by Daniel Yim
DILBERT: I’d feel better if we called that “marketing.”
POINTY-HAIRED BOSS: I need you to be more mindless too.
Not only is this cheeky little comic strip funny, but it also shows that marketing is often concerned with manipulation-for-profit. It also reveals what is often the true nature of bosses, which is that they are controlling. Of course, this isn’t meant to be the universal claim that every corporation uses addictive marketing techniques or that all bosses are controlling, but it humorously indicates that a lot of them do.
There is enough truth revealed in this comic strip to make it appropriately incisive and so avoid obvious logical fallacies. Its subtle, humorous nature goes right to the issue and elicits wide agreement, whereas if Scott Adams were simply to write an essay about the evils of manipulative marketing campaigns and controlling bosses, it might seem a bit tired or, more likely, it might be totally ignored. So humor, particularly the humor of Dilbert comics, can address a serious issue effectively and enjoyably, without the noise that often goes into more “seriously” addressing an issue.
Nearly all Dilbert comics concern the incompetencies of modern companies and their dysfunctional office workspaces. Here’s another example from one of his Dilbert books, Go Add Value Someplace Else:
WALLY: Here’s my card. Let me know if I can be of further assistance.
CUSTOMER: Your phone number is missing a digit and your email address doesn’t have an @ symbol.
WALLY: I didn’t say it would be easy.
Through this comic, we see the well-attested truth that while companies are often very interested in appearing customer-friendly, many, especially when it comes to complaints, aren’t. So, through an apparently simple comic, Adams uses humor to uncover an important truth about these corporations. Adams, therefore, could be seen as virtuous . . . in a way.
How Humor Can Transform Arguments
Humor can take a solemn and serious argument, and quickly communicate an insight about that argument. Here’s a made-up example. The following is a type of argument sometimes expressed by philosophers expounding their thoughts on the origin of the universe:
“Nothing” as one perceives it, isn’t actually nothing. Our limited minds are not capable of understanding “nothing” in its real quantum-mechanical form. Thus, what we think is nothing is not actually nothing. In fact, science reveals that “nothing” is actually something, or nothing inevitably leads to something. So you never actually have “nothing”-nothing. You always have nothing-something. Since nothing is indeed a vacuum in which particles are in chaos, it will lead to something, given enough time. Because these two are inextricably linked, you can indeed get something from nothing. Thus, the whole riddle of how the universe can come from nothing has been solved. Case closed.
Given that argument, it would be easy to get lost in all its twists and turns, especially if you read it fast. If you wanted to defeat that argument, you would have to go through the daunting task of examining each premise and seeing where you might sense logical inconsistency. However, even when you respond, you must also be ready to respond to a potential counter to your objection. And given enough time, you may even come across a whole new ad hoc argument that was developed to avoid such criticism. These debates can go on ad infinitum and even, at times, ad nauseum—to the point of barfing.
However, an alternative is there is a logical tool that could perhaps inform us about reality by piercing through these arguments with quick speed. This tool is humor. It’s the process by which something is expressed in a comedic or amusing way, and simplifies an argument down to its crux. This allows one to see what is really being said without all the unnecessary premises, ambiguous words, and poor structures that these arguments often have.
Person A walks into their daily work office with an ice-cream cone in hand. Person B, upon observation of the ice-cream cone, asks, “Hey! Where did you get that from?”
Person A then responds, “It just popped into existence inside my hand.”
Person B thinks. “At first, I thought that it is logically impossible, but then I remembered some people believe the universe did the same thing, so it can’t be that absurd, right?”
The humor exposes absurdities or at least appearances of the absurd in stark relief. If nothing is literally “no-thing” devoid of any kind of properties, then it seems unlikely that it can cause anything at all. If “no-thing” is defined as chaotic chemicals and atoms in variation, then it seems as though it is a “some thing,” and thus becomes not literally “no-thing.”
Humor can inform us regarding reality in a quick and accessible way since it can be used as a logical tool to assess and examine arguments. Pretty cool, right? We have Scott Adams to thank for this.
An Objection to Humor as Argument
An objection to the use of humor as argument is that it can easily commit the straw man fallacy. The straw man fallacy is to represent the point of view you’re criticizing in a distorted form, so that it becomes weaker and therefore easier to dismiss. Here’s an example of a straw man argument:
PERSON A: I’m now a fully convinced macro-evolutionist.
PERSON B: Ha! Do you really believe that we evolved from a primordial soup?
On the surface, it seems to be using humor to refute the theory of evolution, but in fact it is a straw man argument since it ignores core Darwinian concepts like natural selection. There is more to macro-evolutionary theory than “life came from primordial soup”—it’s overly simplistic and misleading in its simplicity.
So, proper humoring arguments or a proper use of humor as a logical tool needs to preserve the integrity of the claim that is being debunked. The goal still remains truthful representation, not merely a cheeky way to attack arguments that you’re not fond of.
Humor as a Virtue
Not only can humor be used as a logical tool of argument, it is also a moral virtue, according to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle lists humor or wittiness as one of the moral virtues, and as with every character trait, Aristotle claims there are vices—the excessive and deficient forms of these traits.
