Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2012 February 16

= February 16 =

T.S. Eliot's word count?
How many words did T.S. Eliot write? I remember reading somewhere that it was very low, but I can't remember the number. Thanks! --Think Fast (talk) 00:23, 16 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I downloaded the works of T. S. Eliot that are available at Project Gutenberg with T. S. Eliot listed as author, merged them in a Word-document, and did a word count. Result: 38 662 words. This number includes some Project Gutenberg-specific text that was not written by T. S. Eliot (copyright info, disclaimers etc), but still, I doubt that every word written by T. S. Eliot is available in Project Gutenberg, so I consider the word count to be a reasonable estimate. Therefore, a direct answer to your question is, approximately 38,000 words. --NorwegianBluetalk 00:06, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * It is indeed quite low, but then Eliot did not write many essays, or any fiction that I know of, keeping his word count down, and even his poetry and theater output was not particularly prolific. He was very much an author more interested in quality than in quantity, which is relatively rare for a full-time writer who was not cut down in the prime of life. Just about everything he wrote is considered a major work, though. A comparison would be Stéphane Mallarmé, who is considered one of the most important French poets but whose output is tiny, or in another medium, composer Paul Dukas, who has a very small number of compositions to his name, but all of them are considered masterpieces. --Xuxl (talk) 11:17, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Did TS Eliot never write a note for the milkman, scrawl essays at primary school or jot down an aide-memoire? --Dweller (talk) 13:29, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Such questions are obviously intended as enquiries about the number of words he published. It might extend to extant unpublished manuscripts that were originally intended for publication.  But nobody gives a damn about Eliot's shopping lists or post-it notes.  And stuff he wrote for school assignments hardly count as the works of a writer, although they would be of undoubted interest to scholars and collectors of Eliotiana.


 * By analogy, if the Collected Works of Jack of Oz were ever published, I doubt they'd include anything I've ever written on Wikipedia or other websites; or stuff I wrote at school, university or work; or private and work emails; or private correspondence with family, friends or service providers; or Facebook messages; or SMS messages; or letters to editors; or Christmas/birthday cards; or bank deposit/withdrawal slips; or Census and other government forms; or autographs for screaming admirers; you name it.


 * Of course, cutting all that stuff out means it would be a slim volume indeed. (Reminder: Finish tnat damn book, Jack! You still have a shot at the Collected Work of Jack of Oz.)  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  19:59, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

Talleyrand plan
Just a question on the Talleyrand partition plan for Belgium. The article says under Consequences: "The Talleyrand plan was rejected by European powers". Which ones rejected it? Did some accept the plan? And what were the reasons for some of their rejections? Thanks! 64.229.180.189 (talk) 03:33, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * See Treaty of London (1839) for more details on the specific treaty that established it. During the 19th century, Europeans Great Powers met infrequently during meetings known as the "Congress system" or the Concert of Europe.  Belgium is usually counted as one of the major outcomes of the Concert system outside of the first Congress of Vienna.  The Great Powers are generally taken to mean the main signatories of the Congress of Vienna treaties, being the UK, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and France during the first half of the 19th century.  This group of nations was roughly analogous to the "UN Security Council" today.  Presumably, since Tallyrand proposed it, France backed it, but the other four nations apparently opposed it.  -- Jayron  32  03:49, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The main reason for rejecting the plan is that it would have increased the size and power of France. The other European powers were still wary about French ambitions in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.  Another reason is that Britain, then the dominant European power, wanted a strong buffer state on France's border as an impediment to French aggression.  At the Congress of Vienna (1815), the territory of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands had been defined to include what would become Belgium precisely to create a relatively strong state on France's northern flank. Even at the time of the Congress of Vienna, France still had troops positioned in the Southern Netherlands and hoped to retain all or part of it, and at the time when Talleyrand proposed his plan, France again had troops in the region Talleyrand proposed to annex to France.  Britain and the other powers would have preferred for Belgium and the Netherlands to remain united, but since that was no longer feasible after the Belgian revolution, the next best solution for them was to maximize the size and power of Belgium by including the Flemish-speaking areas. Some of the discussions of this question are detailed in this source. Marco polo (talk) 16:30, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Most popular delusion
What delusion is believed by the greatest percentage of human beings on earth? 220.239.37.244 (talk) 13:11, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Probably, that they as an individual mean anything in the grand scheme of things, which is believed by (I would say) 100% of human beings on earth. See Total Perspective Vortex. --TammyMoet (talk) 13:42, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * For further insight, read the Dilbert book called The Way of the Weasel. Author Scott Adams says that in addition to being weasels with others, we are also weasels with ourselves. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:47, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Another example would be from this Paul Simon song: "We work our jobs / Collect our pay / Believe we're gliding down the highway / When in fact we're slip-slidding away." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:52, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The God Delusion? --SupernovaExplosion (talk) 14:43, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Or for that matter, the Atheism Delusion. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:32, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

