January 20, 2026

"Maybe Mr. Adams was an early Trump supporter because 'Dilbert' was itself proto-MAGA."

"The strip’s everyday resentments and cynicism added up to a now-familiar worldview. 'There’s no such thing as expertise. It just doesn’t exist,' Mr. Adams said. Mr. Adams thought this extended even to issues like international trade. 'In these big, complicated situations, no one really knows if we have a good deal. It’s best just to negotiate from ignorance and hope the other side gives in,' he told me. 'In the real world there is a fog. In a world where nobody knows, the loudest person is going to get the most.' From his point of view, I had lived so long among the well-credentialed languishing in abstract thoughts that I was fooled into thinking complex problems required expert solutions. 'In your movie,' by which he meant my perception of reality, 'there’s a big, incompetent guy who doesn’t know the details,' he told me. 'I’m telling you it’s the best thing possible. When President Trump acts without all the information and his facts are not accurate, he’s operating on a higher level, not a lower level. He’s operating in the real world.'"

Writes Joel Stein, in "'Dilbert' Was Always MAGA" (NYT).

37 comments:

Smilin' Jack said...

“'There’s no such thing as expertise. It just doesn’t exist,' Mr. Adams said. Mr. Adams thought this extended even to issues like international trade.”

Even AI doesn’t understand international trade.

Paul Zrimsek said...

"Expertise" in Washington doesn't refer to the guy who knows UNIX; it refers to the pointy-haired boss who's looking for eunuch programmers.

NKP said...

"Experetise" is a credential you buy from an Ivy for around $100K per year. Actually, that's entry-level. You will need to upgrade to 'premium' and, eventually, 'elite' tickets to have a voice in discussion. Maybe blow somebody for a seat at the table.

Quaestor said...

Before some people began using expertise as a name for a supposedly real and admirable quality a person could possess, expertise was a synonym for bullshit.

Leland said...

I think Joel Stein doesn’t quite understand Adams. It isn’t just that Trump might act, even without all the information. It is Trump acts.

Joe Bar said...

Stein doesn't know anything about this. Adams wasn't pro or against Trump or MAGA, initially. He was an observer.

Joe Bar said...

Whenever an "Expert" appears at work, bad things happen.

Grundoon said...

I watched the Coffee With Scott Adams podcast pretty much every day for the last 5 years, maybe more. The recordings are still out there on Youtube and Rumble.
I came to respect his insightfulness. I didn't make any life decisions based on his predictions, but he was right enough times that I quit dismissing the ones that struck me as farfetched the first time I heard them.
Here is an example. Scott stated his idea that when Biden won, Republicans would be hunted. He was right.

Quaestor said...

Joel Stein, Proto-Clown.

Mary Beth said...

Leland beat me to it. Stein did not understand what Adams was telling him. He didn't get Trump's post about Adams' death either.

"I don’t know how you people with MAGA uncles deal with it."

He's thinking about MAGA relatives as something to tolerate, not someone to understand. (I use "tolerate" here intentionally because I have the same problem with "tolerance" that I believe Althouse does. It "others" the other person while pretending not to.)

Readering said...

I think Adams like that Senator and AA found Trump charming.

FormerLawClerk said...

"Scott stated his idea that when Biden won, Republicans would be hunted. He was right.

It's my belief that Republicans are still being hunted. Certainly Donald Trump is, but not just him.

Charlie Kirk was hunted.

They're hunting ICE agents in Minneapolis.

Republicans are beign hunted down and killed by Democrats all across America.

It's a guerilla war, funded by some of America's biggest NGOs and foundations such as Arabella Advisers, the Ford Foundation, Gates Foundation (which lost billions of funding when USAID was shut off) Soros, et. al.

We're in a war. They are shooting and killing our guys. Hunting us. And we're just sitting around with our thumbs up our asses.

Donald Trump's building a fucking dance floor, for Christ's sake, when he's not golfing on Kai's YouTube channel.

