Erasmus · Praise of Folly
Folly Check
Are fashion, status, fear or a polished calculation making a questionable choice look wise? The check includes Desiderius itself: data and AI can also become theatre.
Trust and transparency
Why Desiderius?
The humanist and Stoic ideas behind the Desiderius decision method.
Desiderius is named in honour of the Rotterdam humanist Desiderius Erasmus. His willingness to expose learned folly, moral vanity and self-deception gives the method its first discipline: examine the chooser as carefully as the choice.
Marcus Aurelius contributes a second discipline: distinguish responsible action from the illusion of control. His private Stoic exercises were not about suppressing humanity, but about testing impressions, character and response.
Humanist judgement
Human Check
What do body, mind, relationships, dignity and meaning require? A person is never reduced to the metric that happens to be easiest to optimise.
Marcus Aurelius · Stoic practice
Control Check
Which choices, preparations and responses are genuinely yours? External outcomes still matter, but false certainty about controlling them does not improve a decision.
A compass, not a doctrine
Desiderius does not ask visitors to become Erasmians or Stoics. These traditions supply useful questions, not automatic answers. Evidence may correct intuition; compassion may correct a narrow calculation; changing circumstances may justify changing one’s mind.
This is why the system separates AI for judgement, data for truth and code for arithmetic. You remain the author of the decision.
Further reading: Desiderius Erasmus, Erasmus and ambiguity, and Marcus Aurelius.