gwern comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: katydee 02 January 2013 05:23PM

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Comment author: elspood 06 January 2013 09:29:08AM *  1 point [-]

BART: It's weird, Lis: I miss him as a friend, but I miss him even more as an enemy.
LISA: I think you need Skinner, Bart. Everybody needs a nemesis. Sherlock Holmes had his Dr. Moriarty, Mountain Dew has its Mellow Yellow, even Maggie has that baby with the one eyebrow.

Everyone may need a nemesis, but while Holmes had a distinct character all his own and thus used Dr. Moriarty simply to test formidable skills, Bart actually seems to create or define himself precisely in opposition to authority, as the other to authority, and not as some identifiable character in his own right.

- Mark T. Conrad, "Thus Spake Bart: On Nietzche and the Virtues of Being Bad", The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'Oh of Homer

Comment author: gwern 26 January 2013 04:56:14AM 1 point [-]

That's not a bad essay (BTW, essays should be in quote marks, and the book itself, The Simpsons and Philosophy, in italics), but I don't think the quote is very interesting in isolation without any of the examples or comparisons.

Comment author: elspood 29 January 2013 01:02:45AM *  2 points [-]

Edited, thanks for the style correction.

I suspect you're probably right that more examples makes this more interesting, given the lack of upvotes. In fact, I probably found the quote relevant mostly because it more or less summed up the experience of my OWN life at the time I read it years ago.

I spent much of my youth being contrarian for contradiction's sake, and thinking myself to be revolutionary or somehow different from those who just joined the cliques and conformed, or blindly followed their parents, or any other authority.

When I realized that defining myself against social norms, or my parents, or society was really fundamentally no different from blind conformity, only then was I free to figure out who I really was and wanted to be. Probably related: this quote.

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