Best of Rationality Quotes
"You know what they say the modern version of Pascal's Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God." - Julie from Crystal Nights by Greg Egan
From a BBC interview with a retiring Oxford Don:
Don: "Up until the age of 25, I believed that 'invective' was a synonym for 'urine'."
BBC: "Why ever would you have thought that?"
Don: "During my childhood, I read many of the Edgar Rice Burroughs 'Tarzan' stories, and in those books, whenever a lion wandered into a clearing, the monkeys would leap into the trees and 'cast streams of invective upon the lion's head.'"
BBC: long pause "But, surely sir, you now know the meaning of the word."
Don: "Yes, but I do wonder under what other misapprehensions I continue to labour."
If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top … that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.
Buckminster Fuller
On utility:
culturejammer: you know what pennies are AWESOME for?
culturejammer: throwing at cats
culturejammer: it only costs a single penny
culturejammer: and they'll either chase it, or get hit by it and look pissed off
culturejammer: i now use that system to value prices of things
culturejammer: for example, a thirty dollar game has to be at least as awesome as three thousand catpennies
--bash.org
He uses statistics as a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination.
G.K. Chesterton
The Patrician took a sip of his beer. "I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to its day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."
-- Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
"Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede; not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people cannot count above fourteen."
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
related: The Level Above Mine
It has always appalled me that really bright scientists almost all work in the most competitive fields, the ones in which they are making the least difference. In other words, if they were hit by a truck, the same discovery would be made by somebody else about 10 minutes later.
--Aubrey de Grey
My genes done gone and tricked my brain
By making fucking feel so great
That's how the little creeps attain
Their plan to fuckin' replicate
But brain's got tricks itself, you see
To get the bang but not the bite
I got this here vasectomy
My genes can fuck themselves tonight.
—The r-selectors, Trunclade, quoted in Blindsight by Peter Watts
From Thomas Macaulay's 1848 History of England.
[W]e are under a deception similar to that which misleads the traveler in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan all is dry and bare; but far in advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of refreshing waters... A similar illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and civilization. But if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana.
.................................
We too shall in our turn be outstripped, and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the twentieth century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably paid with twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may receive ten shillings a day; that laboring men may be as little used to dine without meat as they are now to eat rye bread; that sanitary police and medical discoveries may have added several more years to the average length of human life; that numerous comforts and luxuries which are now unknown, or confined to a few, may be within the reach of every diligent and thrifty workingman. And yet it may then be the mode to assert that the increase of wealth and the progress of science have benefited the few at the expense of the many, and to talk of the reign of Queen Victoria as the time when England was truly merry England, when all classes were bound together by brotherly sympathy, when the rich did not grind the faces of the poor, and when the poor did not envy the splendor of the rich.
The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does.
-Warren E. Buffett
John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
-Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong
I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.
Daniel Dennett, interview for TPM: The Philosophers Magazine
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
-- Winston Churchill
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
-- Douglas Adams
When people ask me what philosophy is, I say philosophy is what you do when you don't know what the right questions are yet. Once you get the questions right, then you go answer them, and that's typically not philosophy, that's one science or another. Anywhere in life where you find that people aren't quite sure what the right questions to ask are, what they're doing, then, is philosophy.
One thing I have advocated, without much success, is that children be taught social rules (when they are ready) in exactly the same way they are taught and teach each other games. The point is not whether the rules are right or wrong. Are the rules of 5-card stud poker or hopscotch right or wrong? It's that we're playing a certain game here, and there are rules to this game just as in any other game. If you want to be in the game, then you have to learn how to play it. Different groups of people play different games (different rules = different game), so if you want to play in different groups, you have to learn the games they play. When you develop the levels of understanding above the rule level, you'll be able to understand all games, and be able to join in anywhere. You won't be stuck knowing how to play only one game.
My problem with selling this idea is that people tend to think that their game is the only right one. In fact, being told that they are playing a game with arbitrary rules is insulting or frightening. They want to believe that the rules they know are the ones that everyone ought to play by; they even set up systems of punishment and reward to make sure that nobody tries to play a different game. They turn the game into something that is deadly serious, and so my idea simply seems frivolous instead of liberating.
William T. Powers
"When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to?"
--George Bernard Shaw, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)
If anything of the classical supernatural existed, it would be a branch of engineering by now.
-- Steve Gilham
Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.
— John Von Neumann
"People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx."
-- David Stove, What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts
You want to learn from experience, but you want to learn from other people’s experience when you can.
Warren Buffett
The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
-- George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)
Edit: The full citation is to his 1903 play Man and superman: a comedy and a philosophy, where the character John Tanner ("M.I.R.C., Member of the Idle Rich Class") says:
Yes, because to be treated as a boy was to be taken on the old footing. I had become a new person ; and those who knew the old person laughed at me. The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor : he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.
Even after ten thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser, but an intelligent man requires only two thousand five hundred.
-- Brahma, Mahabharata
Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking.
-- Bill Venables
You say that your opponent lacks humanity. It's the oldest semantic weapon there is. Think of all the categories of people who've been classified as non-human, in various cultures, at various times. People from other tribes. People with other skin colors. Slaves. Women. The mentally ill. The deaf. Homosexuals. Jews. Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, Armenians, Kurds [...]
But suppose you accuse me of 'lacking humanity.' What does that actually mean? What am I likely to have done? Murdered someone in cold blood? Drowned a puppy? Eaten meat? Failed to be moved by Beethoven's Fifth? Or just failed to have—or to seek—an emotional life identical to your own in every respect? Failed to share all your values and aspirations?
The answers is: 'any one of the above.' Which is why it's so fucking lazy. Questioning someone's 'humanity' puts them in the company of serial killers—which saves you the trouble of having to claim anything intelligent about their views.
— Greg Egan (as James Rourke), Distress
Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.
Steven Pinker -- The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
-John McCarthy, on mainstream environmentalism.
As someone who regularly gets into arguments about this, I can say that he's definitely right; you wouldn't believe the amount of nonsense that can be disposed of simply by looking up the relevant numbers and doing a minute's worth of easy arithmetic.
For example, I've heard some people recently claiming that a combination of solar photovoltaics, electrolysis to produce hydrogen, and these new Bloom box fuel cells are cheaper than nuclear fission. Look up the costs of solar farms; about $3 per peak watt. Their average power output is less; we can very optimistically assume that they run at 20% of capacity on average. Efficiency losses from electrolysis and fuel cells are about 50%. Putting it all together, this would cost about $30 per watt of average power delivered. Not including the cost of the fuel cells.
