Kaushik Sridharan writes: > > The modern world progresses by an increase in the things that are > > successfully done ineptly. > > How old is this idea? > > "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by > eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate > the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the > case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important > operations which we can perform without thinking about them." > > -- Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) > 'An Introduction to Mathematics'
That's where I heard it last, I think --- thanks for finding the quote. Whitehead and the copy books and eminent people he criticizes could both be right, and I think both are. Frugality advances by extending the number of important things we can do without spending money on them, and by decreasing the amount of money we have to spend on things we have to spend money on, but it does not therefore follow that we should try to have less money to spend. The "civilization" of which Whitehead speaks is a kind of frugality of mental power. -- <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/> A good conversation and even lengthy and heated conversations are probably some of the most important pointful things I can think of. They are the antithesis of pointlessness! -- Matt O'Connor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
