This etymology reminded me of my favorite Existential Comics comic, the Existential Ad Agency:

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/204

Oh, great - now you make me one of the lucky 10,000 to discover this today and there goes a half hour down the existential rabbit-hole - too much fun!

(srsly, good reading, thx!)

What I’ve never understood with this comic is if the author admires philosophers or is mocking them. They frankly come off as a bit kooky and out of touch with reality. Like your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving.

I'd venture it is a fellow former philosophy major having fun with it, so some of both.

Steve Martin followed a similar path, philosophy major to comedy with a flair for the absurdity of life -- followed to the (il-)logical conclusion...

> "Choisir, c'est renoncer" (to choose is to give up).

This really resonates with me strongly.

Choice is usually portrayed as empowerment or a something you can do from position of empowerment. But choosing is resigning to your fate and loosing everything you have not chosen. The truly empowered are the ones that don't need to choose much.

And choice is not something you need to be empowered to do. There are really very few and very rare occasions where you truly have just one option. Usually when you think you have no choice, you really do, but you choose the current option that is not what you want because you still prefer it to all other you can imagine.

Awareness of that fact helped me in toughest times.

Let's look at it this way: getting to have your cake and eat it too is certainly better than having to choose between the two options, but not having a cake which you can decide to eat (i.e. not having a choice) is even worse...

That's a slight distortion of the original phrase, 'eat your cake and have it', and I think it makes more sense if you go to that meaning (to act, free of consequence). Otherwise, you're just saying that having the option to eat cake is better than not having the option to eat it, which would strike most people as being quite obvious.

You can't really eat cake without first having a cake to eat. If you eat it, you don't have cake any more; if you don't, you still have cake.

Therefore, if you want to eat your cake and have it, you want to do something but don't want the consequence of it.

Somehow I though the cake idiom was similar to that french one: “vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre” (to want butter and money for butter) but it seems to differ more than I thought!

It’s about trying to exchange butter for money but thinking you could somehow end up with both, either intentionally by rigging a zero sum game to someone’s detriment, or mistakenly through a leap of flawed logic when one does not realise it’s zero sum, and thinks it can be outgamed with enough swapping around.

I'm 50 years old and have never understood that saying until now. Thank you!

> a slight distortion of the original phrase, 'eat your cake and have it'

I'm partial to "eat your cake and keep it too", FWIW; "have" is ambigous.

That's some of the rare philosophical aspect of finance/trading. Every body has sold assets that ended up exploding (Tesla or else, and bitcoin amplified this, many people had millions in their hand virtually but gave it up for a pizza).

It teaches you not to focus on regret and only care about risk/satisfaction ratio, and to keep moving.

This topic also tailor your sense of self too. When you made a few too many bad choices (job, relationship, location) you get a finer sense of what you want.

> Choice is usually portrayed as empowerment

I read this and thought maybe we as a culture are too hung up on empowerment, power, power-seeking, etc. You say true power is not needing to choose, I say why is it important to seek power at all?

I think the desire for power is understandable. We need to be able to adapt our environments, and adapt ourself to our environments, in order to survive. Arguably, power is the extent to which we can achieve that.

But you could look at it like this: by not choosing you are losing what you could have gained. I think. Maybe you are choosing the most optimal option, and giving up the lesser ones.

Much of 'overengineering' is refusing to make a choice.

I think I would classify that act as making a different choice, but not everybody sees it that way.

What works better is to identify reversible decisions and just make them, clearing the deck for those that do have serious opportunity costs associated with them.

In English, the equivalent is often expressed as "The Road not Taken", from Robert Frost's poem of the same name.

The two, though contemporaries, could not be more different in my mind, and that is represented in the clarity of the short statement vs short poem. Yet the underlying loss expressed’ is the same.

(I don't intend to get into lit crit: the last line of the poem heads in an additional direction, but that's the difference between three words and a few hundred)

In a related sense, philosophically, gaining knowledge can be seen as narrowing down the ways in which things might be.

In practice, however, gaining knowledge often increases our awareness of how things might be even faster than it removes possibilities that we formerly considered: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio..."

The title you see was chosen by the mods. Original title did say decide is related to cut off.

The first sentence is “The verb decide has deadly interesting origins.”

But yeah, not a great title

in-cision: cut into

de-cision: cut off (eliminate the alternatives)

sui-cide, homi-cide, regi-cide, etc: cut/stab/slay self, a man, a king, etc.

And herbicide too.

My barber won't listen to me, but he foolishly keeps a bottle of barbicide around.

So when I cut my finger when fixing my laptop, did I commit suicide ? Homicide ? Digicide ?

Incisicide.

> "Choisir, c'est renoncer" (to choose is to give up).

Every decision for something is a decision against something. (Netflix Dark)

If you read the actual article it explains exactly that....

That's funny, I was going to mention that, but without the reference to Gide, which I didn't know about :-)