Talk:Stockdale paradox

Merge with James Stockdale

I must disagree with User:Henrygb's decision to merge this paradox article with the main article on James Stockdale. The former is about a literary creation, resulting in a philosophy primarily discussed in relation to business. James Stockdale in fact, had very little to do with the description and development of the paradox itself. It seems to me that including this "Category::Logic" and "Category::Paradoxes" article in the biography article at James Stockdale disrupts the purpose of the latter page, which is the about the life and times of a person. --LightYear 00:52, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

You can always undo my changes (just edit the previous version in the histories, e.g. [1]). But it is an orphan article (i.e. it has no incoming links from other articles) and to me it is no paradox or even an argument for stoicism (Stockdale claims to have been optimistic as to the end result) and perhaps just an argument against expecting short timetables. There is certainly no logic involved. --Henrygb 01:46, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Rather than blindly reverting though, I'd like to suggest that this page has merit. I agree the paradox is weak from a logical point of view, but Good To Great isn't a robust work of hard-nosed philosophy. This is just a business management concept, which I originally came to Wikipedia for clarification of. In fact, as you say, the paradox might not even be an accurate description of Stockdale's philosophy, hence the inclusion of the paradox in James Stockdale is inappropriate. I think a link from Good To Great would be reasonable, thereby de-orphaning the page. I only added the Category::Logic tag because it was the parent of Category::Paradox and I was responding to the earlier uncategorised tag. --LightYear 02:05, 29 January 2007 (UTC)