Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Voltaire's aphorism

Voltaire is attributed with the aphorism, "I don't agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." If he said this, of course it was a lie.

The truth of the matter is that the length to which one will go to defend your right to say what you say is roughly proportional to the product of the extent one agrees with what you say and one's estimation of its importance, which is the sum of importance to oneself weighted by one's self-centredness coefficient, m*, and its cosmic importance weighted by (1 - m).


* For me, m = 0.98; for most, m = something above 0.9.

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I'd be a blackguard and a cad, if I weren't so ineffectual. The less said "About Me", the better.