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Salemicus comments on Rationality Quotes December 2014 - Less Wrong
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Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Reflections on Exile
Cf. Tolstoy: all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
What happens twice probably happens more than twice: are there other notable expressions of this idea?
(There's a well-known principle in software development that's pretty close, though I can't find a Famous Quotation of it right now: when you're choosing a name for a variable or function or whatever, avoid abbreviations: there's only one way to spell a word right, and lots of ways to spell it wrong. Though this is not always good advice.)
Biblical verse on the asymmetry of error: "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it."
That's an interesting comparison. I always took the broad/narrow contrast to be about how easy each path is, and about how many take them, rather than how varied each is, but clearly the ideas are related.
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Usually agreed, on both counts. But: color/colour (and other US/UK pairs...)
True enough. But then there are even more ways to spell it wrong, and the general principle still holds. (With a possible exception for cases where you abbreviate a word in such a way as to remove the bits whose spelling differs. But, e.g. "col" is seldom likely to be a good abbreviation for "colo[u]r", not least because "column" will be a distracting other meaning...)