A little googling will show that the total cost of building two new AP1000 reactors in Georgia is about $14 billion, and they average at least 93% of their peak power, and transmission line losses bring their average power delivered to about 1000 MW each. So their cost is about $7 per watt of average power delivered, or about 23% the cost of solar.
There's a lot of extremely harmful bullshit out there, and defeating most of it doesn't take any advanced techniques; it just takes a willingness to look up some relevant numbers and do a bit of arithmetic.
My dad used to have an expression: "Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value."
Joe Biden, remarks delivered in Saint Clair Shores, MI, Monday, September 15, 2008
On a similar theme:
Fiction often mixes up logical with other concepts ... For one thing, authors sometimes say "illogical" when they mean "counter-intuitive." Correct logic is very often counter-intuitive, however, which is to be expected, as logic is meant to prevent errors caused by relying on intuition.
TV Tropes
Doubt, n. The philosophical device Descartes so cleverly used to prove everything he previously believed.
-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon
A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it for a great deal.
-- William A White
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
During the discussion of Pranknet on Slashdot about a month ago, I saw this comment. It reminded me of our discussions about Newcomb's problem and superrationality.
I also disagree that our society is based on mutual trust. Volumes and volumes of laws backed up by lawyers, police, and jails show otherwise.
That's called selection/observation bias. You're looking at only one side of the coin.
I've lived in countries where there's a lot less trust than here. The notion of returning an opened product to a store and getting a full refund is based on trust (yes, there's a profit incentive, and some people do screw the retailers [and the retailers their customers -- SB], but the system works overall). In some countries I've been to, this would be unfeasible: Almost everyone will try to exploit such a retailer.
When a storm knocks out the electricity and the traffic lights stop working, I've always seen everyone obeying the rules. I doubt it's because they're worried about cops. It's about trust that the other drivers will do likewise. Simply unworkable in other places I've lived in.
I've had neighbors whom I don't know receive UPS/FedEx packages for me. Again, trust. I don't think they're afraid of me beating them up.
There are loads of examples. Society, at least in the US, is fairly nice and a lot of that has to do with a common trust.
Which is why someone exploiting that trust is a despised person.
"Most haystacks do not even have a needle."
-- Lorenzo
In the wake of such suffering, there is no way to adequately explain the tragedy. Yet the seemingly random nature of the mass deaths has made them even harder for the survivors to understand.
"In a situation like this, it's only natural to want to assign blame," said Dr. Frederick MacDougal of the National Center for Infectious Diseases, who recently lost a third cousin to a degenerative nerve disorder. "But the disturbing thing about this case is that no one factor is at fault. People are dying for such a wide range of reasons--gunshot wounds, black-lung disease, falls down elevator shafts--that we have been unable to isolate any single element as the cause."
"No one simple explanation can encompass the enormous scope of this problem," MacDougal added. "And that's very difficult for most people to process psychologically."
[...]
Meanwhile, as the world continues to grapple with this seemingly unstoppable threat, the deaths--and the sorrow, fear and pain they have wrought--continue.
As Margaret Heller, a volunteer at a clinic in Baltimore put it, "We do everything we can. But for most of the people we try to help, the sad truth is it's only a matter of time."
-- The Onion, Millions and Millions Dead
Many people equate tolerance with the attitude that every belief is equally true, and that we should all simply accept this fact and go our separate ways. But I view tolerance as the willingness to come together, to face one another in the same room and hack at each other with claw hammers until the truth finally trickles out from the blood and the tears.
-- Raving Atheist, found via the Black Belt Bayesian blog (props to Steven)
Nature draws no line between living and nonliving.
-- K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation
"Intuition only works in situations where neurology and evolution has pre-equipped us with a good set of basic-level categories. That works for dealing with other humans, and for throwing things, and for a bunch of other things that do not, unfortunately, include constructing viable philosophies."
-- Eric S. Raymond
If you can't feel secure - and teach your children to feel secure - about 1-in-610,000 nightmare scenarios - the problem isn't the world. It's you.
-- Bryan Caplan
Philosopher: Can we ever be certain an observation is true?
Engineer: Yep.
Philosopher: How?
Engineer: Lookin'.
Scrollover of SMBC #1879
A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake.
-Confucius
"Voting in a democracy makes you feel powerful, much as playing the lottery makes you feel rich." -- Mencius Moldbug
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Christopher Hitchens
"What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite."
Bertrand Russell, Free Thought and Official Propaganda, in "Sceptical Essays".
[I]n my opinion nothing occurs contrary to nature except the impossible, and that never occurs.
-- Sagredo, "Two New Sciences" (1914 translation), Galileo Galilei
Just a few centuries ago, the smartest humans alive were dead wrong about damn near everything. They were wrong about gods. Wrong about astronomy. Wrong about disease. Wrong about heredity. Wrong about physics. Wrong about racism, sexism, nationalism, governance, and many other moral issues. Wrong about geology. Wrong about cosmology. Wrong about chemistry. Wrong about evolution. Wrong about nearly every subject imaginable.
A young boy walks into a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, “This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.” The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?” The boy takes the quarters and leaves. “What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!” Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. “Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?” The boy licked his cone and replied, “Because the day I take the dollar, the game is over!”
Found on /r/funny
The question I ask myself like almost everyday is 'Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?'
Mark Zuckerberg
"I have now reigned about 50 years in victory or peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation, I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to fourteen."
-- Abd Er-Rahman III of Spain, 960 AD.
Numerical arithmetic should look to children like a simpler and faster way of doing things that they know how to do already, not a set of mysterious recipes for getting right answers to meaningless questions.
John Holt, How Children Fail, p. 101
See also Paul Lockhart.
When I was young, I thought the act of getting older meant, year by year, getting more sophisticated, more hard, cool, and unpitying. Less innocent.
Maybe that was a childish idea of what getting older was about. Maybe adults, mature adults, get more innocent with time, not less. Because the word "innocent" does not mean "naive," it means "not guilty."
Children do small evils to each other, schoolyard fights and insults, not because their hearts are pure, but because their powers are small. Grown-ups have more power. Some of them do great evils with that power. But what about the ones who don't? Aren't they more innocent than children, not less?
-- John C. Wright, Fugitives of Chaos
There is no real me! Don't try to find the real me! Don't try to find someone inside of me who isn't me!
-- Princess Waltz
Commentary: What's odd is not how many people think they contain other people. What's odd is how many of those people think the other person is the real one.
