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Who Really Said That?

chronicle.com

42 pointsgruseom27 comments

It's funny that this should turn up on HN, which is the true source[1] of this quote, often misattributed[2] to Descartes:

"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company."

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082

[2]: https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=Any+community+that+get...

I recently went down the WAS rabbit hole for "The Harder I Practice, the Luckier I Get" and came back up out of it with an earlier version which I actually like more:

"The more you know, the more luck you have."

Which is attributed to the fantasy author L. Frank Baum, creator of the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in a small collection of maxims from the book “The Burman: His Life and Notions” dated 1896.

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/07/14/luck/

The Quote Investigator is the best. The site is the avocation of someone pseudonymous who tracks these things down meticulously and has been building up a sizeable repertoire. The great thing is that since nearly all these quotations go back decades if not centuries, once one of them has been traced, it's pretty much traced for good.

One of my favorites is http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/28/ford-faster-horse.

Yes, let me add to gruseom's endorsement of Quote Investigator. These days, every time I see a quotation floating around among my Facebook friends, I Google with appropriately chosen keywords, and almost always Quote Investigator shows that the attribution is different from what people suppose.

As someone who posts about quote orgins on HN often enough to wonder whether I should self-deport as a crank, I heartily endorse this article. It is by far the best description of the obsession.

And no, Picasso didn't say "Great artists steal". That's a WAS II. Well, kind of a 1.5 really.

Do you have a master list somewhere?

Oh God no.

According to IMDB, and other websites, in the movie, "Point Break", Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) is attributed with the following:

Wars of religion always make me laugh because basically you're fighting over who has the best imaginary friend.[1]

However, I have not heard this quote spoken by any character within the movie. And a quick web search of a variation of the quote attributes it to "anonymous". Does anyone know if this quote was actually spoken in the movie "Point Break"?

1. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102685/quotes?item=qt1561818

All I can offer is this: Three separate sites that have the script[1][2] (or a transcription[3] of the movie) all fail to have that quote. None of them even contain the word "imaginary" and only two (the scripts, not the transcription) have the word "religion" once but in a scene description and not as dialogue. I should note that the two scripts seem to be the same. (Although who really knows where they got it. One could just copy the other.) But both are different than the transcript.

[1] http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Point-Break.html [2] http://www.awesomefilm.com/script/pointbreak.html [3] http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/p/point-break-scr...

Feels like an opportunity to link to SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3123#comic

I learned recently that the famous Dijkstra quote "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" is apparently a misattribution (at least according to Wikiquote). But it is pithy and great, and it has that Dijkstra ring to it. The author of this piece is on to something with "crowdwriting."

It's Ableson [in the video from the SICP course]:

This first thing we need to do is discuss the focus of 6.001. What is this course all about? This seems quite obvious -- this is a course about computer science. But we are going to claim in a rather strange way that this is not really true.

First of all, it is not really about science. It is really much more about engineering or art than it is about science. ...and it is not really about computers. Now that definitely sounds strange! But let me tell you why I claim it is not really about computers. I claim it is not really about computers in the same way that physics is not really just about particle accelerators, or biology is not really just about microscopes, or geometry is not really about surveying instruments.

In fact, geometry is a good analogy to use here. It has also a terrible name, which comes from two words: GHIA or earth, and METRA or measurement. And to the ancient Egyptians, that is exactly what geometry was -- instruments for measuring the earth, or surveying. Thousands of years ago, the Nile annually flooded, and eventually retreated, wiping out most of the identifying landmarks. It also deposited rich soil in its wake, making the land that it flooded very valuable, but also very hard to keep track of.

As a consequence, the Egyptian priesthood had to arbitrate the restoration of land boundaries after the annual flooding. Since there were no landmarks, they needed a better way of determining boundaries, and they invented geometry, or earth measuring. Hence, to the Egyptians, geometry was surveying -- and about surveying instruments. This is a common effect. When a field is just getting started, it’s easy to confuse the essence of the field with its tools, because we usually understand the tools much less well in the infancy of an area. In hindsight, we realize that the important essence of what the Egyptians did was to formalize the notions of space and time which later led to axiomatic methods for dealing with declarative, or What Is kinds of knowledge. --- So geometry not really about measuring devices, but rather about declarative knowledge.

So geometry is not really about surveying, it is actually fundamentally about axioms for dealing with a particular kind of knowledge, known as Declarative, or "what is true" knowledge.

By analogy to geometry, Computer Science is not really about computers -- it is not about the tool. It is actually about the kind of knowledge that computer science makes available to us. What we are going to see in this course is that computer science is dealing with a different kind of knowledge -- Imperative or "how to" knowledge. It is trying to capture the notion of a process that causes information to evolve from one state to another, and we want to see how we can uses methods to capture that knowledge

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

The quote doesn't occur in your source. Lots of computer scientists have expressed this idea in various ways, but (and I hesitate to say something so obvious it approaches tautology) it isn't the source for the quote if the quote doesn't occur in it.

Yes, indeed. That is why I provided the source of the misquote.

Awfully cocky of you, assuming there's not a single earlier use of this metaphor.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6402775

I remember the first submission of this interesting article. Often on HN, I wonder, "Who really submitted that?" I'm still not sure why the duplicate submission detector is as buggy as it is.

I've always assumed it was deliberately left porous to compensate for the luck of the draw. There's a lot of randomness in which articles get an initial boost on /newest. If the duplicate detector were airtight, a lot of good stories would die unseen. This way, they can have another shot at a discussion.

Obviously one should not abuse this to post things that have already had a good discussion or (worse) to promote uninteresting content.

I saw jamesbritt's submission a few days ago—it may even have been how I learned about the article. I thought it was a shame that it fell through the cracks, hence the repost.

Is the source of a quote really relevant though? Unless said source develop the insight in a text (in which case the source should be easy to find, or if it isn't having the name of the source won't help anyway), it does add no value. Of course, it is natural to be curious.

> Is the source of a quote really relevant though?

It is a big requirement when using proof-by-authority.

Often it isn't, which is why there are so many WASs in existence.

Quotes by themselves are meaningless, no topic can be succinctly covered in a quote. How many quotes have citations? Most of the time they just are there to reinforce pre conceived notions.

But if someone you think knows the topic well says it, then you might assume from their experience it's true.

Humorous quotes often are only funny given who said it. Are funny candid gags on youtube still funny if they are actually planned? Ask a philosopher that one I guess.

Motivation quotes, well I'd need to see proof they work at all rather than just sell posters first.

"People will take your ideas more seriously if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it first."

-- Mark Twain

Twain? Or was it Comins? http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/31662.html :)

Obligatory Wikiquote "List of misquotations":

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/List_of_misquotations

Do what you want and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.

--Not Dr. Suess?

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/04/those-who-mind/

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