Pangloss, who was as inquisitive as he was argumentative, asked the old man what the name of the strangled Mufti was. ‘I don’t know,’ answered the worthy man, ‘and I have never known the name of any Mufti, nor of any Vizier. I have no idea what you’re talking about; my general view is that people who meddle with politics usually meet a miserable end, and indeed they deserve to. I never bother with what is going on in Constantinople; I only worry about sending the fruits of the garden which I cultivate off to be sold there.’ Having said these words, he invited the strangers into his house; his…
> instead of referring to some random story that is not relevant Absolutely relevant, by analogy. Pangloss (the character from Candide) is presented as a counter-argument to an overly optimistic view of the world. Pangloss's overly optimistic view dismisses all evidence that this is an imperfect world based on a nebulous and unprovable idea that the world is already as good as it can be. hjtkfkfmr's overly optimistic view dismisses all evidence that this is an inefficient market based on a nebulous and unprovable idea that the market is already as efficient as it can be. > suggest why it…
In Voltaire's "Candide", there is a character who insists that this is the best of all possible worlds. Every hurt you have ever felt, every illness and death anyone has experienced, everything is exactly as it should be. That neither humans nor God could improve upon the world as it is, because any change would make things worse somewhere else. As the story shows more and more tragedies, natural disasters, wars, and famines, this character needs to come up with increasingly convoluted explanations for how those can possibly exist in the best of all possible worlds. The reader sees just…
> That finding one woman anything less than immediately perfect will cut me off from all the small, lovely moments I have had with women across the world in my life. You had those moments. You could keep trying to chase that bouncing between different partners going forward, but consider: a) more women exit the dating market with age (especially the good ones), b) there is a richness of experience also to be found with a devoted lifelong partner which can't be had with a mere fling. As time goes on, your odds of success are harsher either way, risking being alone much of the time. But in…
Not sure this kind of comparison is meaningful. Many modern books when I read them, I'm immersed into the world that is created, sometimes not wanting them to end. Never felt like that with Shakespeare. Another book I think that highlights this difference is Voltaire's candide, such a fast paced fantastic story, but it doesn't draw you in. But a fast paced dan brown book tends to draw me in way more than Voltaire did. But Candide is a far far cleverer book I think with a lot of things to think about. Shakespeare seems similar, great storylines with fantastic prose but just doesn't draw…
Thank you for the valuable and constructive comment! I just didn't feel like discussing the satire angle was very interesting! In the article: > In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true2. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct. I think this section makes it very clear that in one sense, it's a…
See also the current HR story on Intel [1]. >biggest and most well funded dev team was the one that worked on Revenue Cycle > no incentive to... I am working hard to not build and fuel a fully loaded Boeing 787 into high-earth orbit and crash land it on the not-my-problem, told'ya, it's all corrupt-all-the-time, MONEY! money-is-the-measurement-of-all-things, it's bad-here-so-I-left city center fecklessness of it all. Toyota at its peek performance (say late 1980s) was making king-kong sized money top and bottom line. No manager would ever say their only incentive or even primary care is…
Sure, needing to deal with the question at all is a result of a certain set of cosmological and metaphysical assumptions—but it happens to be a problem that a ton of Western philosophers dealt with, over the years, because they were starting from such a set of assumptions, and so did feel a need to address it, so if you're reading (or reading about) Western philosophy—especially before the 20th century—you're gonna see a lot of it. In Leibniz' case, his work on that problem just happens to be probably his second-most-famous work at all, and better-known than most such efforts, even into our…
Similar phrases have been in circulation since at least the 1700s including a similar passage in Voltaire's Candide: "But in this country it is good to kill an Admiral from time to time to encourage the others." In 1863 the words of Voltaire were alluded to in a memoir by Lord William Pitt Lennox who described the hazing experienced by pupils at the Westminster School in England: "...of having a flogging, to encourage the others, as a Frenchman said of the execution of Admiral Byng." The first known reference to the specific wording "...until morale improves" dates to a 1961 US Navy…
JohnSully says: "Deescalation is not emotionally satisfying but it does [sometimes] work." FTFY but you may not agree. JohnSully, you are an optimist. As in "this is the best of all possible worlds." -the early Candide in Voltaire's Candide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds#Cr... Like the older Candide I am a pessimist and my personal experience is that: a)Roughly a third of people are either simply nuts (insane, partially schizophrenic, manic-depressive, etc.), have significant character flaws (greed, dishonesty, vice, short temper, addiction, etc.), hold…