“Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency.”

— Isaac Asimov , book The Caves of Steel

Source: The Caves of Steel

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Isaac Asimov 303

American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston Uni… 1920–1992

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“Of what I am, I know no more than that I am, but here no tie is necessary between subject and object. My own being is this tie, I am at once the subject knowing, and the object known of; and this reflection or return of the knowledge on itself is what I designate by the term I, if I have any determinate meaning.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book The Vocation of Man

Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 50
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“Modern analysis has yet to describe inefficiency in a world where indivisibilities are present and knowledge is costly to produce.”

Harold Demsetz (1930–2019) American economist

Source: "Information and Efficiency: Another Viewpoint." (1969), p. 19; cited in: Eggertsson (1990; 23)

“We hold that efficiency cannot itself be a "value." Rather, it operates in the interstices of a value system; it prescribes relationships (ratios or proportions) among parts of the value system; it receives its "moral content" by syntax, by absorption. Things are not simply "efficient" or "inefficient." They are efficient or inefficient for given purposes, and efficiency for one purpose may mean inefficiency for another.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Source: The Administrative State, 1948, p. 202

“A choice may have to be made between a biased estimator which is believed to be relatively accurate and an unbiased estimator which is demonstrably highly inefficient, and it is by no means obvious that the latter is always to be preferred.”

Richard Stone (1913–1991) British economist, Nobel Memorial Prize winner

Source: Studies in the National Income and Expenditure of the United Kingdom, 1954, p. 286

“And he arrives at the cogito ergo sum, which St. Augustine had already anticipated… "I think therefore I am," can only mean "I think, therefore I am a thinker"; this being of "I am," which is deduced from "I think," is merely a knowing; this being is a knowledge, but not life. And the primary reality is not that I think, but that I live, for those also live who do not think. Although this living may not be a real living. God! what contradictions when we seek to join in wedlock life and reason!”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

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“I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: thats what I am. Think of what that means to a man.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Act II
1910s, Pygmalion (1912)

“I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

B 158
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

“We have not the slightest sympathy with that socialistic idea which would try to put laziness, thriftlessness and inefficiency on a par with industry, thrift and efficiency; which would strive to break up not merely private property, but what is far more important, the home, the chief prop upon which our whole civilization stands. Such a theory, if ever adopted, would mean the ruin of the entire country — a ruin which would bear heaviest upon the weakest, upon those least able to shift for themselves.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Seventh Annual Message (1907)
Context: A heavy progressive tax upon a very large fortune is in no way such a tax upon thrift or industry as a like would be on a small fortune. No advantage comes either to the country as a whole or to the individuals inheriting the money by permitting the transmission in their entirety of the enormous fortunes which would be affected by such a tax; and as an incident to its function of revenue raising, such a tax would help to preserve a measurable equality of opportunity for the people of the generations growing to manhood. We have not the slightest sympathy with that socialistic idea which would try to put laziness, thriftlessness and inefficiency on a par with industry, thrift and efficiency; which would strive to break up not merely private property, but what is far more important, the home, the chief prop upon which our whole civilization stands. Such a theory, if ever adopted, would mean the ruin of the entire country — a ruin which would bear heaviest upon the weakest, upon those least able to shift for themselves. But proposals for legislation such as this herein advocated are directly opposed to this class of socialistic theories. Our aim is to recognize what Lincoln pointed out: The fact that there are some respects in which men are obviously not equal; but also to insist that there should be an equality of self-respect and of mutual respect, an equality of rights before the law, and at least an approximate equality in the conditions under which each man obtains the chance to show the stuff that is in him when compared to his fellows.

“Really, Ischomachus, I am disposed to ask: "Does teaching consist in putting questions?" Indeed, the secret of your system has just this instant dawned upon me. I seem to see the principle in which you put your questions. You lead me through the field of my own knowledge, and then by pointing out analogies to what I know, persuade me that I really know some things which hitherto, as I believed, I had no knowledge of.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Oeconomicus (The Economist) XIX.15 (as translated by H. G. Dakyns)
Xenophon

“I think you didn't get a reply because you used the terms 'correct' and 'proper', neither of which has much meaning in Perl culture.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199706251602.JAA01786@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“Aimless extension of knowledge, however, which is what I think you really mean by the term curiosity, is merely inefficiency. I am designed to avoid inefficiency.”

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Isaac Asimov 303

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