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The minus one must be for not seeing two fallacies and a bias in such a pretty package. Oh well, can't win em all.
Please don't hastily dismiss my quote, I haven't had breakfast yet.
"Please don't disillusion me. I haven't had breakfast yet." -Orson Scott Card, _Children of the Mind
Any update?
Also, "short is good" would narrow this quotes focus considerably.
New here, sorry for the redundancy. I probably should have guessed that such a popular quote had been used.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“In life as in poker, the occasional coup does not necessarily demonstrate skill and superlative performance is not the ability to eliminate chance, but the capacity to deliver good outcomes over and over again. That is how we know Warren Buffett is a skilled investor and Johnny Chan a skilled poker player.” — John Kay, Financial Times
Your post lead me by tangent to wonder, especially in on-line formats, how often people simply don't respond to arguments that they agree with.
This made me think of a sports gambling database and strategy set that I read about in an ESPN magazine at a barber shop. I don't remember the specifics but I recall that the database was shared by invitation only and had an intentional "barrier to entry" level buy in, which seemed high to me. The article claimed the database was in use by only 9 professional gamblers. I'd like to see some performance data on their bets.
"Cool story bro" is another discouraging phrase that seems to fit what you are looking for.
The church was a good shortcut for me when i was an agnsty teen.
"I don't practice what i preach because I'm not the kind of person that I'm preaching to." sticks out in my quote bank.
Is Avatar really formulaic?
To me, it seems that Avatar could be taken as a "noble savage" dances with wolves trope on a surface viewing, for sure. But a second viewing really shows it as a post singularity society. Every entity on the planet has a neural up-link as a part of it's organism. The Na'vi venerate a tree called "Eywa" (AI-wa?) that seems to be able to control most of the planet, and even aggressively "seed tags" a known invader only to later invite the invader into a situation that allows for the AI tree to upload the brain of an invader and seek a solution for the problem of the invasion.
For me, it seems that Avatar could be a good example of what a post-singularity AI might look like if the organism that initiated the singularity relied on a biological technology and symbiosis rather than a non carbon system for artificial intelligence.
the problem presented by the evolution of an up-link like ponytail and the seemingly godlike intelligence of the trees is what lead me to this line of thought, and i think when it is explored to it's conclusion it satisfies Avatar's formula better than "Dances with Wolves in Space".