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Pablo Stafforini's avatar

H. L. Mencken:

A man who has taken aboard two or three cocktails is less competent than he was before to steer a battleship down the Ambrose Channel, or to cut off a leg, or to draw up a deed of trust, or to conduct Bach's B minor mass, but he is immensely more competent to entertain a dinner party, to admire a pretty girl, or to hear Bach's B minor mass...All this is so obvious that I marvel that no utopian has ever proposed to abolish all the sorrows of the world by the simple device of getting and keeping the whole human race gently stewed.

(‘Portrait of an Ideal World’, The American Mercury, 1924, p. 101)

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Robin Hanson's avatar

The hypothesis that the producers influenced selection does seem worth looking into.

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