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gwern comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong
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--Herbert Simon (quoted by Pat Langley)
Including artificial intelligence? ;-)
The Chesterton version looks like it was designed to poke the older (and in my opinion better) advice from Lord Chesterfield:
Or, rephrased as Simon did:
I strongly recommend his letters to his son. They contain quite a bit of great advice- as well as politics and health and so on. As it was private advice given to an heir, most of it is fully sound.
(In fact, it's been a while. I probably ought to find my copy and give it another read.)
Yeah, they're on my reading list. My dad used to say that a lot, but I always said the truer version was 'Anything not worth doing is not worth doing well', since he was usually using it about worthless yardwork...
Ah, I was gonna mention this. Didn't know it was from Chesterfield.
I think there'd be more musicians (a good thing IMO) if more people took Chesterton's advice.
A favorite of mine, but according to Wikiquote G.K. Chesterton said it first, in chapter 14 of What's Wrong With The World:
I like Simon's version better: it flows without the awkward pause for the comma.
Yep, it seems that often epigrams are made more epigrammatic by the open-source process of people misquoting them. I went looking up what I thought was another example of this, but Wiktionary calls it "[l]ikely traditional" (though the only other citation is roughly contemporary with Maslow).
Memetics in action - survival of the most epigrammatic!