I'm with you sumiyaka - I'm happy if I'm better today than I was yesterday and confidant I will be better tomorrow than I was today.

I don't really want to be the best, I just want to be really good.

I wouldn't object to being the best at something as long as no one else knew it. Fame and notoriety are guaranteed to bring lots of unwelcome attention and stress to your life. As long as my wife thinks I am the best for her then that is really all that is important.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

There's something to be said about this aspect. I want to be the best (not sure at what yet), and I would like to be recognized ... but the recognition doesn't have to be A-list celebrity fame (or even B- or C-list for that matter). Being respected and recognized as THE expert by a set of peers (could be of varying size, from 1 person to a few hundred thousand) is good enough for me.

these guys are great.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_eating

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I am John. John-I-Am.

I would be afraid everyone would view any mark I leave as graffiti and be offended..

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Michael Dobbins; Dragon: mdobbins, KGS: mgd, AGA#: 4253,
My Website

I want to be among the best at everything I care about. If I don't care enough about some activity to put the effort into being one of the best at it, I generally will lose all interest in the activity very quickly. For instance, once I realized that I just didn't have the motivation to devote enough of my life to get good at video games, I stopped playing video games shortly thereafter. With Go, although I realize my chances of being achieving 9p strength are virtually nill, I still aspire to one day be among the strongest amateurs. Same with other interests of mine such as math: although I will never be "the best at math" (however that is defined), I still want to achieve a very high level of understanding in it. Competition is probably my main way of staying motivated about any topic I enjoy.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

I don't care about other people enough to compete with them.
I do enjoy approval, but being merely good is enough for that.

I'm a confused being trying to figure out what in this world is permanent, progressive and great. Works of art, perhaps. Unless someone else decides to be 'great' by unlawfully claiming ownership of them. Accidents can happen too. As for science and philosophy, yesterdays theories are incorrect and obsolete. Today's theories will be considered incorrect in the future and theories in the future will be rendered incorrect farther in the future.

Who should be ask this question anyway? Ask religious people and thou shall pray and not sin. Ask environmental activists and thou shall not pollute. Ask bankers and thou shall save and invest. Everything depends on point of view. Success requires that you poison your mind with illusions of grandiosity. There's no need to attach anything external to what you are doing in your daily life.

No, I don't want to be great. I just want to marry and to have a happy family for the rest of my life with 4 children, or more.

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Stefany, web programmer

I already am great, I don't need more.

Best wishes.

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No aji, keshi, kifu or kikashi has been harmed in the compiling of this post.
http://www.gogod.co.uk

Is there no stability to knowledge? Personally, I'd feel pretty silly if I found something from yesterday or today that was correct and I passed it by simply because I believed everything is wrong and about to be proven as such. Not sure I get your line of thought on this part.

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RazorBrain


- Another One Bites the Dust
- BOOK REVIEW: How Not To Play Go
- Finally, a DGS Client for the iPhone

- Generally no, there isn't. Theories can be constructed and evidence can be gathered. We would instinctively think that more evidence leads to greater clarity, but even the "best" theories have certain phenomena they can't explain. If the theory is young, settling of such inconveniences can be postponed to future, but eventually the number of anomalities starts to build up. When it's enough, paradigms that are foundations of important theories are shaken and new paradigms have to be taken in their place. Knowledge thus doesn't really increase incrementally as time goes on. This is a rough idea of philosophy of science by Thomas Kuhn.



- Pragmatic point of view helps. Perhaps it's useful to accept limits of our knowledge and stop trying to strive for objective, metaphysical truths (as in Plato's world of ideas). We're entities in physical world, constrained by our habits of action. What is true is simply what works. Check out C.S. Peirce. Great philosopher.

It's disingenuous to claim that no knowledge is stable and then hold on to that as a rock-solid, stable fact.

Leads me to think, What is the true meaning of Knowledge?

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Only a child can ask questions that the wise can not answer.

What kind of knowledge?

I first saw this as "What Knowledge?" which for a strange reason feels like it answers my question, but knowledge in general.

From wiki...
The definition of knowledge is a matter of on-going debate among philosophers in the field of epistemology. The classical definition, described but not ultimately endorsed by Plato, specifies that a statement must meet three criteria in order to be considered knowledge: it must be justified, true, and believed.

In my Britannica collection on the shelf over here is a famous quote by someone who I can't remember or find at the moment because I don't know which book it is in said that, "The true meaning of Knowledge is that you know nothing."

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Only a child can ask questions that the wise can not answer.

My point was merely that there may not be such a thing as knowledge in general. Even if there is, its "true meaning" might differ depending on what sub-category it belongs to e.g. scientific, ethical, aesthetic.

Yes true I know what you mean.

For aesthetic knowledge do you mean that of the philosophy idea of knowledge?

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Only a child can ask questions that the wise can not answer.

Aesthetic knowledge (at least as the word aesthetic is typically used in my experience) would be knowledge concerning issues of beauty, taste, creativity and the like.