The excess of humor is the vice of “buffoonery.” The person who can’t be serious even when seriousness is appropriate is a buffoon; your uncle who can’t stop telling jokes at a funeral is a buffoon. In the opposite direction, Aristotle condemns the deficiency of humor, the vice of “boorishness”: the always-serious, only ever studying student at the library is a boor; people who can never laugh at themselves are boors. Aristotle claimed that an excellent human life included the rightly-humored character. The person who has the virtue of wittiness knows when to be serious but also when to joke.
Failing and Winning
In his book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Scott Adams goes through the contours of his life, highlighting everything from being a young boy with aspirations to becoming a cartoonist, to discussing the man he is today. His book pinpoints the problems he’s had in life: problems with his voice, his hand, schooling, and business career. He even talks about problems with Dilbert. However in the midst of all these problems Scott shows his reader pointers and tips on how to succeed despite all the odds against you.
The humor in this book is found in the irony of his very life, and in some ways there is a very Socratic tone to it. Adams claims the people who think they are the most intelligent, most capable, and even most talented are not the ones who typically succeed—a distant echo of Socrates asking his Greek interlocutors, “You know what justice is? Fantastic! Please enlighten an ignorant man . . .” Adams proves to be a Socrates, here, by acknowledging that he is a mediocre artist, yet still one who lives comfortably as a cartoonist.
He claims that “passion,” which is often the vehicle that allows a person to live the American Dream, is “bullshit.” Passion is temporary. We just need to be lucky. He also claims that selfless, humble people can never get what they want. They must be selfish in orde
r to get what they want. Not a kind of selfishness that is rude and mean, but a sort of Nietzschean selfishness, focusing on your life, needs, and wants above those of family, friends, and co-workers.
Scott also claims that more mediocre skills can be better than a few masterful skills. These claims seem radically different than what is often found in self-help books, where it often claims that if one wants to succeed, one must merely have a lot of ambition, and then one can accomplish anything. That may be true of a few individuals, but in reality, it’s not the case for most successful people, according to Adams.
In Chapter 4, “Some of My Many Failures in Summary Form,” he systematically goes through each of his failures in life. He discusses a failed attempt to create a Velcro Rosin Bag for tennis players; he discusses a meditation guide he made, which ultimately only sold three copies; and he discusses many other failures like computer games, websites, and perhaps most comedic, the Dilberito, which was a healthy food product that contained a lot of your daily vitamins, and which was ultimately sold to another corporation.
Adams claims that it isn’t about ideas, which can be good, but about being lucky. In fact, in Chapter 25, he claims that the whole Dilbert enterprise was the result of luck. He maintains that if events had not lined up with others in the way he describes, this book regarding Adams probably wouldn’t have been written because he probably would not have been as well-known as he is today.
The absurd but true core lies in the fact that our capitalist society has given its members a false impression of how to succeed, and Adams humorously shows that he himself should be a “failure” of some sort. If you want to succeed, try to increase your odds of being lucky. OF COURSE, we should not take this to be his real point; rather, his point is that The American Dream is an over-sell.
Win Bigly
In his book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter, Scott Adams talks about the ancient art of persuasion, more specifically, persuasion in the political realm. He establishes that there are three levels of persuaders.
First, there are the amateur persuaders like himself, who probably know a fair bit more than the average Joe. Second, you have the cognitive scientists, who know more about persuasion by virtue of knowing the mind and how it works. And lastly, there are the master persuaders, who are very rare and operate in a whole different dimension.
Though Scott makes it clear that he doesn’t agree with any one political side, he admires Donald Trump’s persuasion skills, which are indeed master grade. In fact, Adams predicted that Trump would win primarily because of his persuasion skills. Throughout the book, Adams brings you through the contours of his prediction of Trump’s victory and ultimately outlines how to become a better persuader. Aristotle would be proud of him.
The humor in Win Bigly is the paradoxical nature of humans, especially in the realm of politics. Scott claims that human beings are deluded when they think most of their choices and opinions are the result of rational reflection. In fact, Adams argues that we each have this subjective filter in which we interpret reality. He even cites Hume and Kant in support of this idea.
Scott claims that humans are inevitably the result of two psychological theories. Firstly, we all suffer from cognitive dissonance, which is the attempt to rationalize why one’s actions are different from one’s beliefs and values. And secondly, we’re all victims of confirmation bias, which is the tendency to view all evidence as supporting our own views. Thus, it is possible, according to Adams, for people to be looking at the exact same data, and draw different conclusions.
In a world where people simply experience life through their own subjective lens, facts become overrated. Because facts are interpreted differently, you can’t convince someone else of a different position by facts alone. In fact, proposing objections can strengthen the other person’s view and even make it more difficult to sway them.
So what’s the method by which politicians get what they want and sway people into making their campaign seem ideal? Persuasion! It’s not about what you say. It’s about how you say it. If you can get your ideas across in a persuasive way, then you can pretty much win a presidential election. Trump, according to Adams, won because of his persuasion skills.
