Earlier this year I worked with Dr. Carmen Simon at Rexi Media to create a memorable SlideShare presentation of my latest book. Did Dr. Simon’s double-doctorate and fancy brain science make any difference to the outcome?

Today I learned that out of millions of presentations on the SlideShare site, our work was picked as a Best of 2014.

Given that my book was not a best-seller or even close, one has to assume my sparkling content was not the reason for the achievement. Science wins again.

To be fair, the other millions of creators are probably still operating at the “People like blue” level of design. While no one was paying attention, the job of designing moved from art to science.

Ever wonder why Apple consistently does great design and others can’t seem to figure it out? My assumption is that Apple is using science and other companies are using art. I once worked in the Human Interface test lab at Pacific Bell and saw how powerful science is when applied to design. And science has learned a lot since those days.

—- And now I talk about robots again —-

I have a Dilbert series in the pipeline in which robots learn cognitive science simply by reading the Internet. All of the science is there. Robots thus informed could control human decisions without us being the wiser.

In other words, robots will never need a bloody coup to take control of Earth. All they need to do is read the Internet where we humans have painstakingly documented the science that will allow robots to manipulate our emotions and thus our choices without our knowledge.

My guess is that most of you think this cognitive science stuff is only influencing group averages and isn’t much of a factor in your own daily decisions. But I will tell you that if you have a background in hypnosis and you have wallowed in this cognitive science stuff as I have for both work and fun, you see it as a far more powerful force, and possibly the only important trend for the future.

Someday robots will fix most of humanity’s problems in the areas of energy, food, water, medicine and even climate change. They might even make war obsolete. But in the process of solving these problems the robots will acquire cognitive science knowledge that will effectively give them control of any democratic country because they can control the majority opinion through cognitive manipulation.

And even more interesting is the question of whether humans will someday prefer machine-based government over human control. I don’t want some human telling me how to live my life based on his belief in magic. But I don’t get angry at my ATM for only giving me the amount of money that I have in my own account. The machines will follow agreed rules and be predictable. I want a machine overlord, not some corrupt, drunken, horny, tired human that had a bad childhood.

But that’s just me.

Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com     
Author of this book 
Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily
Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays

I wouldn’t bother reading this if I were you.  I’m just venting.

The story goes like this…

Bought a Gateway computer from Best Buy

It breaks, as electronics do when near me.

Independent computer repair guy replaces a bad board.

Windows thinks I have a new machine because it doesn’t see the same hardware mix. I have learned that Windows checks the hardware for that reason.

Windows starts its “pesterware” process to bug me into buying a legal copy, which I already have. Knowing my copy is legal, I assume I have malware that is trying to trick me.

I did have the Conduit virus, which I mistakenly believed was related to my Windows authorization problem. But in any case, I needed to remove the malware just to know what my baseline was.

I called what I labelled in my prior post the “fake” Microsoft number and got a rep who said he worked for Microsoft. When I explained that I have a legal copy and don’t want to buy a new one, he told me their global network was down and I should call back in two hours.

I called the next day and explained again that I have a legal copy and want to know how to authenticate my machine. Again, by amazing “coincidence” the rep said their global network was down and they could not help. I asked for a supervisor.

I called bullshit on the “global network is down” and told him I got the same story yesterday. I asked him to verify that the network was down both days. He said it was definitely NOT down at all yesterday when the rep said it was.

That was the moment I unloaded on him for being either a fraud or managing a bunch of folks who are somehow incented to get me off the phone if I don’t whip out a credit card in the first ten seconds to buy a new copy. The supervisor said they do not have any incentives, just salary. Some part of the story was bullshit, so I unloaded on him. His next five minutes were not pleasant.

The folks I spoke with were all Indian-sounding, so this was presumably an Indian call center of some sort.