We have an article List of common misconceptions... AnonMoos (talk) 14:50, 16 February 2012 (UTC)


 * No clear answer can be given. It varies a lot what people consider delusions. Delusion says: "A delusion is a belief held with absolute conviction despite superior evidence. Unlike hallucinations, delusions are always pathological (the result of an illness or illness process). As a pathology, it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete information, dogma, poor memory, illusion, or other effects of perception." PrimeHunter (talk) 16:02, 16 February 2012 (UTC)


 * The The God Delusion has already been mentioned. Surely all religion fits the definition of "a belief held with absolute conviction despite superior evidence". (Faith isn't evidence.) Even if you have a religion and don't regard your own as a delusion, without a lot of word twisting and philosophical gymnastics you have to believe that the adherents of other religions are deluded. Can we label all religious people as suffering a pathological condition "(the result of an illness or illness process)"? HiLo48 (talk) 17:27, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * One could make a similar argument regarding avowed atheists, who are blind to anything that disagrees with their "faith" that no God can possibly exist and that religion has no positive value. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:34, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Heyup, where do you get the idea that atheists believe no religion has positive values? Kittybrewster  &#9742;  17:41, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * , Bugs. Sloppy.  Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:10, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * See New Atheism... AnonMoos (talk) 08:32, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Comparing religious preachers with atheist proselytizers is false analogy because unlike religious preachers, atheist proselytizers use scientific method and deductive logic to criticize religion. But defenders of religion habitually use logical fallacies, and reject scientific method and deductive logic. -- Supernova Explosion   Talk  09:29, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * That's nice; the actual relevant point was that a number of the new modern up-to-date breed of atheist advocates seem to feel an obligation to be get personally nasty and sneer and jeer and trash anything even remotely connected with religion. They're really not dispassionately logical or Spock-like as you seem to imagine. AnonMoos (talk) 13:20, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I'm not so sure the OP is talking about the clinical concept of a delusion, but the broader, colloquial usage, as Will Rogers said, "...what they know for certain which ain't so." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:37, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Yep. Religion. It fits that definition perfectly. It's faith, not evidence based, yet many (far too many IMHO) act as if it's known for certain. What I have just said is not an atheistic position. HiLo48 (talk) 17:46, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I don't think that necessarily follows. The atheist-free/relgious-free position is the agnostic one that "no evidence could either prove or disprove the existence of a god(s)". That is to say, religious believers build their belief, as you imply on no evidence. The definition above says "superior evidence": this is implied by the colloquial "what they know for certain which ain't so" quoted. To call religion a delusion would be to show that it "ain't so". I don't think there's ever been any solid evidence that it "ain't so" - my position in the second sentence was that there was no evidence. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 18:01, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I propose the delusion that, as Travis Bickle had it, "one of these days I'm gonna get organizized". It comes in many variants, but at bottom they're all the same.--Rallette (talk) 17:53, 16 February 2012 (UTC)


 * To get back to the original question, we can't really answer. As the previous discussion has demonstrated, no one will ever agree on what is and is not a delusion, so we'll never get anywhere and end up arguing over religion for hours. I'm not convinced that was the purpose of the question. Anyway, we do have a list of hoaxes, which might being to answer the question. ItsZippy (talk • contributions) 17:57, 16 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Since I note that widely held beliefs are generally of the sort which can't be disproved, or at least have not been disproved, the closest we can get to disproved statements are List of common misconceptions. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 18:01, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

