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Comment by racktash | Hacker News Reader

Epictetus has a wonderful quote. He is talking about moral / philosophical improvement specifically but I find it more broadly applicable when overly high expectations paralyse me from doing a thing:

"What then? Because I have no natural gifts, shall I on that account give up my discipline? Far be it from me! Epictetus will not be better than Socrates; but if only I am not worse, that suffices me. For I shall not be a Milo, either, and yet I do not neglect my body; nor a Croesus, and yet I do not neglect my property; nor, in a word, is there any other field in which we give up the appropriate discipline merely from despair of attaining the highest."

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"Perfect is the enemy of good"

Robert Watson Watt wrote in 1999: "Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes."

Voltaire wrote in 1770: "A wise Italian says that the best is the enemy of the good."

Montesquieu wrote in 1726: "The better is the mortal enemy of the good."

Shakespeare wrote in 1606: "Were it not sinful then, striving to mend, to mar the subject that before was well?" (don't fix what ain't broke)

Chinese proverb says: "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2004: "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." (The troops who got blown up due to lack of armored vehicles might not have fully appreciated his brilliance.)

Troops enlist knowing they may die, not sure what your point is. There is no army that fights a prolonged conflict without loses, no equipment is perfect.

At the time there was a distinct shortage of armored vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many troops were dying in IED and RPG attacks, and they were forced to improvise additional armor in the field out of scrap metal. There are always risks in combat and casualties are inevitable, but in retrospect the Defense Department leadership could have done a lot more at the time to accelerate production and deployment of additional armored vehicles and kits.

They also enlist trusting their leaders to use them wisely. I very much do not believe they were used wisely for those wars.

That quote is damning to his legacy, whatever it might have been: we went to a war we started, that was unnecessary, and which will taint every history of the Bush administration.

I always liked the way G.K. Chesterton put it: "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

The more I've thought about this quote the more value it has given me.

I'll add to this a general take I have about "improving" the world: there is a metric ton of stuff to do in the world, and there aren't enough people to do it, and being the best at what you do is in no way necessary if your goal is to be useful or to produce meaningful things that make people's lives better.

There are so many problems in the world that aren't solved literally because nobody has solved them, because the scope is gigantic and the people available who want to work on them or who are willing to work on them is very small in comparison.

Many of those tasks aren't sexy, and they might not have broad appeal, but... I mean, I ported another person's gameboy emulator to a format that worked in NodeJS and had basically one API change so that you could run the project headlessly without a graphics stack, and so you could advance the emulator frame-by-frame after inspecting memory. It's a garbage project, I have no idea how emulators work. And yet, I've had people contact me on Discord and ask questions about it and go through support chats and thank me for building it.

Was I the best suited person to do that? No. Could pretty much anyone at all with any experience build a better end result then I did? Yes. Heck, it would be trivial for someone to jump in, fork my project and improve it. And yet. The very specific niche case I coded it for didn't have a solution, and then it did have a solution.

Sometimes that's enough. People underestimate how easy it is to be useful and to make the world better in small ways. It does not require you to perfect a skill, it just requires showing up and putting in some work and doing the best work that you can. And sometimes it means not asking "what's the biggest impact problem in the world", and instead asking "what's any problem that's close enough to me to solve that nobody is paying attention to?"

That’s an amazingly modern take.

Epictetus is very good in general.

If you find a good modern translation (Robin Hard is good), I emphatically recommend reading the discourses. Don't cheap out and suffer through some stuffy 19th century translation.

Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca are all excellent reads.

At the other end of the spectrum, I've suffered through some overly-simplified/modernized translations of fiction (e.g. Dostoevsky's the Gambler) that was complete butchery, but I guess this is less likely to occur with non-fiction.

Stoicism in general has aged very well. When I read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, I was amazed at how relevant the thing still is, even though it’s 1.8K+ years old at this point.

It's often claimed that the Meditations are actually Marcus Aurelius's own words. When I traced the lineage of the text, the best I could find was something like several hundred years back with the primary text being possessed by the church. None of this takes away from the relevance of the text—it stands on its own.

Does anyone know of an accounting of the primary text which shows that it wasn't written by a monk or priest of the Catholic church?

I'm definitely no textual criticism expert, but I do have a book recommendation.

The Inner Citadel by Hadot is a great analysis of the Meditations. It explains extracts from the Meditations – such as references to certain people in Marcus's life – with facts we know about Marcus from other sources.

For me personally... While it could be an elaborate imitation, it would raise the question why Marcus espouses views that don't necessarily tie with Christian doctrine. Obviously something about the Meditations appealed to Christians of the time, but if they were inventing it whole cloth, they probably wouldn't have included only one reference to Christianity, which is arguably negative. (Book 2, chp3)

Both have roots in Platonism so makes sense they would have significant overlap.

And what is Platonism but Christianity for people who have read a certain preface from Nietzche

Just because you were of the cloth didn't mean you were a raving fundamentalist. Who else was going to house, feed, and protect you and allow you to read and think all day?

He has some Epicurean influence as well. In the early days they were both popular, then changes in religious sentiment and denunciation of Epicureanism as sensualism changed that. Stoicism is ingrained with comparatively more spirituality and austerity.

It’s funny, I’ve always heard great things about Meditations but I found it to be one of the least approachable books on stoicism. Perhaps I didn’t like the terse note format. On the other hand Seneca’s letters are extraordinary

It gives you a really solid framework for not worrying about why things happen and who they happen to. A very valuable skill indeed in our world where everywhere you look there is preventable misery. Modern indeed! It's no wonder it's so popular with tech workers.

Hum... It didn't age any well before it got a chance to age well.

It's coherent with modernity because we have are in a time where that mindset is popular, and since there are only a few alternatives, we are prone into cycling between them at random and revisit each one from time to time.

Eventually, it will pass, and it will become old and unfit again.

“…but better by far than a master of one.”

> discipline

"discipline", hu, not motivation ? Duly noted and pointed out :)

edit: oops, no more internet for me today :).

Discipline meaning “branch of knowledge,” or “area of work/study,” in this case. In the other sense (obedience/adherence to something), motivation is often considered temporary or fleeting. “Motivation gets you started, discipline keeps you going.”

Oooooh, oups my bad, I realize now I am on edge and chose to interpret the word in such a way that it reminded me of another post and I triggered myself. Guess it's time to unwind for the week-end and call it a day :).

It means "job" or "hobby" here.

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