Then I called a “real” Microsoft number and asked if the last guys I called were real or fake. The real Microsoft rep, who sounded American, confirmed that the other phone number is not genuine. Moreover, she confirmed that if I had called a number because of a pop-up error on my screen it was definitely not Microsoft because they don’t ever show you a number and ask you to call to fix a problem. She said that is policy. (And it makes sense because no one wants customers calling.)

On a second day, I called the real Microsoft number and got another American-sounding rep who also confirmed that the other number is a scam. I’m not sure how, but he said he was familiar with this malware and Microsoft was trying to track down the perps. They even knew the cities where they operate.

But the second rep also mis-diagnosed my problem as the Conduit virus (which was a coincidental problem) so he might have been confused about the rest as well.

Yesterday one of the commenters here called the real Microsoft number to ask if my “fake” number was really fake. At first the rep said it was fake and later in the conversation confirmed it was genuine. If you are keeping score, that is three official Microsoft opinions that the other number is fake and one opinion that it is not.

Today I called the “fake” number again and got someone who – as far as I could tell – was an actual Microsoft employee, or at least he did a better impression of one. His first suggestion was a simple command prompt of “slui 3” to bring up a window to enter my legal Windows authorization code, which I had from the sticker on the machine.

This process didn’t work, and the new error message prompted the real Microsoft rep to say only the manufacturer of the computer (Gateway) can fix the problem. So I have to call them.

It is not possible to call Gateway, as far as I can tell.

So my current working theory is that Windows 7 is the malware, in effect. It is illegitimately forcing me to buy a “legal” copy when I already own one, and there is no workaround. The alternative is to throw away my machine, or reformat and try over I suppose, but even then I would need to buy a new copy of Windows. And Windows 8 isn’t even a real product.

My best guess about the Indian call center – which might actually be Microsoft – is that they have either a fraud problem, an employee incentive problem, or a training problem within the organization because I’m willing to bet that the network is never down when you offer to pay for a new copy of Windows.

So, anyway, eventually I did solve the malware problem. You might have heard of this solution. I’ll show you a picture.

Disclosure: I own Apple stock.  I was a Mac user for the first half of my career and those crash-puppies have collectively eaten over a month of my work in the past. I don’t expect the new one to be better. But it won’t have the SAME problem and I’m tired of the old one.

[Update: People often ask where I get my ideas. Here’s a sneak preview of the first panels of a Sunday comic I am working on today. I think that answers some of the question.

Nearly 100% of the well-informed and honest citizens of the United States agree that the Federal Government should not be in the business of weed-policing in states that allow medical marijuana.

That’s an easy law to change, right? I mean, if something like 80% of voters agree on an issue, it’s a no-brainer.

But our ineffective government couldn’t pass a law that had overwhelming support because, I suppose, it is bad for reelection if someone labels you pro-drug.So instead, Congress quietly just removed funding for the FBI’s weed-chasing efforts. No budget means no action in the future. In effect, the federal war on weed is over.

While I appreciate that the government is moving in the direction the citizens prefer, how much does it tell you about the effectiveness of our system that lawmakers couldn’t change a law that nearly 100% of well-informed and honest (meaning not taking money from private prison lobbyists for example) folks prefer?

My point is not about weed. That fight is essentially over. We’re just waiting for the referee to count to ten, although that might play out over several years. Full legalization for adults (in effect) is inevitable because the data will be so clear after a few states do their test runs.

My point is that if your government can’t pass a law that has has nearly universal approval, do you really have a functioning government?

Recently I wasn’t paying attention and clicked something I shouldn’t have. I got a [update: not the Conduit virus] virus on my Windows machine and it dug in deep.

I can accurately predict whether you will meet your weight loss goals by the way you talk about it.

I mean that literally. I think I could devise a controlled experiment in which I pick weight-loss winners and losers in advance based on nothing but a transcript of folks talking about their fitness goals.

I’ll give you some examples. What follows is a list of things you will hear from people that have no legitimate chance of losing weight and keeping it off. Yes, your thing is probably on this list and it pisses you off to see it. But stay with me and I’ll change your life by the end of this post.