The Christian god delusion followed by the Muslim god delusion. --Broadside Perceptor (talk) 19:18, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The every god but my own delusion. They simply can't all be right. HiLo48 (talk) 19:33, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Maybe, but that doesn't disprove 100% of them. You said above: Surely all religion fits the definition of "a belief held with absolute conviction despite superior evidence".  Just what is this "superior evidence" of which you speak?  Where is the evidence that there is no such thing as God?  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  20:35, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I would humbly submit that the most popular delusion, believed by 100% of humans since shortly after birth, (perhaps I am the world's first and/or only exception) is that there is ever an objective answer to "why", or, in other words, regarding the false misconception of a a cause-effect relationship existing at all. In every language on earth one of the first words anyone would learn is "why" or the answer "because" - and it is, I submit, a delusion. Let's take a simple example. Please read this article, or just the part begining with the third large dropped capital O and reading "On October 30, 1935, at Wright Air Field in Dayton, Ohio, the U.S. Army Air Corps held a flight competition for airplane manufacturers vying to build its next-generation long-range bomber."

Go ahead and read that part if you want. I may spoil it as follows:

!Then it stalled, turned on one wing, and crashed in a fiery explosion. Two of the five crew members died, including the pilot, Major Ployer P. Hill."

This pilot was extremely well-trained. But the article reports "An investigation revealed that nothing mechanical had gone wrong. The crash had been due to “pilot error,” the report said."

So, we can ask a simple question: why did this plane crash. We arrive at a simple answer: pilot error.

But is it so simple?

What about these answers: 1) This type of pilot error should not have been possible. the plane should not have been engineered to start this way. 2) The pilot should have performed a dry run five times in a row on five consecutive days, without taking off. why wasn't this done? 3) the pilot should have taken his methamphetamenes and been chosen for his OCD properties, so that even a procedure 10 times more intricate for starting the plane would have been error-proof.

The third one is outside of our social norms. The first two are OK. So, in my humble opinion, this idea of "cause" or an answer to "why" or statements beginning with "because" is a mass delusion.

I believe there are facts. You can say, the computer had a core temperature of 104 degrees when it crashed. You can say, the patient had a stopped heart shortly before reaching clinical death. I believe that "why" is a mass delusion. Let's say it was diet. Was it McDonald's advertising? The way they were raised? Personal weakness? A poor doctor who was not a good psychologist and got the patient to change habits after the first heart attack?

Thre are no whys, it is a mass delusion. Asking "why doesn't America speak French, Spanish, or Portuguese, as other parts of the Americas, is a delusional question that can be answered simply. this simplification is simply wrong.

i don't believe in causes. even in such a simple case as this: a nurse takes blood from an HIV positive subject to do some blood tests, then pricks herself, and contracts aids. Why did she contract aids?

Here are ten answers off-hand: 1) she shouldn't have been a nurse. with an attentiveness like that, she should be in a different profession. 2) it should not be possible to prick yourself with a used needle after taking blood. the design is flawed.ű 3) HIV patients should not be handled without prick-proof gloves. 4) HIV patients should take their own blood, and do their own tests in specially quarantined equipment. 5) The nurse was overworked and should have worked half as many hours, but there is a nurse shortage due to lack of funding. Major funding is needed to avoid this type of situation. 6) The man should not have had HIV, and if not for stigmatization of gay sex in the sixties and seventies, HIV would not have become a gay pandemic. it could have been stopped extremely quickly. Historically, history will view aids as a failure of ethics and a disease that had as its main vector prejudice and bigotry. 7) If sufficient R and D had been invested in nursing, then hyperdermic needles would have been long-since a thing of the past, an drisk free pneumatic blood drawing would have long-since been the norm. While saving money overall, society does not care about medical costs, as it makes medical companies richer, who lobby for the status quo. 8) HIV would be curable if the medical industry did not have as high vaults as it does, if it were more like math, and readily available online. Due to the restriction on talent, many people with bright ideas in the medical field are unable to participate meaningfully in it, and not only due to lack of laboratories. The nurse who contracted HIV contracted a curable disease whose cure is locked away behind ivory towers operating on medieval structures of study. If the medical industry were like the open-source security industry, there would long-since been real antivirus physical AV hardware that can eliminate aids. The academic closed structure and privatization and lack of openness is the reason 9) the patient was not as important as others to whom the nurse pays more attention, such as celebrities In this case it was a homeless man the nurse wanted to get the procedure over with ASAP. 10) the person should have chosen the less expensive and less error-prone home test-by-mail, but didn't know about it. It would actually have saved him money. The reason he didn't do it this way is lack of information. It's an information problem.