I have met people who exaggerate the differences [between the morality of different cultures], because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did-if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
-C.S. Lewis
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
-- Isaac Asimov
"I accidentally changed my mind."
my four-year-old
Upon his death man must leave everything behind ... and depart forever from the world he has known. He must of necessity go to that foul land of death, a fact which makes death the most sorrowful of all events. ... Some foreign doctrines, however, teach that death should not be regarded as profoundly sorrowful. ... These are all gross deceptions contrary to human sentiment and fundamental truths. Not to be happy over happy events, not to be saddened by sorrowful events, not to show surprise at astonishing events, in a word, to consider it proper not to be moved by whatever happens, are all foreign types of deception and falsehood. They are contrary to human nature and extremely repugnant to me.
-- Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) - quoted from Blocker, Japanese Philosophy, p. 109
Motoori was as far as you can get from being a rationalist but this quote was so Yudkowskian that I felt it belonged here.
My hotel doesn't have a 13th floor because of superstition, but people on the 14th floor, you should know what floor you're really on. If you jump out the window, you will die sooner than you expect.
-- Mitch Hedberg (Quoted from memory)
Robot: "With all your modern science, are you any closer to understanding the mystery of how a robot walks or talks?"
Farnsworth: "Yes you idiot! The circuit diagram is right in the inside of your case."
Robot: "I choose to believe what I was programmed to believe!"
-- Futurama, The Honking
Kołakowski's Law, or The Law of the Infinite Cornucopia:
For any given doctrine that one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of arguments by which to support it.
Leszek Kołakowski
In 1923, England and France divided between them the previously Turkish territories of what are modern Syria, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine. They drew a pencil line on a map to mark the treaty border.
It turned out that the thickness of the pencil line itself was several hundred meters on the ground. In 1964, Israel fought a battle with Syria over that land.
People were killed because someone neglected to sharpen their pencil. That's "scribbles on a piece of paper" for you.
Ref: a book found by Google. I originally learned about this from an Israeli plaque at the Dan River preserve near the border.
Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.
Dean Schlicter
Mitch Hedberg on the distinction between labels and the things to which they are applied:
I just bought a 2-bedroom house, but it's up to me, isn't it, how many bedrooms there are? Fuck you, real estate lady! This bedroom has a oven in it! This bedroom’s got a lot of people sitting around watching TV. This bedroom is A.K.A. a hallway.
"Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson."
-- Frank Herbert, Dune
It helps to stop worrying about what you are and concentrate on what you do. If you think of a poet as a person with some special qualifications that come by nature (or divine favor), you are likely to make one of two mistakes about yourself. If you think you've got what it takes, you may fail to learn what you need to know in order to use whatever qualities you may have. On the other hand, if you think you do not have what it takes, you may give up too easily, thinking it is useless to try. A poet is someone - you, me, anyone - who writes poems. That question out of the way, now we can learn to write poems better.
Judson Jerome, The Poet's Handbook, Chap. 1 ("From Sighs and Groans to Art")
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
Bertrand Russell
If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.
-- Bertrand Russell
I know that most men — not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems — can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.
— Leo Tolstoy, 1896 (excerpt from "What Is Art?")
I had, also, during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.
-From his Autobiography, 1902.
A wonderful quote indeed. Found by guessing that it was biographical or autobiographical (it seemed a little too personal for a scientific treatise) and searching for the word "fact" in the online text of the (very readable) autobiography.
And when someone makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means.
-- H Beam Piper, "Space Viking"
On some pitch black mornings, hearing what I knew was a cold wind howling outside, I might think, "Well, it is certainly comfortable in this bed, and maybe it wouldn't hurt if I just skipped practicing to-day." But my response to this was not to draw on something called will power, to insult or threaten myself, but to take a longer look at my life, to extend my vision, to think about the whole of my experience, to reconnect present and future, and quite specifically, to ask myself, "Do you like playing the cello or not? Would you like to play it better or not?" When I put the matter this way I could see that I enjoyed playing the cello more than I enjoyed staying in bed. So I got up. If, as sometimes happened or happens, I do stay in bed, not sleeping, not really thinking, but just not getting up, it is not because will power is weak but because I have temporarily become disconnected, so to speak, from the wholeness of my life. I am living in that Now that some people pursue so frantically, that gets harder to find the harder we look for it.
John Holt, Freedom and Beyond, p. 119
See also this comment by Z_M_Davis.
Of course, to really see what someone values you'd have to see their budget profile across a wide range of wealth levels.
"Everyone thinks they've won the Magical Belief Lottery. Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow lucked into the one true belief system."
-- R Scott Bakker, Neuropath
Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
Hunches are not bad, they just need to be allowed to die a natural death when evidence proves them wrong.
"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!"
~Girl Genius
We have not solved all your problems. Each answer only led to new questions. We are still confused - but perhaps we are confused on a higher level, and about more important things.
-- seen on a hotel bulletin board
"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."
— Marcus Aurelius
To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it--the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.
... "But," says one, "I am a busy man; I have no time for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the nature of the arguments."
Then he should have no time to believe.
--W. K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief."
if you're the smartest person in the room, go look for a room with smarter people in it.
This bedroom's over in that guy's house! Sir, you have one of my bedrooms, are you aware? Do not decorate it!
And more Mitch Hedburg, illustrating how redrawing the map won't alter the territory.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
"Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do. ... Science advances whenever an Art becomes a Science. And the state of the Art advances too because people always leap into new territory once they have understood more about the old."
-- Donald Knuth
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
-- Voltaire
"Experiment and theory often show remarkable agreement when performed in the same laboratory."
-- Daniel Bershader
"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."
-- M. Cartmill
Today, safe flight inside clouds is possible using gyroscopic instruments that report the airplane’s orientation without being misled by centrifugal effects. But the pilot’s spatial intuition is still active, and often contradicts the instruments. Pilots are explicitly, emphatically trained to trust the instruments and ignore intuition—precisely the opposite of the Star Wars advice—and those who fail to do so often perish.
-- Gary Drescher "Good and Real"
(I really like this quote as a counterweight to the ubiquitous cliche-advise to follow you intuition. Often, your intuition may be fooled. And, it cannot be repeated often enough, Good and Real is a must-read for LW-minded folks)
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." --Woody Allen
Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.
--Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline (2009), p 216
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
-- George Eliot
Someone once quoted Shakespeare to the philosopher W. V. O. Quine: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." To which Quine is said to have responded: "Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth."
I was about to reply that apparently Marcus Aurelius had never put his hand on a burning stove, but then I remembered that he had probably been taught about Mucius Scaevola about a million times.
The singularity is my retirement plan.