Here’s what people say when they are preparing to fail at a weight-loss strategy.

“I need to exercise more.”

“I’m counting calories.”

“I have a cheat day coming.”

“I’m watching my portions.”

“I’m doing a cleanse.”

“I’m trying the (whatever) diet plan.”

Ten years ago I would have said everything on the list is a common-sense way to lose weight. But science has since shown otherwise. I’ll go through them one at a time.

“I need to exercise more.”

You probably DO need to exercise more, for lots of health-related reasons, but exercise is a terrible way to lose weight. Science tells us that exercise is maybe 20% of the solution and diet is 80%, roughly speaking. So when I hear someone talking about trying to lose sixty pounds by joining a gym, I know that person isn’t up-to-date on the science and doesn’t have a plan that can work. The only way to lose tons of weight through exercise alone is by pushing yourself to the pain point, and science tells us that in that case your subconscious mind will find a way to be “too busy” to keep exercising.

During the first week of January my gym fills with overweight people who think they can exercise their way to slimness. After a month they will see no improvement and quit. The gym probably makes its entire profit from the folks that mistakenly believe exercise is a great diet plan.

“I’m counting calories.”

If you are counting calories you probably don’t know about the recent science on hunger control. One of the best ways to decrease hunger naturally is by eating calorie-laden fatty stuff such as peanuts. Science says that peanut-eaters lose weight even though they eat fatty peanuts because it suppresses their appetite. Meanwhile, calorie-counters might eat carbs with low calories without knowing they are stimulating appetite by their food choices.

“I have a cheat day coming.”

Science tells us that unpredictable rewards create addiction. If you find yourself talking about your upcoming cheat day a week in advance, and craving it, you probably just set yourself up to become addicted to that cheat day – and therefore bad food in general – by your diet plan. If you reward yourself for “cheating” your diet, what do you think happens to your brain wiring? Yup, you crave the bad food that is the reward. Worst…diet…strategy…ever.

“I’m watching my portions.”

Portion control has the same problem as calorie-counting. If you eat the right food, portion control takes care of itself. When was the last time you ate too much broccoli? If portion control even enters your mind, it means you don’t understand the science about food cravings and the science about the glycemic index. Successful dieters manage their food choices and eat as much of anything as they want. The secret is in changing the “wanting” part, not the portion size. Eating a smaller portion of cake is rewarding the part of your brain that wants cake.

“I’m doing a cleanse.”

I timed myself and it took exactly five seconds to find a Mayo Clinic link that says science does not support cleanses. If your diet plan can be debunked in five seconds, you probably aren’t a seeker of knowledge. So even if a cleanse turns out to be accidentally a good idea, a knowledge-free long-term diet strategy has a low chance of success.

“I’m trying the (whatever) diet plan.”

When I took my dog to puppy training class the instructor told us the importance of training the dog in different locations. If you only train your dog to sit when he is in your kitchen, he only learns to do the trick in that one room. You walk into the living room and the dog doesn’t understand why you are doing the “sitting in the kitchen” trick in the wrong place. It will just stare at you.

My point is that if you learn to lose weight on a diet plan … all you learned is how to lose weight on a diet plan. After you lose your ten pounds you stop the plan and return to your normal diet. You don’t know how to lose weight on your normal diet. Now you’re the dog in the living room looking puzzled when someone says, “sit.”

Okay, so those are all the things that don’t work. So what does work?

Beats me. I’m not a doctor. But I can tell you my story to compare to other folks’ accounts and maybe you can see a pattern. What I noticed in myself is that until I reached a critical base of knowledge about diet science I couldn’t lose weight no matter how much so-called willpower I brought to it. As a reference point, I have a lot of this thing called willpower. Generally speaking, I simply have to want something badly enough and I’ll chew through a concrete wall to get it. But willpower didn’t help me lose weight, and it took me decades to learn why. In my defense, science was confused about diet choices until recently too, so the knowledge I needed didn’t exist. Now it does.

