I came across the above quote while reading about Monads in Functional Programming and it seemed to tie together a few thoughts that have been percolating. The article talks about self-imposed restrictions while programming (“Don’t break encapsulation”) and how ignoring these artificial constraints makes the job of maintaining or developing your work that much harder. “What seemed like freedom [e.g. doing whatever was easiest at the time] is really slavery.” A while back ziffle on Flutterby pointed to a collection of essays in which people propounded on their “Dangerous Ideas”. The most fascinating one to me was Clay Shirky’s: Free will is going away. Time to redesign society to take that into account. Now, the idea that “free will” can come and go is, in itself, interesting. But his introductory example was the suit brought against McDonald’s “charging, among other things, that McDonald’s used promotional techniques to get them to eat more than they should.” (For more indepth commentary on these “dangerous ideas”, see How to save the world.) Then, last Monday, Jeremy Zawodny criticized an editorial in the Washington Post that claimed obesity is good for the economy. While I won’t dispute the claim that obesity can have some positive effects on the economy, many of Jeremy’s criticism are my own, Now, here’s the clincher. As
I believe
I believe I would pay a non-trivial amount of money to watch you dance to a video game.