I'm afraid I just don't buy it. The distinguishing feature of one's boss is that this person has certain kinds of (formally recognized) power over you within your organization's hierarchy. No one thinks that their boss has the power to rearrange physical reality at a whim.

My objection to the quote as a rationality quote is that it reads like this: "Because my job performance may be affected by the laws of physical reality, which my boss is powerless to alter, he (the boss) in fact has no power over me!" Which is silly. It's a sort of sounds-like-wisdom that doesn't actually have any interesting insight. By this logic, no one has any legal/economic/social power over anyone else, and no one is anyone's boss, ever, because anything that anyone can do to anyone else is, in some way, limited by the laws of physics.

P.S. I think the Francis Bacon quote is either not relevant, or is equally vacuous (depending on how you interpret it). I don't think Bacon is "advising" us to obey nature. That would be meaningless, because we are, in fact, physically incapable of not obeying nature. We can't disobey nature — no matter how hard we try — so "advising" us to obey it is nonsense.

In a similar vein, saying that the mice have "the final say" on whether the compound is safe is nonsensical. The mice have no say whatsoever. The compound is either safe or not, regardless of the mice's wishes or decisions. To say that the have "the final say" implies that if they wished, they might say differently.

In short, I think a "poetic reading" just misleads us into seeing nonexistent wisdom in vacuous formulations.

I used to think that the dust specks was the obvious answer. Then I realized that I was adding follow-on utility to torture (inability to do much else due to the pain) but not the dust specks (car crashes etc due to the distraction). It was also about then that I changed from two-boxing to one-boxing, and started thinking that wireheading wasn't so bad after all. Are opinions to these three usually correlated like this?

Hi! I'm Free_NRG. I've just started a physical chemistry PhD. I found this site through a link from Leah Libresco early last year (I can't remember exactly how I found her blog). I read through the sequences as one of the distractions from too much 4th year chemistry, and particularly liked the probability theory and evolutionary theory sequences. This year, I'm trying to apply some of the productivity porn I've been reading to my life. I'm thinking of blogging about it.