He's a fucking buffoon.

Yancey Ward said...

Whatever expertise kis in any field is, it isn't possessed by people under the age of 40-50.

Jaq said...

Supposedly Steve Jobs' employees said that he had a "reality distortion zone" around him, and it took them a while to see that what he was talking about was possible.

Other people have tried it, like that lady who even wore the turtleneck, but it's not that easy.

n.n said...

Dilbert was demos-cratic, not Democratic, antifascist, not Antifa, and rejected DEIst faith and practices.

RJ said...

Ann needs to open her world wider than NYT/WaPo.

tcrosse said...

Dilbert did for life in the cube farm what Catch-22 did for life in the service.

RCOCEAN II said...

Shorter Joel Stein: Trump is a poopy-head and so was Scott Adams.

RCOCEAN II said...

One Left-wing propaganda technique is to dress up your politically driven analysis with a lot pseudo-intellectual and pseduo-objective bullshit. This fools dumb people into thinking your attack on someone isn't partisan hackery but somehow valid.

Its funny how so may "Objective" x-burts dropped the mask when Trump ran in 2016 and came out as full-fledged politically driven leftists. Larry J. Sabato is a perfect example. He always had his thumb on the scale but pretended to be an umpire just callin' political balls and strikes. The dropped the mask in 2016 and started pitching at Trump heads.

RCOCEAN II said...

I was listening to Scott Adams on Joe Rogan in 2017 and its amazing how anti-racist he is. Then I skimmed through the althouse archives and found he was attacking the Covington kids and pretty calling everyone a racist before his 2023 foe-pah.

But y'know one strike and you're out. When you get tagged as a trump supporter.

chuck said...

Stein didn't have much to say. Should I be disappointed?

Lazarus said...

Adams is right. Economists are partisans, often bought-and-paid-for partisans. Their vaunted expertise means that they ignore counterindications and inconvenient facts and dismiss other points of view out of hand. If you're old enough to have some experience of life, your ideas are 30 or 40 years old. They might still apply -- or they might not. The apparent successes of your thinking may blind you to changing circumstances, and if you are young enough to have no real experience of life that is another problem. Still, that doesn't mean that one should act blindly and rely on will alone. It's just that one has to be skeptical of expert opinion.

Intellectuals wanted to retain power based on their expertise, even as their more radical colleagues were teaching that there was no truth and that all ideas were class-based, gender-based, or race-based. They undercut their own claim to expertise and power.

Eva Marie said...

Re the Covington kids. On Jan 19 2019 he said something negative about them. The next day he issued this apology on Twitter:
“Turns out that the Covington Catholic kids were the good guys in the story. Consider this my public apology for assuming otherwise in my Periscope yesterday. I got fooled by @CNN fake news. That’s 100% on me.”
He also did a dedicated YouTube episode to an apology and mentioned how wrong he was in several podcasts.
As far as calling everyone a racist, he may have used the term ironically. He was always skeptical of claims of racism.

Josephbleau said...

Stein is a pretty stupid fellow. If he thinks Dilbert is “maga” then the democrats are catbert, or Dogbert? The bullshitters and HR people? Or the boss?

Kevin said...

Donald Trump's building a fucking dance floor, for Christ's sake

Donald Trump is modernizing the command bunker under the East Wing. The ballroom is the head fake to distract the rubes.

n.n said...

Trump is indeed a Person of Orange (PoO) in the Diversity catalog of blocs.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

At the time, "Dilbert" was thought to be an accurate, if cynical and exaggerated depiction of decision-making in large corporations. It was reality. Reality kept proving itself to be like Dilbert, including the part about expertise. I don't reject all expertise, but we have certainly learned that we have had a poor relationship with it, worse every decade. I don't mean Covid, but studying history, doing research, understanding other countries, teaching psychology, recognising excellence in art. We simply have not been very good at these things, and I see no nations around that are much better.