Now you might stop for a moment and ask yourself whether or not this framework reduces the political system to a battle of sophistry instead of truth. Sadly, but humorously, according to Adams, this is so. It’s the reason why he humorously provides thirty-one tips throughout the book on how to become a better persuader. Trump was shown to be a master persuader because of the following: he was a proponent of intentional mistakes (so as to attract attention); he displayed a strong sense of confidence; he was well-dressed (formal dress appears to give a sense of credibility and authority); he used visual imagery (which is more powerful and effective than just verbal imagery); he used repetition, which would ultimately stick with his supporters and his critics; and so on. Though Scott makes it clear that he doesn’t support the political ideas of either Trump or Clinton, he does admire Trump’s persuasion skills.
The rub, of course, is that the humor here—the over-selling of the importance of persuasion—is meant to be instructive rather than literal. It’s not that persuasion is so great—Hitler was a great persuader, too—but rather that cold, rational arguments are often ineffective in making signigicant change and that, we think, is Adams’s real point.
So, by attending to the core, central truth on a given issue and then applying this to a humorous situation—with a great dose of irony—Scott Adams demonstrates that he not only has the Aristotelian virtue of wit but also the Socratic demeanor to go along with it.
6
The PowerPoint Conspiracy Theory
CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
William of Ockham, a Franciscan monk from the twelfth century, said that given two or more hypotheses that explain something, the one with the fewest assumptions is likely the better hypothesis. This is minimalist thinking. Why take one more step than you must?
See, this is the point of PowerPoint. Make the footprint small and the typeset HUGE so you can’t stuff too much onto the page. William of Ockham would have loved PowerPoint.
On the other hand, the PowerPoint type size gets smaller and smaller the more you try to stuff on the tiny page. At some point it just gives up and begs you to make a new slide. In the twentieth century Rube Goldberg produced contraptions that used many more steps than necessary to pour a cup of coffee, or toast a piece of bread. This is maximalist thinking. Are you a PowerPoint minimalist or a maximalist?
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is four hundred-plus pages, many thousands of words. A Scott Adams cartoon may consist of three to six panels and be less than fifty words. Cartoonists must think minimally with just the right combination of art and words to make their statement. We can debate the value of the work of Dostoevsky against Adams but in the end, Adams achieves his message in a minimalist way and Dostoyevsky takes the long route. How about Dickens, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times,” or Melville, “Call me Ishmael,” both perfect PowerPoint phrases? How did Dickens and Melville know how to do this? Folks, it’s in our genes.
About Minimalism
Before we get to the conspiracy that is PowerPoint, we must take a historical deep dive to tease out its primitive origins. Minimalism does not begin with Ockham. We see minimalism in the very real but simple prehistoric cave paintings. Sometimes it’s just an animal and a palm print. In other words, a painting signed by the author. In the twentieth century, musical composers like John Adams, John Cage, and Philip Glass composed music from simple chord progressions that are highly repetitive. Cage’s 4’ 33” has no notes; it’s four minutes and thirty-three seconds of ambient noise—but not all agree on its minimalism because noise is quite complex. In 1915, Kazimir Malevich, paints a black square . . . that’s right, a black square.
For many people, minimalist art and music is so much nonsense. Perhaps it is . . . However, hav
e we not been conditioned to minimalist thinking in other ways? The billboard. The street sign—STOP. The cartoon. The words, “no” . . . and “yes,” and the PowerPoint presentation, the canvas “of the people, by the people, and for the people”—you see now, don’t you, even Lincoln was a minimalist. We can go too far. That is where this conspiracy thing comes in. Oh, and we will get to Scott Adams presently, just be patient.
Points about PowerPoint
PowerPoint was purportedly designed for business, for the time challenged and hopelessly perplexed executive who undoubtedly cannot understand any report unless it is distilled down into pithy one-line bullet points in large print. Think child psychology.
The large print means that we’re to assume that once again we are in a kindergarten class, writing letters with three-line ruled paper so that we can carefully keep the circle of the small letter ‘d’ within the first two lines (the thick bottom one and the dotted one above) and extend the tail of the ‘d’ to the thick top line but no higher. MY NAME IS JILL. See how easy it is? It tells you everything you need to know about the child. Her name is Jill. What do we need to know about the child beyond that? What does your corporate executive need to know? Probably not much more than that.
We all know that Dilbert has a most ineffective boss. You know him, he who is always proposing stupid stuff or damning good stuff. And he speaks Gobbledygook Business (GB), the language that has no dictionary. So, when the Pointy-Haired Boss said in September 2014, “Executives only respond to familiar colors and shapes,” you know he’s singing the praise of PowerPoint itself. As I said, it’s in our genes, even in the too-many-chromosomes Pointy-Haired Boss.
Most business problems do not involve nuclear physics, but when it comes to things like logistics, IT, actuarial analysis, economics, and finance, the execs are probably not going to be well-versed in each of these various business sciences. Simplicity is advised. This is why Microsoft created Power-Point as an unpretentious tool to be used by the masses. However, once the corporate geek starts playing with the program we’re apt to experience anything from a child’s stick-figure representation of his family, to something elegantly fashioned to convince a busy executive to decide more quickly, and hopefully make a better decision.