So you see, the most simple occurrence, a nurse pricking herself and contracting HIV, from a patient she knew to be HIV positive, does not have an answer as to why. Why is a human construction, because even more so, and it is a delusion on the grandest scale. Of course, it's easy enough to say: "because she pricked herself" but then, you have to add, with a needle that had HIV, and then you have to add why it had HIV, and why she pricked herself. Pricking herself with a fresh needle doesn't cause the same result.

Also maybe she could have done something afterwards. Maybe thew hole sentence is: "she pricked herself with a needle she should have known had HIV in it, and didnt follow procedure to immediately cleanse as much blood from the pinprick as possible.." etc etc etc ad infinitum... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.99.254.208 (talk) 20:50, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * But under your explanation almost anything can be dismissed of responsability. Massive accidents (like the Chernobyl nuclear disaster) can be dismissed as just that would/could/should happen. Almost everything has an obvious and logical explanation. Flamarande (talk) 21:39, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * You've hit the nail on the head: responsibility is often the true reason for why/because. You gave a GREAT example of the Chernobyl disaster.  As far as I know it (I didn't even read the article, just hearsay) the guys there shut down some emergency system to do some tests, and therefore the emergency system didn't kick in when it should have, and it didn't avoid the meltdown as it should have.  That's what I know.  It's also completely delusional. 94.27.171.38 (talk) 09:58, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * This is a reference desk, not a WP:SOAPBOX for your original research, 80.99. Comet Tuttle (talk) 21:57, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry, but the poster asked for something that the MOST people believe is a delusion. If literally 100%-but-one of people believe something, with the exception of a sole poster who tells the OP what that something is, then it obviously constitutes original research.  Or would you rather, for this particular answer, remove the theoretically possibility of the OP receiving the best answer?  (WIth best being something everyone believes, and therefore mentioning that it is a misconception obviously constitutes OR - if it didn't, not everyone would believe it).


 * I do have to apologize for the lack of formating on the spiel - feel free to reformat it! The linked article also got lost, it's this one: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande


 * But I think that his lack-of-causes-explanation is interesting. However I must add that I have a friend (here where I live - Portugal) that has a similar approach. I'm a guy that believes in law and order, cause and effect and he is always contradicting me on many issues but he explains me things under another perspective. Sometimes he and I totally disagree, but on many issues I begin to slowly analyse his approach/explanation of certain issues and on some he has indeed changed my opinion because I'm unashamed to tell it he is right after-all. And if the gaining of knowledge is the true goal of Wikipedia then I'm hereby invoking the unofficial Ignore:AllRules because I want to learn. Flamarande (talk) 22:08, 16 February 2012 (UTC)


 * I should also add that I (the person who added submitted the 'because' or cause-effect answer) also do believe in it. If I'm riding an escalator and it stops, I'm peeved and look around to see why.  I see that a child has just pressed the 'stop' button located at intervals on the way up, and now I know why it stopped.  But what I "know" isn't really knowledge at all -- it's a total delusion.  Sure, it's true enough that if you press the stop button the escalator stops, and sure enough if you eat three week old milk you will have diarrhea.  Why do you have diarrhea?  Because you ate the three-week-old milk. It's simple enough, it's true, and it's delusional.  It's hard to get over this delusion, but it's there.  (For my first example, the 'why' is that the mother wasn't watching her kid for a moment, because she just got a phone call, for the second example, the why is that you were very, very drunk and high and drank the milk without thinking.  You drank it BECAUSE you were high and drunk, and wouldn't have drunk it otherwise.  You got diarrhea as part of a stupid ill-thought-out binge, much as when someone dies in one.  Sure the immediate cause of death might be drowning --  but did the person die "because they inhaled water"?  Explanations are delusional. 94.27.171.38 (talk) 09:58, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

