[cm2187]

Scott Adams claims that about 30% of people in a society just do not get humour / satire and take things at the first degree, particularly if it reinforces their convictions.

If it is true, and I think he may have a point, there would be some value in labelling humour or satire as such. It sounds ridiculous, but like it is ridiculous to have a label “not suitable for your pets” on a microwave!

[chrisseaton]

> Scott Adams claims that about 30% of people in a society just do not get humour / satire

Satire, snark, and sarcasm have to be least effective way you could possibly choose to communicate. You are absolutely begging to be misunderstood and misquoted, either genuinely or maliciously, and then it's nigh on impossible to explain yourself as all your excuses just sound like like it-was-a-prank-bro.

Another huge problem is that satire is often used as cover for telling not-quite-truths. I listen to satirical radio programmes (we have a lot of those in the UK) and sometimes I think they're really bending the truth quite a bit to get the joke and their criticism isn't really fair. That'd be fine if these people weren't simultaneously actual political activists who the next night are saying they're making genuine political arguments, and if people didn't think it's-funny-because-it's-true. I'm pretty sure some of them do satire just to get away with attacking without having to back any of it up, and so they can absolve themselves from responsibility when challenged.

Quite often, I think really I'm just listening to some nasty bullies.

All-in-all, I think satire is a bit toxic for everyone involved.

[andybak]

Aren't all the reasons you state, reasons why satire, snark, and sarcasm are actually incredibly effective ways to communicate?

Not many people have the fortitude to resist their charms or the self-awareness to police themselves indefinitely. I know I don't.

[notacoward]

Were you intending to demonstrate self-satire, or was it an accident? _A Modest Proposal_ alone should make the case for the effectiveness of satire, which is closely related to the even more time-honored reductio ad absurdum. The problem is that there's a lot of bad satire, and false satire, but that's a problem with almost every form of speech/writing that's not completely dry, flat, and colorless. It's true of analogy, allegory, metaphor, hyperbole (like yours when you say "least effective way possible"), poetry, etc. They're all abused. They're all prone to misunderstanding. Effective communication is hard. Don't mistake personal preference for a general rule, or present it as such.

[chrisseaton]

I think satire is different from just being ineffective, in that it actively opens yourself up to malicious mis-interpretation. Its failure mode isn't just your audience being confused or missing the point.

Like the comedian in the UK who said she wanted to throw battery acid at politicians. It was (probably 90%) satire. But when challenged if she said she thought you should throw battery acid all she can say is yes with a weak-sounding defence of 'but it was just a prank.'

[leftyted]

Aren't you proving his point?

Scott Adams became world famous writing a cartoon full of snark and satire. These are perfectly valid ways of communicating and in fact they make up a significant chunk of human communication.

Reading comments like yours is somewhat bewildering to me. It seems like you're pushing philistinism as a virtue.

[ravenstine]

This has not been my experience. People, especially the ones these days, are bored to tears by facts. They don't care.

However, by pointing out absurdity in a way that invokes a positive state of being, welled crafted humor can not only get the point across more efficiently but propagate more effectively if people choose to retell the joke.

[INGELRII]

Satire is effective influencing method. The additional benefit is avoiding the requirement for reliability and responsibility because it's not real journalism.

In the US The Daily Show established satirical ha-ha as effective method to deliver news and discuss politics for younger generations.

It started as pure satire but turned into real institution people used to learn about the world. The spinoffs like The Colbert Report and related shows from people who worked in the show is impressive: The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn , Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The Break with Michelle Wolf and Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj all continue using similar framework.

In the right the effective satire seems to come mainly in the form of internet trolls. It's more hostile, less intellectual. It's for people who see hostility as funny. Despite being very crude, this kind of satire can have huge influence.

[raverbashing]

True, it's easy being cynical at everything and treating everything with irony and contempt (which would be most your latter example)

I think the satirical shows do a better job of being more subtle and not just being cynical at everything

[probably_wrong]

I'm glad you brought this specific quote from this specific author, because to me it presents some very interesting questions.

On one hand, I used to follow Scott Adams' blog when he made that assertion and a couple other ones. His point, if I remember correctly, boiled down to "I'm going to present an obviously wrong idea, argue in favor of it, and see where it takes us". In this context, his assertion about people not "getting" humor referred to people taking his hypotheticals for a fact even though he clearly labeled them as "but what if...?". The example that comes to mind is when he argued "What if we assumed that men are rapists by nature, and modeled society around this fact?" and people attacked him for "affirming" that all men are rapists.

On the other hand, he has become one of the stronger Trump supporters I've ever seen (which is not necessarily bad), pointing out how everything he does is a great calculated move to what I consider a delusional extent (which is kind of bad - his POV currently seems to be "by asking Ukraine to investigate his opponent, Trump was doing the country a service"). By reading his blog, I got more and more the feeling that his "what if" questions were not an academic thought exercise, but rather a way to push some toxic beliefs he holds while having the plausible deniability of "it's just a hypotetical".

So my point being: this quote by Scott Adams can go both ways. Maybe he's right and humans are very bad at understanding humor and/or satire, and my two points are in no way related. But I wouldn't rule out the other possibility: that humans are actually very good at spotting what's behind the mask, and that those 30% of people are those who didn't fall for his trick and rightfully called him out for it.

[cm2187]

I can't help thinking that his support for Trump is more like an intellectual challenge than any personal convictions. He is quite open on the fact that he disagrees with much of his policy. But his view on the persuasion aspect is interesting.

