Christianity is a grotesque blight!

arthwollipot said:
In his 1985 anthology Metamagical Themas, Douglas Hofstadter described a recusive game called "Mediocrity".

It is played by three players. Each round, each player picks a number. The player with neither the highest nor the lowest - ie, the middle number - wins. The game is played for a set number of rounds, after which the player who has won the middle number of rounds is the overall winner.

I have never played this game. I don't think I'd be very good at it, but I don't think I'd be the worst, either.
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I'd probably be great at it. I just can't win!
 
Heck, mendicancy is life, you get to know everyone, hear everything, move like a ghost amongst the dispatching extremes and affront no one, well, except on this thread. I say this as not just a “C” college graduate and generally circle 65 high school graduate but as someone who just likes putting effort into just where it is needed and then just doing other things not needed.

Oh, sure occasional extremities are nice but like any drug become addictive and the extremes are where things tend to breakdown. Most stuff used is designed to be best when used in the median of its applications, while not designed ourselves that precept still holds. There are no extremes of excellence and progress without the median to support them. Even the best of the best of the best can’t do everything themselves. We don’t have to punch up, we would only have to just stop supporting everything.

Blaming the median for not getting anywhere sounds like a rather mediocre excuse. If extremities fail it’s just because that’s where failure more often tends to happen, not because of a failure of the median just being there for them and anyone.
 
Are we talking about meaty okra ITT? Cuz I hear seagulls loves them some okra. Speaking of seagulls, anyone seen the OP around?
 
Mediocrity is both inevitable and something to aspire to.

I always chuckle when guys want to belong to a group of "alpha males", as if being part of a pack of alphas wouldn't automatically turn them into betas and lower.

Pure Gaussian distribution tells us that excellence is the outlier and can, by definition, not become the norm.

"Good enough" is good enough. If the 80/20 principle gets you there, that means that you have so much more energy/resources left to do something else, too, instead of squeezing a few extra % of performance out of something for increasingly diminishing returns.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
Mediocrity is both inevitable and something to aspire to.

I always chuckle when guys want to belong to a group of "alpha males", as if being part of a pack of alphas wouldn't automatically turn them into betas and lower.

Pure Gaussian distribution tells us that excellence is the outlier and can, by definition, not become the norm.

"Good enough" is good enough. If the 80/20 principle gets you there, that means that you have so much more energy/resources left to do something else, too, instead of squeezing a few extra % of performance out of something for increasingly diminishing returns.
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It's the need of some for external validation. Even on the lower rungs of some group.

I take the Groucho Marx approach myself…

“I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”

Personal excellence is what I strive for. Heck, couldn’t give a crap if everyone forgets me the second I die, because at that second, I’ll be, well, you know, dead. How could I even, give the crap about external validation then, that I never did when alive?
 
Oh, it's fine if some people strive to excel - it should just be clear that that is a personal decision and not a iob requirement.

If you keep raising expectations what your employees should do, you quickly come to the point where they fake it instead of making it. And then you are worse off than if you just had let them get things done sufficiently well.

Most of Middle Management is just faking what you're doing, because you don't have the ability to actually affect the work of others (positively) that much, but have to pretend that you alone is what keeps everyone else from descending in riot and anarchy.
 
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The Great Zaganza said:
Oh, it's fine if some people strive to excel - it should just be clear that that is a personal decision and not a iob requirement.

If you keep raising expectations what your employees should do, you quickly come to the point where they fake it instead of making it.
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Crap, dude too many fakers where I work. As a central hub, we get support calls from other sites. On one the tech was asking a question about a stalled equipment element. My recommendation was to jump out the sensors that might be restricting it, just to get it moving. His question to me was “How do I jump out a sensor?”. My response was “OK, maybe you might want to rethink your career choices here, if you don’t know how to jump out a sensor as an electromechanical tech”. He eventually worked it out.
 
MarkCorrigan said:
Are...are you quoting Ayn Rand (note spelling) as someone to listen to?

Are you a fan of Rand?
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  1. Why is it relevant in any possible way to the OP's topic if I am or I am not?
  2. Does one have to be a fan of someone to quote them?
  3. I quote all the time the Zombified human sacrificed ill begotten son of a celestial ethnic cleansing, slave mongering, racist lover of Sumerian Pimps, called Jesus... do you think I am a fan of this sordid guy or his deadbeat sky daddy?
  4. Judging by my misspelling her name as noted in another red-herring post... do you think I am? Do fans misspell the names of their idols?
Nevertheless, to answer your question... no I am not a fan of Ayn Rand but I think that her discarded toenail clippings are infinitely more worthy than the mountebank cult leader called Jesus or any of his cultists whom I often quote too.

Furthermore... and relevant to the OP... Ayn Rand's statement quoted in the OP stands as a totally correct commentary on the extolling of imbecility and simpletons which is the abject ethos of the tribe of Christianity as expressed by
  • 1 Corinthians 1:26-28 Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are...

See... despite not being a fan of the charlatan peddler of Jesus called Paul, I still quoted him.
 
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Personally, I would argue against Rand's definition of mediocrity; I would think of it as an average intelligence that believes itself to be exceptional and envies and resents the failure of others to recognise it as such. Having read "Anthem," one of the most poorly-written books I've ever actually made it to the end of, I suspect Rand herself was a prime example.

Dave
 
Steve said:
It's a Leumas thread. They are always educational.
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Steve said:
This is a very mediocre thread.
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Much like the Buybull (a.k.a. OT) and more so the New Tall tales (a.k.a. NT).

However... Steve... other than the above ad hominem fallacies about the thread... do you have any comments about the topic of the OP?

Do you think deriding wisdom and excellence is a good ethos to hold, like the hawker for a Zombified human sacrifice called Paul said is the aim of his deadbeat sky daddy and his ill begotten son and their cult of grotesque imbecility called Christianity?
  • 1 Corinthians 1:19-21 For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent... it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
 
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