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GabrielDuquette comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong
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lanyard
"Two roads diverged in a wood. I took the one less traveled by, and had to eat bugs until the park rangers rescued me."
Duplicate.
Wasn't that poem sarcastic anyway? Until the last stanza, the poem says how the roads were really identical in all particulars -- and in the last stanza the narrator admits that he will be describing this choice falsely in the future.
That's not how I read it. There's no particular difference between the two roads, so far as Frost can tell at the point of divergence, but they're still different roads and lead by different routes to different places, and he expects that years from now he'll look back and see (or guess?) that it did indeed make a big difference which one he took.
He expects that years from now he'll look back and claim it made a big difference. He says he will also claim it was the road less traveled by, for all that the passing there had worn them the same and so forth. It may well make a big difference, but of what nature no-one knows.
Yes, I understand that what the poem says is that he'll say it made a big difference, rather than that it did. But there's a difference between not saying it's a real difference and saying it's not a real difference; it seems to me that the former is what Frost does and the latter is what ArisKatsaris says he does.
(My reading of the to-ing and fro-ing about whether the road is "less traveled by" is that the speaker's initial impression is that one path is somewhat untrodden, and he picks it on those grounds; on reflection he's not sure it's actually any less trodden than the other, but his intention was to take the less-travelled road; and later on he expects to adopt the shorthand of saying that he picked the less-travelled one. I don't see that any actual dishonesty is intended, though perhaps a certain lack of precision.)