I’ve lost 26 pounds from my high adult weight, gradually, over years. None of the improvement is from any sort of “diet.” I simple acquired knowledge about nutrition and food science, a bit at a time, year-by-year, until some sort of critical mass was hit. Now I literally eat as much as I want, whenever I want, of whatever I want, and I have the body of a 19-year old swimmer who was tragically born with an old guy’s head.

The secret to eating whatever I want is that I systematically reduced my cravings for the wrong food. Now I only want things that happen to be great for my body. And I also experimented for years to find ways to prepare healthy food that doesn’t taste like your grandpa’s socks. I’m already looking forward to my protein smoothie that is full of berries, almond butter, yogurt, protein powder, chia seeds, almond milk and ice. I get the same pleasure from the smoothie that I once got from ice cream. Sacrifice? Zero. Portion control? Zero. I often have two smoothies in a row just for the pleasure.

As an aside, my efforts in learning to control my food cravings are part of a larger decade-long personal experiment in which I am seeing how much I can reprogram my basic human preferences using science and my knowledge of hypnosis. Preview: So far, almost all of my most basic preferences in life seem reprogrammable. That will be another blog post someday.

If you want links to any of the science I mentioned, I have most of that in my latest book.

You shouldn’t listen to cartoonists when it comes to health decisions. All I’m trying to add to the discussion is the idea that knowledge of food science can replace your need for willpower, and that wasn’t possible until recently because the knowledge didn’t exist. So consider a diet that involves consuming knowledge first. You’ll know you have enough knowledge the first time you consciously eliminate a food craving you’ve had all your life.*

Good luck!

——————————

Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com     
Author of this book 
Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily
Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays

  *That’s a hypnosis trick I just did for you. It’s a trigger for the future.

If you needed to describe the human mind to aliens from another planet, what would be the simplest way to do it? Assume the aliens speak English.

I would tell the aliens that humans form strong bonds with sports teams and enthusiastically cheer for victory. Then I would walk away, done. The aliens, having learned all there is to know about humans, get back in their spacecraft and continue their search for intelligent life.

In my youth, I rooted for my local sports teams. As I matured, I learned that life is just particles bumping into each other according to the rules of physics. What we observe with our five senses is nothing more than the result of all that particle activity. Once that understanding sunk in, I could no longer feel any emotion about the fate of one team versus another. In the universe, shit happens, and sometimes humans are wearing matching uniforms when it does. Why would that excite me?

I think the answer lies in the illusion of free will.

If you believe humans have free will then it makes sense to see a sporting event as a battle of wills. And maybe, just maybe, your mental concentration and inspirational rooting from home is helping things along. If you believe in free will it is not a stretch to believe that your free will flies from your head into the cloud and interacts with the “will to win” of your favorite team and somehow strengthens it. Thus, you, the fan, are important to the winning process. I can see how that would be exciting.

But if you are scientific-minded, and see no evidence of this thing called free will, you probably see sports as the sum of particles bumping around. It’s hard to root for that.

I’m also puzzled by the concept of loving a specific team. A professional sports team is a legal entity with assets that change every year. If the assets change (mostly the players) but you still love your team the same, you’re actually rooting for an artificial corporate entity formed for tax and legal purposes. Try explaining that to your aliens.

Perhaps you love your local teams because they are local, so you have something in common and they are representing for you. But realistically, your team is comprised of a bunch of freakish multimillionaires that came from other places. And the minute their contracts expire they are probably gone.

I love playing sports because it jacks up my body chemistry, gives me a cardio workout, has social benefits, and more. But watching other people play sports doesn’t entertain me. The exception is major tennis matches, but I watch those more to observe techniques I can borrow.

This all leads me to wonder if there is a strong correlation between religious belief and rooting for a sports team. Both actions require a special kind of belief in free will, and not all of us have that.

So I put the question to you, my blog readers. On a scale from 1 to 10, where do you rank in terms of religious belief and enjoyment of watching sports?

