Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
In that case Unix was misdesigned. Proper design stops its users from doing stupid things and enables them to do clever things. It makes the right thing obvious and easy and the wrong thing difficult to impossible.
When the right thing can be made obvious and easy, it generally does so. It also makes the wrong thing difficult. However, short of giving it AI, there is no way for Unix to tell a clever thing from a wrong thing, so it lets you do both, but only if you're logged in as root.