It is perhaps understandable why people in the public eye might be tempted to defend themselves this way, but it’s never a good idea:
How many people think I’m actually Scott Adams writing about myself in third person?
posted by plannedchaos at 9:21 AM on April 15 [1 favorite]I am Scott Adams.
posted by plannedchaos at 11:09 AM on April 15 [20 favorites]And just to be clear that this isn’t some weird joke, yes, he is.
Scott, if you wanted to sign up for Metafilter to defend your writing, that would have been fine. If you wanted to sign up for Metafilter and be incognito as just another user, that’d be fine too. Doing both simultaneously isn’t; pretending to be a third party and high-fiving yourself by proxy is a pretty sketchy move and a serious violation of general community expectations about identity management around here.
I appreciate you fessing up at this point, but I’d sure rather it hadn’t happened at all. It’s just incredibly disappointing to watch play out.
posted by cortex at 11:16 AM on April 15 [131 favorites]
I like both Scott and his work, but I would absolutely have advised him against taking this tactic. If he’d defended himself openly, many of the people on the site would likely have been thrilled that he was communicating directly with them. As it stands, well, it’s just doesn’t look good.
And for the record, I do not engage in sockpuppetry here. I realize that some of my critics do occasionally look so spectacularly stupid that suspicions I am setting up strawmen in order to knock them down are entirely understandable. But unfortunately, the fact is that both the critics and the arguments are genuine.
Anyhow, I suspect most of the Dread Ilk recognize that I am too arrogant to be so concerned about whether anyone agrees with me or not that I would resort to a real appeal to public opinion, let alone a fake one.