From: Jerry Mitchell (cosmicv@tampabay.rr.com)
Date: Sat Jan 26 2002 - 14:32:17 MST
> Gordon Worley wrote:
> >
> > Not to be rude, but this fascination with spiting the norm
> to spite it
> > seems to be pretty adolescent behavior. If I'm going to take on the
> > world, I make sure that I've got a damn good reason first.
>
> Or as I once said to a friend of my little brother's, when said friend
> wanted to make arbitrary changes to the rule of some game (I
> forget what)
> in order to "make it interesting":
>
> "Don't violate rules for the sake of violating them. If you
> violate only
> those rules for which you have a vastly superior alternative, you will
> still have more than enough trouble to last you the rest of
> your life."
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
> Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Also, taking the opposing view of the majority allows the majority to
control your view in effect. Take a position you find logically correct and
damn the numbers.
I had a friend growing up that liked to dye his hair blue, wear typical
counter-culture clothing, etc... I'm sure he thought he was being quite the
renegade and individual. Then one night we went to a club that could be
deemed "alternative" and I made the comment to him "hey, looks like your the
mainstream one and I'm the individual here as I'm the only one without a
leather jacket". This Zen moment taught him (and me) that there are bigger
fish to fry then fighting the fashion police and jumping on particular
cultural bandwagons (anyone up for whale saving, their so cute after all?).
Jerry Mitchell
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