Rejecting the overlordship of expertise has had mixed results, but sometimes it works. Trump has gotten some surprising things right. Dilbert was not MAGA. Dilbert and Trump both perceive parts of reality that were previously discredited.

Prof. M. Drout said...

Back when I was in J-school at Stanford I interviewed a researcher who was, both by number of publications and by consensus among other people I interviewed, an expert on elephant seals. I could tell he was a real expert because everybody else sent me to him rather than telling me things themselves.
He did not claim to be an expert on all seals, or all marine mammals, or on the ocean, or the climate, or biology. Just elephant seals. And half of his responses to my questions were "We don't really know" or "There are various theories."
Real experts are like that: they're focused on a very sharply defined subject, and why they are talking about their subject half the time they tell you how much we DON'T know.

Does that sound like ANY of the people who are held up by journalists as "experts"?

Big Mike said...

<.i>I was fooled into thinking complex problems required expert solutions.

Complex problems require elegant solutions, where the word that is most synonymous with elegance is “simple.” That’s one way to know whether the problem-solver is truly an expert is to look at how clean and simple the proper solution is.

Greg The Class Traitor said...

I was fooled into thinking complex problems required expert solutions.

One would have hoped that Alexander's solution to the Gorian Knot would have put that stupid idea to rest a couple of millennia ago

Greg The Class Traitor said...

“'There’s no such thing as expertise. It just doesn’t exist,' Mr. Adams said. Mr. Adams thought this extended even to issues like international trade.”

So, Trump created / jacked up a bunch of tariffs. results:
1: US gov't collected extra $200 billion in tariff / tax revenue
2: Inflation is down
3: Economy growing ~5% annualized rate

Inflation down means US consumers aren't paying for the tariffs
Economic growth that high means the tariffs aren't strangling US economy
All if this contrary to what the "experts" claimed

"Trust the experts" is about as sane as believing in Santa Claus when you're in your 20s

Lucien said...

One would have thought that anyone who lived through the era of Robert McNamara would be permanently skeptical of “experts”.

boatbuilder said...

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
Feynman

boatbuilder said...

The capture of Maduro, the success of tariffs, the closing of the border, the cleanout of USAID, all illustrate that Trump does, indeed, rely on the expertise of people who know what they are doing.

Those people should not be confused with the people who call themselves "experts."

Anthony said...

I've been contemplating this idea of 'expertise' since the early days of the Internet when it was beginning to become apparent that those in mass media who were put forth as 'experts' weren't really, as actual experts -- who would actually post links and quotes supporting what they were saying -- would be contradicting them and providing said basis for those contradictions. My first major introduction to this was the Michael A. Bellesiles 's "Arming America" fiasco.

People do have actual expertise. I have some expertise in a few areas, archaeology, epidemiology/public health, typewriters, etc. I have concluded at least two things from my contemplations: 1) Expertise really has to be demonstrated; and 2) As someone mentioned above, real experts are very upfront about what is not known.

wsw said...

Joel "where are they now" Stein was on with Adam Carolla some time back, hawking his, "In Defense of Elitism," which sounded promising until he opened his mouth. The interview about this humor book contained not one laugh —except when he reluctantly admitted that everyone he met in Trump country (near Amarillo) was "really nice." [Re the Adams stuff] Stein assumed that his mockery of those skeptical of credentialed "experts" would be hilarious. Instead, Carolla called out the inherent fakery of experts-for-hire — using a relatively benign example of trial attorneys/prosecutors only calling to the stand the experts guaranteed to deliver their preferred / needed findings. This went completely over Stein's head. You had to hear it to believe it.

Fred Drinkwater said...

In the movie "Fury" one of the most memorable scenes for me, is near the beginning when the War Daddy character, a Sergeant, is getting an assignment from a Captain. At one point, the Captain just looks at him, and in a deeply tired voice, says, "I know you know what you are doing."

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