-- tocomment, in a Hacker News post
Rule I
We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.
To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.
Rule II
Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.
As to respiration in a man and in a beast; the descent of stones in Europe and in America; the light of our culinary fire and of the sun; the reflection of light in the earth, and in the planets.
Rule III
The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intensification nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.
For since the qualities of bodies are only known to us by experiments, we are to hold for universal all such as universally agree with experiments; and such as are not liable to diminution can never be quite taken away. We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple, and always consonant to itself. . .
Rule IV
In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.
This rule we must follow, that the argument of induction may not be evaded by hypotheses.
Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis: Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy
The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report.
From desert cliff and mountaintop we trace the wide design,
Strike-slip fault and overthrust and syn and anticline...
We gaze upon creation where erosion makes it known,
And count the countless aeons in the banding of the stone.
Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks shells are found;
Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground.
The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.
There are those who name the stars, who watch the sky by night,
Seeking out the darkest place, to better see the light.
Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will,
Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still.
High above the mountaintops, where only distance bars,
The truth has left its footprints in the dust between the stars.
We may watch and study or may shudder and deny,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the sky.
By stem and root and branch we trace, by feather, fang and fur,
How the living things that are descend from things that were.
The moss, the kelp, the zebrafish, the very mice and flies,
These tiny, humble, wordless things--how shall they tell us lies?
We are kin to beasts; no other answer can we bring.
The truth has left its fingerprints on every living thing.
Remember, should you have to choose between them in the strife,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote life.
And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
~Catherine Faber, The Word of God
In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information; extract the knowledge.
Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. These filters protect against advertising.
Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians.
Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects from the media.
-- Marc Stielger, David's Sling
Sheldon: "More wrong?" Wrong is an absolute state and not subject to gradation.
Stuart: Of course it is. It's a little wrong to call a tomato a vegetable; it's very wrong to say it's a suspension bridge.
-- The Big Bang Theory
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world, and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
-- E. B. White
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
-- H. L. Mencken
"A witty saying proves nothing." -- Voltaire
I've always found that useful to keep in mind when reading threads like this.
That had better be a long conversation, a very wise person, and one damned lost field you were studying for ten years.
When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they're nonsense generally keep quiet.
-- Paul Graham
A great many years ago, a couple of Jehovah Witnesses bit off more than they could chew with my grandmother. During the unsolicited conversation one of them remarked, "Only God can make a rainbow". To which my grandmother-who was watering her plants at the time-said, "Nonsense!", and created her own rainbow with a spray of water from the hose. Family lore has it that was the end of the conversation.
-- seen on Livejournal
In general, we are least aware of what our minds do best.
— Marvin Minsky
Your calendar never lies. All we have is our time. The way we spend our time is our priorities, is our "strategy." Your calendar knows what you really care about. Do you?
-- Tom Peters, HT Ben Casnocha
One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
I will maintain a realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter the line "No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!" (After that, death is usually instantaneous.)
I will be neither chivalrous nor sporting. If I have an unstoppable superweapon, I will use it as early and as often as possible instead of keeping it in reserve.
If my advisors ask "Why are you risking everything on such a mad scheme?", I will not proceed until I have a response that satisfies them.
I will see a competent psychiatrist and get cured of all extremely unusual phobias and bizarre compulsive habits which could prove to be a disadvantage.
I will never build a sentient computer smarter than I am.
-- Peters Evil Overlord List on how to be a less wrong fictional villain
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things
We know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
-- Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
Thinking is skilled work. It is not true that we are naturally endowed with the ability to think clearly and logically--without learning how, or without practicing.... People with untrained minds should no more expect to think clearly and logically than people who have never learned and never practiced can expect to find themselves good carpenters, golfers, bridge-players, or pianists.
Alfred Mander -- Logic for the Millions
In an universe full of inanimate material, sentient beings are gods.
-- spire3661, in a Slashdot post
(posted in the right thread this time)
People constantly ignore my good advice by contributing to the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, CARE, and public radio all in the same year--as if they were thinking, "OK, I think I've pretty much wrapped up the problem of heart disease; now let's see what I can do about cancer."
You don't have to believe everything you think.
Seen on bumper sticker, via ^zhurnaly.
(In a thread where people were asked whether or not they had a religious experience of "feeling God"):
I had something similar to feeling God, I suppose, except it was in essence the exact opposite. I was in a forest one summer, and I looked up at the sunlight shining through the leaves, and suddenly it felt like I could see each and every individual leaf in the forest and trace the path of each photon that poured through them, and I remember thinking over and over, in stunned amazement, "the world is sufficient. The world is sufficient."
I'd never thought much about religion before that, but that experience made me realize that the material world was entire orders of magnitude more beautiful than any of the tawdry religious fantasies people came up with, and it felt unspeakably tragic that anyone would ever reject this, our most incredible universe, for spiritual pipe-dreams. In a way, you might say I felt the lack of god, and it felt like glory.
-- Axiomatic
We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning.
-- Carl Sagan
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..."
-- Isaac Asimov
The fact that you are giving money to charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not.
-C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
One of my mentors once gave me a list of obvious things to check when stuff doesn't work. Funny, years later I still need this list:
It worked. No one touched it but you. It doesn't work. It's probably something you did.
It worked. You made one change. It doesn't work. It's probably the change you made.
It worked. You promoted it. It doesn't work. Your testing environment probably isn't the same as your production environment.
It worked for these 10 cases. It didn't work for the 11th case. It was probably never right in the first place.
It worked perfectly for 10 years. Today it didn't work. Something probably changed.
edw519, Hacker News, on debugging.
I always need that list, too.
We live in a world where it has become "politically correct" to avoid absolutes. Many want all religions to be given the same honor, and all gods regarded as equally true and equally fictitious. But take these same people, who want fuzzy, all-inclusive thinking in spiritual matters, and put them on an airplane. You will find they insist on a very dogmatic, intolerant pilot who will stay on the "straight and narrow" glidepath so their life will not come to a violent end short of the runway. They want no fuzzy thinking here!
Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.
Rene Descartes.
Man, I'm amazing! I'm a machine that turns FOOD into IDEAS!
-- T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics #539
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." - Peter Drucker
"One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it."
-- David Hilbert
No one has ever announced that because determinism is true thermostats do not control temperature.
Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, qtd. in Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
Whitehead, Alfred North (1861 - 1947), An Introduction to Mathematics.
"There is a superstition in avoiding superstition, when men think to do best if they go furthest from the superstition formerly received."
-- Francis Bacon
It's not really surprising, though, is it? Brilliant people want to have other brilliant people as their colleagues.
