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Here's the thing. "You can do anything" is obviously bullshit if you take it too literally. It's trivial to spend your time thinking of loads of counterexampl

by colomon 14y ago

Here's the thing. "You can do anything" is obviously bullshit if you take it too literally. It's trivial to spend your time thinking of loads of counterexamples, especially if you have that engineer knack of being painfully logical. I think people mean it as shorthand for "You can do amazing things if you put your mind to it," and damn it, there's an awful lot of truth to that.

dinkumthinkum 14y ago
I think that kind of thing is often mistaken for being "logical" when it is just pedantry and kind of a sign of not being a great problem solver. It's like when people give out problems like the Two Egg Problem and those people spend all the time going on about the properties of actual eggs rather than getting to the real mathematics. Part of the reason it is so silly is that it is like a case of a human behaving as a computer program with absolutely no AI (or robots from SciFi going "does not compute" and then blowing up).