That quote is very illogical. It tries to create a dichotomy where it doesn't really exist. Pretty much everyone tries to adapt the world to themselves (see the use of fire, clothing, air conditioning, fans, etc to try to adapt climate). Also, pretty much everyone adapts themselves to the world (realizing that gravity means you can't jump off of cliffs with no parachute, that you need to eat, that you need oxygen, etc). Progress depends on finding out the right balance of what can be adapted to you, and what you need to adapt to. Finding that balance requires reason. Thus all progress is dependent on the reasonable person.

That quote is so spot on that I'm going to get it printed on a mug.

Lets call the adaptive people "Alice", like in cryptography, and use one of your examples at random: Air conditioning.

A hundred years ago, if it was too hot Alice just shrugged and didn't do anything about it. She just accepted that "It Is What It Is." Around the turn of the century, one guy, named Willis H. Carrier, decided "enough is enough, I'm going to fix this" and invented modern electric air conditioning machines. These days Alice accepts the new state of things: you can buy air conditioners, and once purchased, you can turn them on.

But lets be honest: If Alice had to use a building without air conditioning, or broken air conditioning, there's a snowball's chance in hell that she'll actually do anything about it, despite the ready availability of such devices and specialised tradespeople to fix them.

I've regularly visit a government office where 200 people have sat sweating for three years because nobody lifted a finger to I dunno... maybe see what's wrong with the aircon.

This observation exactly matches my experience of the world.

I'd love to live in your world where most people go out of their way to improve the status quo in novel ways. It would be... magical.

Hi, I'm Alicia from the Veneto (Venice if you like). I'd like to point out that we have been living in buildings that don't need air conditioning for 800 years, because our venacular architecture is designed to keep us warm in winter, yet cool in summer.

Do you have more info about this architecture? Could it be applied world-wide? Ie. think Japan needs architecture against earthquakes, The Netherlands needs to take floods into account, etc.

Not an expert on the subjet, but what I saw is this: old houses and churches (400+ years) with big stone walls tend to be rather cool in summer (my parents house ground floor always stay under 25°C when properly used, even with temperatures reaching 40°C outside) and have little temperature fluctuation overall (a piano, which is very sensitive to that and need yearly tuning in most places, can stay tuned for 10 years without intervention). I suspect the biggest factor is insulation due to having having a lot of mass that doesn't easily change temperature, but again I'm not an expert.

Incidentally, you cannot have it all: this architecture is not cheap, not fast, and isn't designed to withstand earthquakes or floods. But you'll never need air conditionning.

I don't know, the need to air conditioning is kinda relative anyway, and it creates a lot of Co2 as well, thereby contributing to the global warming problem.

A few years ago I've been in an old monastery, almost daily, in both summer and winter. The summer was good, albeit with a window open. Not as good as airco, but good.

However the gas costs in winter were insane, from what I heard it was in the hundreds of thousands of EUR.

AFAIK air con was discovered by building a machine to make air dryer so that photo rolls wouldn't spoil.

The fact that it emitted cool air was a side bonus in summer.

> That quote is so spot on that I'm going to get it printed on a mug.

There are other issues with the quote. Look at where and when George Bernard Shaw lived (1856 - 1950) in the United Kingdom. The elan of the era that Shaw grew up in Britain was all about "taming" nature and "civilizing" the benighted brown people. This was the era where people went to areas that had previously been jungles and tried to have manicured British lawns. This was also the era where Great Britain tried to impose the British way of life over civilizations that were thousands of years older than it. In many ways, our world is still recovering from the effects of the "unreasonable men" that George Bernard Shaw talks about.

The point of the quote is to make people think before dismissing someone as being unreasonable. A person perceived as unreasonable may be the very person who is going against the grain, which is generally what you have to do to make progress.

I like how you use gravity as an example. Using the quote logic, Apollo project comes to my mind ;-)

Concise aphorisms that encapsulate wisdom often trade comprehensive nuance for brevity. It is up to the reader to look beyond the literal words for the value in the aphorism. My favorite example is the golden rule, which invites you to consider other people's experiences and perspectives, to generously value their experience on par with how you value your own, and treat them accordingly. A literal and simplistic application of the golden rule, though, would often be a terrible idea as it ignores critical differences in our wants, values, life circumstances, and abilities.