(In fact, one mathematician of my acquaintance said that he once dabbled in circuit design, but when his first paper in the field was received as a major achievement, he left it immediately, concluding that if he could make such a large contribution so easily, the field must be unworthy of him.)
How utterly selfish of him.
Sounds like I'd better change that.
When I look around and think that everything's completely and utterly fucked up and hopeless, my first thought is "Am I wearing completely and utterly fucked up and hopeless-colored glasses?"
Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind is obsessed with it.
-- Bruce Lee
The word agnostic is actually used with the two distinct meanings of personal ignorance and intrinsic unknowability in the same context. They are distinguished when necessary with a qualifier.
WEAK agnosticism: I have no fucking idea who fucked this shit up.
STRONG agnosticism: Nobody has any fucking idea who fucked this shit up.There is a certain confusion with weak atheism which could (and frequently does) arise, but that is properly reserved for the category of theological noncognitivists,
WEAK atheism: What the fuck do you mean with this God shit?
STRONG atheism: Didn't take any God to fuck this shit up.which is different again from weak theism.
WEAK theism: Somebody fucked this shit up.
STRONG theism: God fucked this shit up.An interesting cross-categorical theological belief not easily represented above is
DEISM: God set this shit up and it fucked itself.
-- Snocone, in a Slashdot post
I've always believed that the mind is the best weapon.
-- John Rambo, Rambo: First Blood Part II
I'm embarassed to bring this up again, because I seem to quote steven0461 too often--but, in something close to his words; "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is likely more improbable than an error in one of your impossibility proofs."
From the Wikipedia article about perverse incentives:
In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty for each rat pelt handed in was intended to exterminate rats. Instead, it led to the farming of rats.
and
19th century palaeontologists traveling to China used to pay peasants for each fragment of dinosaur bone (dinosaur fossils) that they produced. They later discovered that peasants dug up the bones and then smashed them into multiple pieces to maximise their payments.
"I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do."
Robert A. Heinlein
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
-- William James
-- Ryan Armand
Sometimes I see something that just seems to hit the bullseye deeply in the centre, and sticks there, quivering.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
There's also a certain fun challenge in looking for jewels among the fecal matter. Rationalist aphorisms by Voltaire or Russell are a regular feature of their writing, and have been quoted in books and articles for decades or centuries, but a pearl of wisdom by a fideist is a tough find and most likely unknown to other LW readers.
Heh. Of all goddamn things to be a hipster about, "rationality quotes" has got to be one hell of a weird choice.
'One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit.
"Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he took a 2nd one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies."
The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet.
"You see," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter."'
I think of this as a rationalist parable and not so much a quote. It has a lot of personal resonance since I often had dog biscuits with my tea when I was younger.
I think the local version would be something like, "May my strength as a rationalist give me the ability to discern what I can and cannot change, and the determination to make a desperate effort at the latter when remaining uncertainty allows that this has the highest expected utility."
If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day.
John Archibald Wheeler
When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.
-- Richard Dawkins
Once again, we are saddled with a Stone Age moral psychology that is appropriate to life in small, homogeneous communities in which all members share roughly the same moral outlook. Our minds trick us into thinking that we are absolutely right and that they are absolutely wrong because, once upon a time, this was a useful way to think. It is no more, though it remains natural as ever. We love our respective moral senses. They are as much a part of us as anything. But if we are to live together in the world we have created for ourselves, so unlike the one in which our ancestors evolved, we must know when to trust our moral senses and when to ignore them.
--Joshua Greene
Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it pisses on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying to gently bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence. Because if I don't learn to do this, I think I'll keep getting things wrong.
-Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Better our hypotheses die for our errors than ourselves.
-- Karl Popper
Moral language persuades best when opinions are not yet formed, which is why writers of children’s literature can get away with saying things like, “Mr. Billings was an awful, horrible man with a heart of stone.” This sounds like a line from a children’s book because it employs persuasive methods that, though appropriate for children, would insult the intelligence of most adult readers.
Most moral discourse is the conversational equivalent of children’s literature. Disputants speak to one another—or, rather, at one another—as if their interlocutors failed to pay adequate attention on the day elementary morality was explained. Unaware of the projective nature of value, they marvel at their opponents’ blindness, their utter failure to see what is so perfectly obvious. Not knowing what else to do, they scold their opponents as if they were children, and scold them as if they were belligerent children when they fail to respond the first time.
What to do about this? Take a cue from good writers. Stick to the facts. Keep evaluative language to a minimum, and get rid of the most overtly judgmental, moralistic language.
-- Joshua Greene, The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality And What To Do About It
"CAESAR [recovering his self-possession]: Pardon him. Theodotus, he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature."
--George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)
Politicians compete to bribe voters with their own money.
--Adapted from something in The Economist (sorry, they don't have bylines)
If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first four sharpening the axe. - Abraham Lincoln
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
-- Isaac Asimov via Salvor Hardin, Foundation
…it is fatally easy to read a pattern into stochastically generated data.
-- John Maynard Smith (The Causes of Extinction, 1989)
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
-- Clay Shirky
"All things end badly - or else they wouldn't end"
- Brian Flanagan (Tom Cruise), Cocktail, 1988. He was referring to relationships, but it's actually a surprisingly general rule.
Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: 'My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.' The stranger is a theologian.
- Denis Diderot
The first person to come to mind for me was Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege who is famous for basically inventing symbolic logic (specifically, predicate logic with quantified variables). He spent an enormous amount of time working on the thesis that the results of mathematics flow rather directly from little more than the rules of logic plus set theory. He aimed to provide a constructive proof of this thesis.
Bertrand Russell discovered a logical flaw (now called Russell's paradox) in Frege's first book containing the constructive proof when the second book in his series was already in press and communicated it to Frege. Russell wrote of Frege's reaction in a bit of text I recall reading in a textbook on symbolic logic but found duplicated in this document with more details from which I quote:
As I think about acts of integrity and grace, I realise there is nothing in my knowledge to compare with Frege's dedication to truth. His entire life's work was on the verge of completion, much of his work had been ignored to the benefit of men infinitely less capable, his second volume was about to be published, and upon finding that his fundamental assumption was in error, he responded with intellectual pleasure clearly submerging any feelings of personal disappointment. It was almost superhuman and a telling indication of that of which men are capable if their dedication is to creative work and knowledge instead of cruder efforts to dominate and be known.