Here’s me:

Religious belief: 0
Enjoy watching sports: 2

How about you?

——————————

Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com    
Author of the best book in the history of humanity
Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily
Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays

There has been a lot of research on willpower in recent years. The gist of it is that willpower is a limited resource during any given day, so if you use your willpower resisting one temptation you might not have enough to resist the next.

I don’t know about you, but my biggest drain on willpower during any given day is my iPhone 6. It calls to me continuously during the day. Often I need to be focusing on something more important, or it would be socially impolite to check my text messages, or I am driving and it would be dangerous. These situations come up all day long. It’s mentally exhausting. The conversation in my head goes like this: “Look at phone. DON’T LOOK AT PHONE! Look at phone. DON’T LOOK AT PHONE!” And so on to infinity. The research on habit formation suggests that anyone with a smartphone is having the same experience because the “rewards” of checking your phone are unpredictable, and unpredictable rewards create addiction circuitry in your brain.

Life had enough temptations before smartphones were invented. Personally, my daily willpower drain feels as if it is 100% higher than it was pre-smartphone.

If my hypothesis is correct, smartphone users should have higher obesity rates, drug dependence, spouse abuse, and infidelity rates than non-smartphone users all other things being equal.

I have no data to support my hypothesis, but it is built on fairly solid assumptions:

1. Willpower is a finite resource.
2. The reward from checking your phone is unpredictable and creates addiction/habit circuitry in your brain.
3. Resisting your smartphone addiction all day requires willpower.
4. You need willpower to resist unhealthy choices.

I’m pro-technology and I don’t suggest we return to an agrarian civilization. But am I wrong that smartphones are killing us?

——————————

Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com     
Author of this book 
Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily
Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays

Here’s a short video of Katie Curic interviewing an entrepreneur with a device like the one I described a few posts ago to prevent teens from driving and texting.

I propose a constitutional amendment to allow Bill Gates to become dictator of the United States for one year. The only exception to his power would be control of the military. The civilian president along with Congress would still control military actions and policies. That should prevent any temporary dictators from consolidating power and becoming permanent.

During Bill Gates’ one year run as dictator he could create any laws he wished, change national priorities any way he liked, and generally fix things without a lot of political friction. He could even tweak the Constitution while he’s in power.

At the end of Gates’ one-year reign, the returning civilian government could – if they want – reverse any of his laws, but doing so would be politically perilous because Bill is likely to have good reasons for what he did. We can depend on political timidity and inertia to keep most of our dictator’s laws on the books after he leaves.

I picked Bill Gates for this example because I’m not entirely sure he has a political leaning. He’s probably a robot from the future. And at this point I think he has removed all doubt about whether his motives are pure. These days he obviously isn’t in it for the money. And we would expect him to bring a high degree of rational thought to any decision. What more do we want?

I deal with lots of odd legal contracts in my career, ranging from licensing to publishing to public appearances and more. The default solution to almost every contract issue is to make the term short. The shorter the term, the less likely something will go wrong that can’t be fixed. I’m using the same idea for the dictator concept. A permanent dictator would be the worst system in the world because power eventually corrupts even the nicest human. But a one-year term for our dictator removes most of the potential problems. As long as the dictator doesn’t control the police, military, or intelligence services, he or she can’t cause too much trouble in a year.

Overall, I like our “sticky” political system with its perpetual gridlock because that means only the most important issues become laws. But every ten years or so, we probably need a temporary dictator to clean out our political closets and get some useful things done.

If you look at the United States as a system, or a big machine, it is lumbering along with nothing but basic maintenance. We have a political system that was designed during the age of horse-drawn carriages and it no longer fits the times. (Or at least it ignores the opportunities of the Internet age.) We need a system that occasionally rebuilds the entire engine of democracy as opposed to keeping the old system dusted and oiled for eternity.

