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rule_and_line comments on Rationality Quotes October 2013 - Less Wrong
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-- Oliver Cromwell
Previously posted two years ago. I'm curious if some things bear repeating. Is there any accepted timeframe for duplicates?
Currently, no. It seems worthwhile to keep old quotes visible, but I suspect that would be better accomplished by automatically generating a database of rationality quotes from these threads (like DanielVarga's best of collections), and then displaying a random one on each LW page with frequency related to the number of upvotes they received, say. I don't think that duplicating quotes in quote threads is a good idea, because this focuses effort on finding new quotes and material to incorporate into a growing body of knowledge rather than rehashing previously found knowledge.
I endorse (with the possibly-expected caveat about Wilson score ranking).
Unfortunately, I can't (don't know how to?) hack the LW backend. Is that something I can look into?
This and this are the primary resources I am aware of, as well as the Google Code page. I recommend contacting someone personally involved for more as well as poking around on your own (the source is here, for example).
Does this idiom make sense to native English speakers?
It's archaic. The modern variant would be like "Please, for goodness's sake, consider that you could be mistaken," or "Please, for fuck's sake", or "Please, for the love of God," or so on.
Yes, but do people actually read it as that without looking it up, instead of just thinking of the quite different modern meaning?
I read it as a flowery, archaic way of saying something along the lines of "in the name of God", without needing to map it away from a modern meaning, so that's one data point for you. I don't recall hearing the phrase elsewhere, but there are lots of religious invocations along similar lines from various eras, and I may unconsciously be drawing an inference between them.
(My favorite might be "God's teeth!", although that conveys shock rather than supplication.)
In Henry V, Shakespeare has the Duke of Exeter say:
So it seems to have been a fairly common idiom in 17th C English.
When I say the quote I use "in the bowels of Christ" and go directly to the concept/emotion I believe Cromwell wanted to evoke without going through another phrase first. But I have far more familiarity with English works written in Cromwell's time than the average person, so I can't say. (Similarly, "beseech" is a word rarely used undeliberately in modern times, but I don't feel a need to translate it.)
There is a modern meaning? Once you drew attention to it above it occurred to me that the closest literal interpretation would be to "Holy Shit!" but that's not a euphamism I've ever actually heard...
Not especially. I sort of skip over it and the meaning "probably some shoddy translation of something that means to convey emphasis" appears in my head without me bothering to notice the words.
It reads fine to me.
I'm not keen on this one. It has a sensible reading as an injunction to keep the support of one's prior wide, and if that is what one is reminded of by the maxim, that is fine. But too often I see in everyday discourse people saying "you've made your mind up!" as a criticism. The argument becomes a bodyguard to support a belief that has no other support.
Some Wikipedia scholarship indicates that the real situation behind the quote is unpromising for a clear moral about rationality. Cromwell made this appeal on the occasion of the Scots proclaiming Charles II their king instead of accepting Cromwell's rule. Being rebuffed, he conquered them, and it appears from this biography, p184ff that he would have had an easier job of it had he not taken the time to first invite their surrender. On the other hand, the Scots handcapped themselves by too strict an attention to the religious correctness of their generals and soldiers, at the expense of numbers in the field, and might even have benefitted from the lesser fervour that Cromwell suggested to them.