I don't think science generally lives up to its own ideals... but as I grow older and more cynical I find myself admiring the mere fact that it has those ideals and that every so often I find examples of people living up to them :-)
The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance—meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his powers, and so set his understanding in motion.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Norman Kemp Smith), p. A5/B8.
That's not true. He had perfectly good reasons for atomism in his context.
The ontological arguments of Parmenides (and as exposited by Melissus) lead to extremely unpalatable, if not outright contradictory, conclusions, such as there being no time or change or different entities. The arguments seem valid, and most of their premises are reasonable, but one of his most important and questionable premises is that void cannot exist.
Reject that premise and you are left with matter and void. How are matter and void distributed? Well, either matter can be indefinitely chopped up (continuous) or it must halt and be discrete at some point. The Pluralists like Anaxagoras take the former approach, but continuousness leads to its own issues with regard to change.* So to avoid issues with infinity, you must have discrete matter with size/divison limits - atoms.
So, Democritus and Leucippus are led to Atomism as the one safe path through a thicket of paradoxes and problems. Describing it as wild conjecture is deeply unfair, and, I hope, ignorant.
* One argument, if I remember it from Sextus Empiricus's Against the Physicists correctly, is that if matter really is infinitely divisible, then you should be able to divide it again and again, with void composing ever more of the original mass you started with; if you do division infinitely, then you must end up with nothing at all! That is a problem. Cantor dust would not have been acceptable to the ancient Greeks.
I was actually starting another article that presents a solution (well, a research program) for qualia. [1] The idea is this:
The concept of qualia becomes mysterious when we have a situation in which sensory data (edit: actually, cognition of the sensory data) is incommensurable (not comparable) between beings. So the key question is, when would this situation arise?
If you have two identical robots with idential protocols, you have no qualia problem. They can directly exchange their experiences and leave no question about whether "my red" is "your red".
But here's the kicker: imagine if the robots don't use identical protocols. Imagine that they instead simply use themselves to collect and retain as much information about their experiences as physically possible. They optimize "amount I remember".
In that case, they will use every possible trick to make efficient use of what they have, no longer limited by the protocols. So they will eventually use "encoding schemes" for which there is no external rulebook; the encoding is implicitly "decompressed" by their overall functionality. They have not left a "paper trail" that someone else can use and make sense of (without significant reverse engineering effort).
In that case, you can no longer directly port one's experience over into the other's. To each other, the encoding looks like meaningless garbage. But if they're still alive, they can still achieve some level of commensurability. They can look at the same uniform surface and ask each other, "how does your photo-modality respond to this thingamajig?" [2] They can then synchronize internal experiences across each other and have a common conception of "red", even as it still may differ from what exactly the other robot is doing internally upon receiving red-data.
(And they can further constrain the environment to make sure they are talking about the same thing if e.g. one robot has tightly-coupled sensory cognition in which sensation of color varies with acoustics of the environment.)
This, I claim, is the status of humans with respect to each other: We have very similar general "body plans" but also use a no-holds-barred, standards-free method for creating (encoding) memories that puts up a severe -- but partially circumventable -- barrier to comparing internal experiences.
(Oh, and since you guys are probably still wondering: even I wouldn't fault you for failing to explain color a blind man. The best I would expect is that you can say, "Alright, you know how smelling is different from hearing? Well, seeing is as different from both of those as they are from each other.")
[1] Yes, I start a lot of articles but don't finish them ... have about three times as many in progress as I have posted.
[2] Remember: even though they have different internal experiences, they can still tell that a particular observation depends on a particular sensor by turning it on and off, and thus meaningfully talking about how their cognition relates to a particular sensor.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
-- Plutarch
... the history of mathematics is a history of horrendously difficult problems being solved by young people too ignorant to know that they were impossible.
-- Freeman Dyson, Birds and Frogs
Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth. (Jean-Paul Sartre)
I think you may have misunderstood the point Dawkins was making. It wasn't "if you're in an aeroplane, you aren't entitled to denigrate the society whose achievements made that possible". It was "If you're in an aeroplane, you aren't entitled to claim that all truth is relative, because the fact that the aeroplane stays in the air is dependent on a very particular set of notions about truth, which demonstrably work better than their rivals -- as demonstrated by the fact that our aeroplanes actually fly."
On the same theme as the previous one:
I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There is no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there is no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to "God" are all answered at about the same 50-percent rate.
George Carlin
'One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.
At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.”
God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”'
Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., quoted in Medical World News (September 1, 1972), p. 45, as quoted in Tufte's 1974 book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy; http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12/the-ethics-of-random-clinical-trials.html
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
Charles Babbage
Practically anything can go faster than Disc light, which is lazy and tame, unlike ordinary light. The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles—kingons, or possibly queons—that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expounded because, at that point, the bar closed.
-- Terry Pratchett, Mort, on mind-projection fallacy intuitions (and/or on Jack Sarfatti's theories of superluminal signaling)
There is a mathematical style in which proofs are presented as strings of unmotivated tricks that miraculously do the job, but we found greater intellectual satisfaction in showing how each next step in the argument, if not actually forced, is at least something sweetly reasonable to try. Another reason for avoiding [pulling] rabbits [out of the magicians's hat] as much as possible was that we did not want to teach proofs, we wanted to teach proof design. Eventually, expelling rabbits became another joy of my professional life.
-- Edsger Dijkstra
Edit: Added context to "rabbits" in brackets.
"It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest assured with that degree of precision that the nature of the subject admits, and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible."
--Aristotle
Freedom is understood in contrast to its various opposites. I can be free as opposed to being presently coerced. I can be free as opposed to being under some other person's general control. I can be free as opposed to being subject to delusions or insanity. I can be free as opposed to being ruled by the state in denial of ordinary personal liberties. I can be free as opposed to being in jail or prison. I can be free as opposed to living under unusually heavy personal obligations. I can be free as opposed to being burdened by bias or prejudice. I can even be free (or free spirited) as opposed to being governed by ordinary social conventions. The question that needs to be asked, and which hardly ever is asked, is whether I can be free as opposed to being causally determined. Given that some kind of causal determinism is presupposed in the very concept of human action, it would be odd if this were so. Why does anyone think that it is?
-- David Hill
"Thus Aristotle laid it down that a heavy object falls faster than a light one does. The important thing about this idea is not that he was wrong, but that it never occurred to Aristotle to check it." Albert Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
"Everything is open to questioning. That does not mean all answers are equally valid."
-- Kelvin Throop
Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.
"My style" sure makes a great crutch for putting off learning how to draw better, doesn't it?