[richardwhiuk]

If you want to hold an opinion which is viewed by society as dangerous, presenting as just a hypothetical, might allow you to reduce your criticism, while still openly stating it.

Given all opinions are based around what you would do in a hypothetical circumstance, the limits should be pretty low.

Also, there's a strong difference between satire and hypothetically asserting that rape is innate.

[MaysonL]

Or as Lord Buckley always said "If you must tell the truth, be sure to leave them laughing!".

[jerrre]

I'm already looking forward to serious articles that are going to be ironically labeled as satire (obviously again misunderstood by some percentage of the population)

[MaysonL]

As opposed to the Onion articles which are confusingly close to actual news. [or are merely prescient]

[rjf72]

For what it's worth this is new, and intentional. In 2016 Haim Saban, Clinton's top financial supporter, purchased The Onion and immediately transitioned it to an outlet for propaganda under the guise of satire. [1] They rapidly went from running articles like 'Hillary Clinton Tries To Woo Voters By Rescinding Candidacy' [2] to "Why Don't People Like Hillary Clinton?" [3] with reasons such as suggesting in allusion to her being a woman (twice), because she's smart, or verbatim because she "Suffers from unfortunate speech impediment of sounding like a capable, self-possessed woman".

[1] - https://theintercept.com/2016/01/26/ha-ha-hillary-clintons-t...

[2] - https://politics.theonion.com/hillary-clinton-tries-to-woo-v...

[3] - https://politics.theonion.com/why-don-t-people-like-hillary-...

[ForHackernews]

Scott Adams also claimed that women are treated with deference for the same reason children and mentally handicapped people are[0], so you'll have to forgive me for not giving too much credence to his unsourced statistics about the incompetence of a large fraction of humanity.

[0] https://jezebel.com/dilbert-creator-deletes-misogynist-rant-...

[ravenstine]

Scott Adams is a commentator and humorist, not a researcher or academic. Most reasonable people don't expect others in such a position to cite statistics and evidence, just as we don't shout "citation needed" every time a comedian makes a joke and doesn't mention a study proving their punchline is indeed funny because it's true.

Even if Scott Adams wrote something legitimately offensive, that article, like everything on Jezebel, has an obvious agenda and uses language that rip-snorts while tip toeing around the points Scott was making. If anything, it's made me more sympathetic to him because the obviously bigoted author can't stand the fact that a "white male" said something contrary to the women-are-wonderful stereotype.

[chapium]

Then maybe he shouldn't be using made up statistics to reinforce his arguments. He can't just spout bullshit and be immune to criticism because he's not a true "x".

[ravenstine]

I'm not saying that he's immune to criticism or that he's even right. I'm saying that I don't find Adams using "unsourced statistics" to be a compelling reason to believe that he's wrong, and it's generally lazy argumentation when people criticize non-academic public figures for not providing statistics for the things that they say. It's really better to just argue for exactly why Scott Adams is wrong. Sure, proving a falsehood is more difficult than making falsehoods and people shouldn't be making false statements in the first place, but that's the way of the world.

In the case of Scott Adams, it's especially not fair to say that he's wrong without actually providing a reason why because, as a person who has been writing humorous comic strips for decades, he's in a position to provide his intuition as to how many people don't understand humor. Whether his belief is actually correct is a matter for discussion. It might be one thing if Joe Dirt off the street was shouting that 30% of people don't understand humor, but it's not unreasonable for someone who writes humor for a living to provide his judgment on how people respond to humor. Scott Adams doesn't write the funniest stuff in the world, but at least give the guy some credit for his experience instead of just pointing out that he doesn't have proof.

[ramblerman]

Go after the argument please. This attempted character assassination is petty and weak.

[dTal]

They did go after the argument. The argument was an appeal to authority, and they dismissed the authority with evidence.

When the statement is as outlandish as "30% of people don't understand humor", the burden of proof lies squarely with the person making the claim.

[ForHackernews]

An argument only holds if its premises are true. "Scott Adams claims X" is very weak evidence for X. He's a cartoonist with a history of making flimsy, self-flattering pronouncements.

Let's see some actual research supporting the notion that a third of the population reads and interprets satirical content as straight fact.

[nosianu2]

You write

> Let's see some actual research

which I find ironic given that you present your personal opinion about that person as if it were a fact. Maybe we should all start cleaning up in front of our own doors first whenever we feel an urge to not criticize (which would be okay) to bad-mouth other people.

In addition, you also do exactly what the comment you replied to ask you not to, seemingly without having given its content any thought whatsoever.

More, Scott Adams didn't say anything here. You merely read a comment from someone making a claim about what he said, in a short sentence. So you don't even have anything from the person you talk about himself. On top of that that claim would not be worth any severe criticism in the given context. Even if it were shown to be wrong, so what? It does not seem to me like anything substantial hinges on it, even if you took it as just a tongue in cheek kind of comment. Anecdotal evidence from reading online forums and discussions seem to indicate that the described phenomenon indeed exists, how many people are involved and if it's always the same ones or not don't seem to me to be of great importance since no quantitative predictions are involved.

[ForHackernews]

> Even if it were shown to be wrong, so what?

Indeed. Who cares whether anything is true or not when discussing policy on websites with billions of users? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[nosianu2]

Why do you ignore what I actually wrote? Wouldn't discussions be much better if you actually responded to what other people actually say? Given that you want truth, it's quite ironic that you yourself don't seem to be quite flexible.