I think the temporary dictator system could be a huge economic advantage over our international rivals. Their systems would either be Putin-like dictatorships that self-destruct in the dictator’s lifetime or bloated democracy-inspired systems that are gridlocked beyond usefulness. Our hybrid system with its temporary dictatorship every ten years could be the best system of all.

What do you think?

—————————————

Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com     
Author of this book 
Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily
Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays

Last year I rejoined the ranks of the spouse-free. Things sure changed since the last time I was single.

For starters, it is not necessary for men to ask women for revealing selfies. Those photos just start showing up on your phone after you exchange numbers. A revealing selfie in 2014 is essentially just a digital business card for your dating life.

I have also discovered that the most-used characters on my phone keyboard are emoticons. When single people text each other, every sentence has to end with an exclamation mark or a smiley emoticon or else it looks like you lost interest since the last time you texted thirty seconds ago.

For the most part, texting is just a means of feeling connected at a distance. The content isn’t terribly important. But the pauses between text messages mean A LOT. Single people monitor the pauses between text replies to decipher real meaning in the content. For example, if I text “I really enjoyed our time together,” the real message is contained in the timing of the message not the content. If the text is sent while one person is still driving home from a date, that means you feel a strong connection. But if I text something nice and have to wait seven hours for a reply, the seven-hour wait is the message, not the content of the reply.

Single people in 2014 frequently break up with each other by text, but the words are only the punctuation at the end of the break up. The actual break-up happens with what is called “the taper.” The taper is when you are texting someone at a predictable rate, such as several times per day, and you gradually reduce your texting to one message every third day. That’s the taper, and it tells the other person your interest has tapered too.

But here’s my biggest insight about the single world: Expectations.

I have observed two approaches to dating. One approach involves creating a checklist of expectations that you have for your next romantic partner. You might want a minimum height, a good job, geographic proximity, the same travel preferences, and on and on and on.

Then you find out that no one on the planet fits your criteria. So you have to make hard decisions about which items on the checklist you want to give up on. And if you do give up on those items, you probably resent your partner forever or try to change him/her to conform to the checklist. And that is doomed to fail.

The long checklist is a modern dating problem. Two-hundred years ago, if you and your romantic partner both liked square dancing, you had everything in common. The checklist looked like this:

1. Are you alive?
2. Do you like square dancing?

Today the checklist for a romantic partner is 25-items long. Literally no one meets the requirements of anyone else’s checklist. So setting expectations before searching for a romantic match is doomed to fail. And the checklist approach is the primary method that most people are using. It is no wonder that 70% of marriages are unhappy

Let’s call the 25-item checklist a “goals” approach to dating.

The other approach to life is the “no expectations” method I am trying to cultivate.  This is more of a system than a goal. The idea is that you arrange your life so you meet lots of people and you put no expectations on any of them. If I meet someone with a 4.5 tennis level and lots of free time, perhaps I have a new tennis partner. If we click on some other level, that’s great too. No expectations.

It is too early to say if my systems approach is successful. But the first year or so have been wonderful. I’m never stressed or disappointed. Everything pleasant that happens to me feels like a gift.

Stress is essentially the gap between what you optimistically expect to happen and what actually does. That means you can eliminate stress either by changing your expectations or by changing what actually happens. Most people are trapped in a doomed loop of wishful thinking that our romantic partners will change their basic nature and start conforming to our unrealistic expectations if only we complain long enough. For comparison, here’s how my model of no-expectations works:

Other Person: Do you want a hug?

Me: Yes

That’s the beginning and end of my expectations. Or at least I want it to be. It isn’t easy to release expectations, but I hold it as an ideal.

To be fair, if kids are part of the equation you probably do need a checklist before getting involved. So the no-expectations system isn’t for every situation. I’ll let you know how it works for me.

—————————————————————————

Scott Adams
Co-founder of CalendarTree.com     
Author of this book  (about systems versus goals)
Twitter Dilbert: @Dilbert_Daily
Twitter for Scott: @ScottAdamsSays