Scott Adams once again demonstrates his pointy-headed stupidity with an appallingly irrational rationalization of his sock puppetry. He's got some new excuses, I will give him that.
Guess what, he may have been naughty, but at least he's not a mass murderer.
On the scale of immoral behavior, where genocide is at the top, and wearing Spanx is near the bottom, posting comments under an alias to clear up harmful misconceptions is about one level worse than Spanx.
Great. So if ever I'm caught kicking a puppy or lying on the internet, all I need to do is explain that I didn't kill six million Jews, so you can all forgive me. Of course, I don't think anyone accused Adams of genocide or suggested that he needed to be locked up for life like a Hannibal Lecter, so that's all rather irrelevant.
His other excuse is that he needed to create a sock puppet to correct misinformation about himself.
The messenger with a strong self-interest is automatically non-credible, and should be. There are some types of information that can only be communicated by an unbiased messenger. And the most unbiased messenger in the world is one that is imaginary, such as my invisible friend, PlannedChaos.
There is no such thing as an unbiased messenger, but we can still value independent input. The problem with a sock puppet is that it is an effort to create an illusion of independence and less bias, but we know it isn't — that is, we know it if we're a little smarter than Scott Adams. PlannedChaos, his pseudonym, is even less trustworthy and credible than Scott Adams himself because PlannedChaos has the same biases as Scott Adams, but is unconstrained by the consequences to his reputation.
Not that Adams seems particularly concerned about his reputation anyway—I think he has fully embraced his inner douchebag and is now simply happy to get people to look at him.
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