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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Yes, the point, as I have always thought, is not that playing with the devil is playing with a deceitful sharper, but playing against one's own inability to handle one's desires, one's own imperfections and basically facing the corruption of the original sin in oneself. The devil just sets things up in such a way that the human who yielded to the temptation arrives to the state of ruin faster, and initially enjoying the ride, all while not being formally lied to at any moment.

The idea is that there logically may be ways to outwit the devil, but he will never offer you a deal where you would be able to outwit him by the power of your (weak and corrupted) mind, so the faith is the only salvation, and rejecting any deals is the only non-losing strategy. Remember, Dr Faustus was not written by an atheist.

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> The idea is that there logically may be ways to outwit the devil, but he will never offer you a deal where you would be able to outwit him by the power of your (weak and corrupted) mind

If it’s a comedy, The Devil may end up outwitting himself. Doubly funny if the human was suspicious at first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnhfjdVYRrk

Though in the end, The Devil may still get what he wanted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwg8EjQXEc4

Reading the description I immediately knew what will be under the links. Nice reference!

The Swiss outwitted him at the Gotthard.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sch%C3%B6llenen... (look for Devil's Bridge legend)

Or in other words "it's hard to get scammed if you're not greedy"

In Pratchett's "Going Postal", there's the following quote:

There is a saying, “You can’t fool an honest man,” which is much quoted by people who make a profitable living by fooling honest men. Moist never tried it, knowingly anyway. If you did fool an honest man, he tended to complain to the local Watch, and these days they were harder to buy off. Fooling dishonest men was a lot safer and, somehow, more sporting. And, of course, there were so many more of them. You hardly had to aim.

So in a nutshell the whole genre can be reduced to "be careful what you wish for, you might get it"?

Or "don't think you're as smart as you think you are."

Perhaps there's a line to be drawn from here to the dictum that code should be only half as clever as it could be, because debugging is twice as hard.

Jokes about recursion are always funny, just like this one!

Not just that, but also "...and you'll never be able to handle it, and the sleek scoundrel on the other side knows it".

So you want to wave away whole storytelling experience by sentence that fits in a tweet.

Gist of it might be true but reading dry sentence doesn’t do to a brain same thing as reading a story and going for a ride along with the imaginary person.

Well done story evokes emotions, makes one think of what ifs and what nots.

Also a lot of memes or tweet length life lessons are not possible without long form background we share as a society.

I see a "discussions" one time where a professor tried to explain why Twitter is actually bad for the wiring of the brain. The other guy was a self proclaimed twitter expert. Every time the professor tried to say something the twitter expert interupted him just around 500 chars. The professor eventually got angry then the twitter man said, but i already knew what you wanted to say.

Enraged the professor stood up then left the room.

I thought it was the best instance of my work here is done

And then the whole class stood and clapped - and that twitter expert’s name?

Or you can beat him just by being really good at playing a fiddle.

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