This question is impossible to answer objectively. A "delusion" is something stupid someone else believes. To a religious person, atheism is a delusion, and vice versa. Anyway, "delusion" is a psychiatric term, and psychiatrists (except for perhaps militant atheists among them) don't consider religious people to all be delusional. This website says the most common form of delusional disorder is the persecutory type. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 00:14, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Sure, and some people believe that the Earth is flat, or that the United States is ruled by a cult of amphibians. I humbly suggest that it would not be wrong to categorize those people as "delusional" beyond all reasonable doubt.  Ditto with religious people, except their beliefs are even more ridiculous and improbable than the flat-Earth theory, or the amphibian-cult conspiracy theory.  --140.180.4.56 (talk) 04:30, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * You mean the United States isn't ruled by a cult of amphibians? Bus stop (talk) 04:43, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * No, that would be France. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:09, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * The cult of amphibians was in H.P. Lovecraft; the more modern conspiracy theory is Lizard people... AnonMoos (talk) 13:20, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Hang on. Isn't the conviction that (global) economic growth can continue forever a delusion which is believed by most people? 202.177.218.59 (talk) 03:35, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Who is "most people"? It can't grow forever, but it can grow for a long, long time: until all the matter in the observable universe is used up.  --140.180.4.56 (talk) 04:30, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The delusion that memory is accurate can be a problematic delusion. Bus stop (talk) 04:39, 17 February 2012 (UTC)


 * The most popular delusion, beyond question, is that we actually exist. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:10, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Albert Einstein said "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one". But reality and existence are different things.  Mathematicians and scientists deal with unreal or imaginary numbers every day of the week, which would be a rather tall order if they didn't exist.  So anyway, what's the difference between an illusion and a delusion?  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  07:49, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * That if you don't know the answer to a question, you should answer it anyway.Thedoorhinge (talk) 09:25, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Double ????? --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  11:06, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

that's a pretty good one about the economy. most people believe banks lend out money someone else has deposited, or perhaps money they have borrowed at a lower interbank rate. this is not the case. banks lend out money that doesn't fully exist until they've lent it out -- they don't have to borrow the full amount from another bank or the government, nor do they have to have the full amount in deposits from depositors. a pretty popular misconception. most people would be surprised goldman sachs doesn't take deposits at all. 188.157.246.43 (talk) 21:33, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

I guess I am not the only one that thought the OP was probably hinting at the classic book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds? It would indeed be interesting to read an updated edition of that book including more recent examples. --Saddhiyama (talk) 21:45, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * My delusion is that someday we'll get through a week on the RD without a militant atheist chiming in off-topic to bash religion. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 23:46, 18 February 2012 (UTC)
 * It could happen. It happened for an entire day recently. There was not one iota of vandalism, trolling, sockpuppetry, or poor good-faith editing on wikipedia. And it made the national news! ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:08, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

Original text for the Oath of Supremacy
Can anyone find the original text for the Oath of Supremacy 1559? Our article on it, which has no sources whatsoever, uses language such as "do utterly testify and declare in my conscience", which is definitely not the way that 16th-century English was spelled. An identical modernisation of the spelling appears (again, without citations) at Act of Supremacy 1558. Looking around on Google produces tons of results that refer to the original text but don't quote it. Nyttend (talk) 18:02, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The text quoted in our article seems to come from a source published in 1896 and cited here. Whether that is the original spelling, I can't say.  Very possibly, the 1896 publication regularized the spelling.  There is likely not an exact transcription of the original document available in electronic form and perhaps not even in print.  The only way to know the original spelling might be to examine the archival document itself.  Marco polo (talk) 18:28, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The original parliament rolls are available at the National Archives, Kew. Marco polo (talk) 19:04, 16 February 2012 (UTC)