World: Learning from Scott Adams' blog

Scott Adams writes the Dilbert cartoons*. He has a daily blog - possibly because he wants to get his real opinions out…

He’s one of those people (like myself J) who thinks they’re right, and everyone else is mistaken or misled. Politically, he’s neither left nor right, but a cynic (he’s still the enemy: if you’re not for us, you’re against us J). But his particular obsession is religion-baiting.

Why are his blogs worth reading? To get some insight into his character? No. In fact, it’s the quantity and breadth of the comments that make it interesting. He’s well-known enough that he’s guaranteed 100 to 300 comments for every post. If you rifle through the drebbidge, you get some a diversity of views, generally well-considered (apart from a fair quotient of smart alecs), and a good overall perspective on the topic at hand.

For his religion-baiting posts, he always gets a good quota of comments. About 40% are from believers, 40% from non-believers (the rest seem to be uninterested in being drawn either way). In the aggregate, there’s some good insight into why non/believers feel the way they do… although, in the end it might seem to be simply personality-typed – i.e. your ‘belief’ gene is switched a particular way. For example, a recent post about prayer gives some insight into why different people pray. There’s some intelligent answers there.

Not that Adams’ posts are always relevant to anything. But the aggregate of answers tends to demonstrate greater wisdom than Adams’. If only I got that many comments for each post… perhaps I’d be a little wiser…

*Current theme is particularly anti-feminist, which shows Adams' colours somewhat.