“To know what question one should, reasonably, ask is already a great and necessary proof of one’s sagacity and insight. For if the question is in itself absurd and demands answers that are unnecessary, then it not only embarrasses the person raising it, but sometimes has the further disadvantage of misleading the incautious listener: it may prompt him to give absurd answers and to provide us with the ridiculous spectacle where (as the ancients said) one person milks the ram while the other holds a sieve underneath.”
I don’t think that this would be so highly rated were it in the regular quotes thread. I think this is the type of thing it is helpful to see without seeing the author first, even though it was guessable.
By way of comparison, here’s a Kant quote that I posted in a normal quote thread. Actually, I’d say that my quote was pretty close to mjcurzi’s along a lot of axes, including length, tone, vividness of imagery, and agreement with LW conventional wisdom.
At the moment, mjcurzi’s quote and mine have a similar number of votes: 15 for mjcurzi’s and 16 for mine.
Source
Is it bad that I called it once the second sentence started wearing on and on and on …?
I don’t think that this would be so highly rated were it in the regular quotes thread. I think this is the type of thing it is helpful to see without seeing the author first, even though it was guessable.
By way of comparison, here’s a Kant quote that I posted in a normal quote thread. Actually, I’d say that my quote was pretty close to mjcurzi’s along a lot of axes, including length, tone, vividness of imagery, and agreement with LW conventional wisdom.
At the moment, mjcurzi’s quote and mine have a similar number of votes: 15 for mjcurzi’s and 16 for mine.