Egypt "peganthyrus" Urnash, comment thread, a quick drawing lesson, July 17, 2008
This conception of debate as combat is, in fact, probably the main reason why the Social Text editors fell for my parody. Acting not as intellectuals seeking the truth, but as self-appointed generals in the "Science Wars'', they apparently leapt at the chance to get a "real'' scientist on their "side''. Now, ruing their blunder, they must surely feel a kinship with the Trojans.
But the military metaphor is a mistake; the Social Text editors are not my enemies.
- Alan Sokal (hat tip)
"You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right." --Randall Munroe, in the alt-text of xkcd 701
"If the tool you have is a hammer, make the problem look like a nail."
Steven W. Smith, The Scientist and Engineers Guide to Digital Signal Processing
...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
-- Herbert Simon 1971
"It is said that those who appreciate legislation and sausages should not see them being made. The same is true for human emotions." -- Steven Pinker
If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
-- Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts
I've asked this question before, but where the hell does the high-quality rationality on TV Tropes come from?
Silas, you're making strong arguments but mixing in emotion that makes it harder for your interlocutor to change their mind.
I've linked to a quote from Daniel Ellsberg at Overcoming Bias, but it seemed relevant enough here to excerpt the bits that caught my eye:
First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn't, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn't even guess
[...]
you will forget there ever was a time when you didn't have it, and you'll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don't....and that all those other people are fools
[...]
you'll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information [...] But that takes a while to learn. In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. Because you'll be thinking as you listen to them: 'What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?' And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening.
[...]
You will deal with a person who doesn't have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you'll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You'll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you'll become something like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.
And by the same token, we'll know we've nailed AI not when we have written a program that can have that conversation... but when we have written down an account of how we are able to have that conversation, to such a level of detail that there's nothing left to explain.
Writing a program which solves the Towers of Hanoi is not too hard. Proving, given a formalization of the ToH, various properties of a program that solves it, isn't too hard. But looking at a bunch of wooden disks slotted on pegs and coming up with an interpretation of that situation which corresponds to the abstract scheme we know as "Towers of Hanoi"... That's where the fun is.
I'm continually amused by the abundance of quotes here on LW from sundry wingnuts and theists, some of which are quite good. We've had Jack Chick, Ted Kaczynski, CS Lewis (howdya like that reference class, Lewis), GK Chesterton, and that crazy "Einstein was wrong!" guy.
Maybe being a contrarian in anything whatsoever helps one to break through the platitudes and cached thoughts that ordinary folks seem to bog down in whenever they try to think.
...
...
...reason #7 I love LessWrong: when they want to improve audience comprehension, people have to translate from English to mathematical formulas instead of the reverse.
Know the hair you have to get the hair you want.
-Pantene Pro-V hair care bottle
Getting caught up in style and throwing away victory is something for the lower ranks to do. Captains can't even think about doing such a carefree thing. Don't try to be a good guy. It doesn't matter who owes who. From the instant they enter into a war, both sides are evil.
- Shunsui Kyōraku Bleach
Related to: Politics, Protection
“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”
--Nietzsche
I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
Bertrand Russell, ‘Introduction’, in Sceptical Essays, London, 1928
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." -- Richard Feynman
You cannot improve the world just by being right.
-- Confusion, Why functional programming doesnt catch on
"From the inside, ideology usually looks like common sense."
--John Quiggin
http://crookedtimber.org/2009/04/22/the-ideology-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/
"Your superior intellects are no match for our puny weapons!"
(Variously attributed. TV Tropes says the Simpsons.)
Also variously interpreted. I take it as a caution against forgetting to actually win with one's towering genius.
"The seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."
"The lottery is a tax on those incapable of basic math."
-- Ambrose Bierce
"I'm writing a book on magic," I explain, and I'm asked, "Real magic?" By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. "No," I answer. "Conjuring tricks, not real magic."
Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.
-from Net of Magic, by Lee Siegel
The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.
-- Terry Pratchett, 'Hogfather'
People often lack the discipline to adhere to a superior strategy that doesn't "feel" right. Reasoning in a way that sometimes "feels" wrong takes discipline.
-- Michael Bishop, Epistemology and the psychology of human judgement
As a rule, people judged themselves according to their intentions and others according to results. In study after study, individuals ranked themselves as more charitable, more compassionate, more conscientious than others, not because they in fact were - but because they wanted to be these things and were almost entirely blind to the fact that others wanted the same. Intentions were all important when it came to self-judgement, and pretty much irrelevant when it came to judging others. The only exceptions, it turned out, were loved ones.
That was what it meant to be a 'significant' other: to be included in the circle of delusions that everyone used to exempt themselves.
-- Scott Bakker, Neuropath
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
-H. L. Mencken
On parsimony:
If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
--John von Neumann, at the first national meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery
"In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it." GK Chesterton
That is not dead which can eternal lie,/ And with strange aeons even Death may die.
—H.P. Lovecraft, clearly talking about cryonic preservation
also from bash.org (made as a reply since I'm already at my 5-quote limit):
+kritical christin: you need to learn how to figure out stuff yourself..
+Christin1 how do i do that
More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good people are at evaluating risk.
Bruce Schneier
If [Ayn] Rand really wanted to build an individualist sub-culture, she would have done so in an evolutionarily informed way. If people naturally care about the opinions of others, jumping on people is a good way to get dishonest conformity, but a bad way to get an honest exchange of ideas. Instead, an individualist sub-culture must be built upon tolerance and honesty. I'd suggest three key norms:
- Don't think less of people who sincerely disagree.
- Do think less of people who insincerely agree.
- Do think less of people who think less of people who sincerely disagree.
Reference: Guardians of Ayn Rand
Something is missing here, a fourth term: [..] the unknown knowns - things we don't know that we know. That's the unconscious! That's ideology!
In our public medical personas, we often act as though morality consisted only in following society's conventions: we do this not so much out of laziness but because we recognize that it is better that the public think of doctors as old-fashioned or stupid, than that they should think us evil.
-- The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine
Million-to-one odds happen eight times a day in New York.
Penn Jillette
The man who lies to others has merely hidden away the truth, but the man who lies to himself has forgotten where he put it.
old Arab proverb, according to this page, which is itself interesting
You're thinking of Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness. AngryParsley was referring to Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, neither of which should be confused with Mohs Scale of Rock and Metal Hardness.
"There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you."
-- J.K. Rowling, Harvard commencement address.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
-- Christopher Hitchens
Right on. I'm thinking about writing an "explain yourself" series that shows how you can overcome the supposed barriers to explaining your position if there's actual substance to it to begin with.
ETA: 5 upvotes so far -- sounds like a vote of confidence for such an article.
