Vaniver comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Alejandro1 03 August 2012 03:33PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (426)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vaniver 12 August 2012 12:13:53AM 5 points [-]

The Chesterton version looks like it was designed to poke the older (and in my opinion better) advice from Lord Chesterfield:

Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.

Or, rephrased as Simon did:

Anything worth doing is worth doing well.

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.)

Comment author: gwern 12 August 2012 12:17:10AM *  8 points [-]

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...

Comment author: arundelo 12 August 2012 01:14:19AM 1 point [-]

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.