Author’s note: As noted earlier, beloved cartoonist and podcaster Scott Adams passed away today of cancer at age 68. I wrote the following in November 2018.
Well, not exactly, but what he says here comes awfully close to hitting just that mark. I love Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist turned daily video commentator on the world at large. Watch this in which he “Teaches the First Class of Troll College.”
He facetiously proposes to teach Internet trolls how to up their game, as trolls. Notice anything familiar? Yes, you do. As described by Adams, trolls behave almost exactly the way Internet Darwinists do. Not only the anonymous Darwin trolls (that would be obvious) but tenured biology professors and mainstream journalists who write under their own name, aka “the critics.”
His tips for trolling include, “Misstate then criticize,” “Context doesn’t matter,” “You understand science” (and nobody who disagrees with you does), and “Mind reading is real.”
An example of that last might be: Via mind reading, you can determine that ID proponents seek to mandate intelligent design in the public schools despite their years of urging against precisely such an extremely misguided idea. Or by looking deep into their minds, you know that ID advocates are really creationists despite their persistent affirmations that the world is billions of years old, the Cambrian explosion of animal life occurred some 530 million years ago, and so on.
How to be a troll — or I would add, an ID critic — on science in particular starts at about 11:48. As Adams summarizes, “It’s all in the attitude.” Again, in the context of our critics, none of this is limited to mere trolls. Scott Adams is quite funny. Enjoy.