claims is empirically indistinguishable from the standard theory (prima facie, at least). His bold new theory: everything in the universe is just getting bigger all the time. So when we jump in the air the Earth and our bodies get bigger so they come back into contact. Seriously. Even as a fourteen-year-old, it took me only a few minutes to think of about five reasons this could not be true.
I read that book in the late 90s, and I’ve read very little by Scott Adams since then. In recent years, I’ve heard a few people cite him as a generally smart and thoughtful guy, and I have a very hard time reconciling that description with the author of that monumentally stupid chapter.
It’s conceivable that he focuses down on things that are important to him, and is quite content to do more or less humorous BS the rest of the time.
IIRC, in that chapter, he also discussed how quantum mechanics (specifically the double slit experiment) meant that information could travel backwards in time...
I don’t remember that specifically, but it would be one of the less crazy things he says. There are sound theoretical motivations for a retro-causal account of quantum mechanics, although a successful retro-causal model of the theory is yet to be constructed (John Cramer’s transactional interpretation comes close).
However, I do remember Adams endorsing something like The Secret) in the chapter, where you can change the world to your benefit merely by wanting it enough. I don’t entirely recall if he sees this as a consequence of quantum retro-causality, but I think he does, and if that’s the case then yeah, the quantum stuff is batshit too.
Yes, he does. It’s not necessarily “wanting it enough,” though; he specifically instructs that you have to pick a sentence that describes what you want, such as “I want to get rich in the stock market”—specific, but not too specific—and write it, by hand, in a notebook designated for this purpose, at least 10 times each night. He claims that doing this, he did in fact make a lot of money in the stock market, and became the mostt popular cartoonist in the world by a metric he specified (some index, I don’t remember which).
Not really connected to the quantum stuff, and possibly not as crazy. I think he mentions some possibility that all it actually does is force you to focus on your goals, which subconsciously makes you more responsive to opportunities, or something.
Confession: I was taken in by that section too for a while … a long while. In fact, when Eliezer’s quantum physics series started, my initial reaction was, “oh, I wonder how he’s going to handle the backwards-in-time stuff!”
I agree in a lot of respects. But if you can cure such a major disorder when professionals, who are supposed to know this stuff, think it’s impossible, and do it by your own research … well, you have credibility on that issue.