無用の用 The usefulness of the useless..

It's been a few years since I ask classes of 40 to 80 students for the meaning of "Don Quijote". They tell me it's a store. My question was intstigated by the extra (Not on the test!! just for your enjoyment if you finish quick) reading on the back side of a worksheet. While discussing proverbs in comparison with science, literature, and slang Bertrand Russel mentions Sancho Panza.^1

Sancho Panza produced more proverbs than any other character in fiction

サンチョ・パンザは、他の小説の主人公の誰よりも多くの諺を創りだした。

Bertrand Russel also refers to Don Quijote to illustrate a type of thinking.^2

The classic example of subjectivity is Don Quixote. The first time he made a helmet, he tested its capacity for resisting blows, and battered it out of shape ; next time he did not test it, but “deemed” it to be a very good helmet.

Don Quijote illustrates "subjectivity" in On Education in 1925, and decades later Albert Camus's Myth of Sisyphus uses Quijote thinking to illustrate the difference between "lyricism" and "truism":

... there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity.... If Faust and Don Quixote are eminent creations of art, this is because of the immeasurable nobilities they point out to us with their earthly hands. Yet a moment always comes when the mind negates the truths that those hands can touch....

- ^1 russell-j.com/PROVERB.HTM
- ^2 russell-j.com/wp/archives/2640
- russell-j.com/beginner/OE16-07…
- ^3 pixelfed.social/bobfisherphoto
- pixelfed.social/p/bobfisherpho…
- pixelfed.social/i/web/post/828…

#BertrandRussel #AlbertCamus #MethodsOfThought #TypesOfThinking
#RusselWithQuijote #CamusWithQuijote

"I read a really great phrase recently that said something along the lines of 'why would I bother to read something someone couldn't be bothered to write' and that is such a powerful statement and one that aligns absolutely with my views."
..
"If you want to know why a decision is made, we will need humans. If we don't care about that, then we will probably use AI," he says.
...
"Even when you do a Google search it includes an AI overview, while some emails have a topline summary, So now it almost feels like we have no control. How do I turn all that off? It's snowballing."
bbc.com/news/articles/c15q5qzd…
#SabineZetteler
#AISalami #SalamiAI

> All Crimean War hospitals were ghastly, she insists, and the statistics suggest that at least two had higher death rates than Scutari. McDonald also makes a persuasive case that Nightingale believed the blame for Scutari’s dreadful state lay elsewhere. In her letters, she pointed repeatedly at military doctors and administrators, chastising them for a host of “murderous” errors including sending cholera cases to overcrowded wards and delaying having the hospital “drained and ventilated.” The sanitary commission’s investigation confirmed Nightingale’s suspicions about the links between filth and disease, McDonald contends, and she became determined never to let those conditions occur again. “That is the foundation of all she does in public health for the rest of her life,” McDonald says...

> Throughout her sojourn, she faced the resentment of officers and bureaucrats who regarded her as an interloper. “There is not an official who would not burn me like Joan of Arc if he could,” Nightingale wrote from Crimea, “but they know that the War Office cannot turn me out because the country is with me.”

- smithsonianmag.com/history/the…

#FlorenceNightingale #LadyOfTheLamp #LadyOfTheHammer #Scutari
@bsmall2

The Defiance of Florence Nightingale

Scholars are finding there’s much more to the “lady with the lamp” than her famous exploits as a nurse in the Crimean War

^{Smithsonian Magazine}