I’m madder than a Baby Boomer using the self-checkout machine at the supermarket!

The story begins when Scott Adams-creator of the Dilbert comic strip- had a little Twitter catfight with yours truly.

He said I-and others like me who critiqued him for making incorrect predictions about COVID– were hallucinating and had cognitive dissonance.

Why would the creator of the Dilbert cartoons say such things about little ol’ me? Because I Tweeted him this observation from Ted Beale’s website, that’s why:

It has been interesting over the last month to watch the curious saga of Scott Adams on Twitter. He has gone from being a bog standard normie to very nearly crossing the bridge to covid enlightenment, only to draw back from the brink and instead go full on Branch Covidian. Of course, to save face for how he and others have been so wrong so often while a bunch of anonymous right wingers on social media have been right, Scott has taken to portraying himself as merely “doubting the doubters,” casting their correct predictions as mere luck, a case of the crowd occasionally getting something right entirely by accident.

Underlying all of this is Scott’s abiding faith in “experts,” and his corresponding incredulousness that non-experts, social media anons and the like, could have been right when the experts were wrong. It must be a fluke. Those who don’t think so are just engaging in confirmation bias, just”coping” (with what, being right when the experts were wrong?). Surely their rightness isn’t because they had access to better information or had better instincts than the experts, that’s impossible! All of this is even more ironic because Scott’s whole brand as expressed in his books and in his Dilbert comic strip is that those in positions of authority rarely know what is going on and the little guy drones in the trenches are the ones who really make things work.

What this unmasks, I suspect, is ultimately that he is a product of his generation and cannot escape its assumptions, even when he tries to. The intellectual underpinnings for Boomers were formed when most of America’s institutions still actually worked as advertised. Their generation is used to assuming that things like government agencies and large corporations fundamentally operate for the good of those who they supposedly serve. This creates a normalcy bias that leads to undue trust being granted to them. Boomers have a great deal of difficulty coming to grips with the increasing institutional decay and dysfunctionality that characterizes modern America.

Scott then says this in response to my tweet: Compare my actual Covid prediction record (the best in the nation). with the interpretation below and spot the cognitive dissonance tells. 

It’s weirdly fascinating to see how easily people hallucinate entirely different lives for me. 

So I responded with: The voices in my head were telling me that Mr. Adams might have made a mistake. But it was all a hallucination, after all. What a twist! I’m glad he set me straight–this cognitive dissonance is getting in the way of me being a master persuader & predictor, goshdarnit 

There was more fun to be had with his followers–but I won’t bore you with those details.

I will say that the point about Boomers is accurate: They process information in a way that gives a lot of weight to “experts” and people in authority.

I’m not upset about this at all. In fact, I use it to my advantage when writing ads in the alternative health niche. The target audience for the health products I write for are people between 50 to 70 years old—that is prime Baby Boomer territory.

Any, I’d like to hear about your experiences in selling to Baby Boomers. What patterns have you found that work with this demographic?

Feel free to write me back & let me know

P.S. My book shows business owners and entrepreneurs the exact steps for using creativity to make lots of money. It costs around $30 everywhere else, but if you join my daily email list by clicking the link below, you can have a digital copy for free.

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