ETA2: Message heard loud and clear! I'm working on an article for submission, which may expand into a series.
There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
He seems to have understood that 0 and 1 are not probabilities.
"It's wonderful how much we suck compared to us ten years from now!"
-- Michael Blume
It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
Another Twain quote.
...Or you've just missed something. If all you're left with is improbable you notice that you are confused. I've always thought that quote was off.
Then again, Sherlock never did miss anything.
Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and bourgeois, theologians and physicians, politicians and moralists, religionists, philosophers, or poets, not forgetting the liberal economists - unbounded worshippers of the ideal, as we know - are much offended when told that man, with his magnificent intelligence, his sublime ideas, and his boundless aspirations, is, like all else existing in the world, nothing but matter, only a product of vile matter.
We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily belong to it - that this matter has nothing in common with the vile matter of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giving birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum, an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God; as the opposite of this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by that constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme nothingness.
--Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State
Reminded me of some posts here by Academician.
Please don't delete comments. It makes it hard to understand orphaned replies. Adding an [Edit: Withdrawn] at the end of the comment serves the same purpose, but maintains conversational continuity.
"You can always reach me through my blog!" he panted. "Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future--"
- Zendegi, by Greg Egan (2010)
Go ahead, down-vote me. It's still paradoxically-awesome to be burned in a Greg Egan novel...
This sounds like a bad idea.
It does, but mostly for the same reasons that cryonics does. It's a violation of Common Sense and Sensibility. But given the beliefs that tocomment has (emphasis: not mine!) it is the wise decision for him to make. He has just bitten the bullet and actually followed through from his stated beliefs with (token verbal support of) the rational conclusion.
I think tocomment has his predictions about the future miscallibrated and has probably not accounted for his own cognitive failure modes but I suspect that people would judge him to be 'unwise' almost completely independently of whether or not they share his premised beliefs.
Basically, I think we (that is, humans) are likely to judge him as naive and foolish because he is actually acting as though his beliefs should relate to his pragmatic choices.
By way of some illustration:
- A mainstream 'retirement plan' is probably making the same 'putting all your eggs in one basket' mistake that tocomment makes. It is by no means certain that the structures and circumstances that make conventionally wise retirement plans will remain in place. There are perhaps other more fundamental actions that should be taken to ensure future safety and wellbeing than investing in superannuation. "Creating a stash of gold somewhere" may be a little trite but "develop the kind of social and political connections and develop the skills and resources that will allow you to survive into your later years even in the face of social upheaval" is something that makes sense and has applied across all cultures and times. Yet we aren't likely to look down our noses at people who don't divert significant resources away from their 401k and into that sort of future insurance.
- "Retirement Plans" essentially amount to saving up lots of money for use while you go through the process of physical and mental decline and then death. A plausible and sane person may actually have values such that a conventional retirement plan is a strictly irrational allocation of resources. That person is probably still going to be labelled foolish, unwise or naive despite the fact that he is acting entirely in his own best interests. ie. At worst he is weird, not stupid but will usually be lumped with the latter judgement.
Either the prayer is answered, or not, so the odds must be 50%, right? :)
This is a bit long for a rationality quote and isn't really a quote but short enough and worth the read: The most poetic and convincing argument for striving for posthumanity (via aleph.se).
David Hume was right to predict that superstition would survive for hundreds of years after his death, but how could he have anticipated that his own work would inspire Kant to invent a whole new package of superstitions? Or that the incoherent system of Marx would move vast populations to engineer their own ruin? Or that the infantile rantings of the author of Mein Kampf would be capable of bringing the whole world to war?
Perhaps we will one day succeed in immunizing our societies against such bouts of collective idiocy by establishing a social contract in which each child is systematically instructed in Humean skepticism. Such a new Emile would learn about the psychological weaknesses to which Homo sapiens is prey, and so would understand the wisdom of treating all authorities - political leaders and social role-models, academics and teachers, philosophers and prophets, poets and pop stars - as so many potential rogues and knoves, each out to exploit the universal human hunger for social status. He would therefore appreciate the necessity of doing all of his own thinking for himself. He would understand why and when to trust his neighbors. Above all, he would waste no time yearning for utopias that are incompatible with human nature.
-- Ken Binmore, in Natural Justice, p56
For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.
~René Descartes, Discourse on the Method
"Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
-- Charles Darwin
Most things are, in fact, slippery slopes. And if you start backing off from one thing because it's a slippery slope, who knows where you'll stop?
Sean M Burke
"Faced with the choice of changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
"Imagine a world where everything changes to match the state of your mind, where evidence never pushes back against your theories, where your every thought is correct simply because you think it so. Can there be any better definition of hell for a man of learning? "
-- Bradeline, Fall From Heaven
...you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.This is isomorphic to the principle that you should prevent your beliefs about how things are from being contaminated by how you wish they were. Most people let them mix pretty promiscuously. The continuing popularity of religion is the most visible index of that.
-- pg
"Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils; but present evils triumph over it."
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
If they are false they are small violations of truth and thus inconsequential.
Consequentialism: The belief that doing the right thing makes the world a better place.
-- DanielLC
"You can safely say that you have made God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." -- Reverend Robert Cromey
2 + 3 = 5, 3 + 2 = 5, 5 - 2 =3, and 5 - 3 = 2 are not four facts, but four different ways of looking at one fact. Furthermore, that fact is not a fact of arithmetic, to be taken on faith and memorized like nonsense syllables. It is a fact of nature, which children can discover for themselves, and rediscover or verify for themselves as many times as they need or want to.
The fact is this:
***** -- *** **
If you have before you a group of objects--coins or stones, for example---that looks like the group on the left, then you can make it into two groups that look like the ones on the right. Or--and this is what the two-way arrow means---if you have two groups that look like the ones on the right, you can make them into a group that looks like the one on the left.
This is not a fact of arithmetic, but a fact of nature. It did not become true only when human beings invented arithmetic. It has nothing to do with human beings. It is true all over the universe. One doesn't have to know any arithmetic to discover or verify it. An infant playing with blocks or a dog pawing at sticks might do that operation, though probably neither of them would notice that he had done it; for them, the difference between ***** and *** ** would be a difference that didn't make any difference. Arithmetic began (and begins) when human beings began to notice and think about this and other numerical facts of nature.
----John Holt, Learning All the Time
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close it again on something solid.
-- G.K. Chesterton
"We can get very confused, because we think that words must have some secret meaning that we have to figure out. They don't. They are just noises or marks, and they mean whatever experience you have learned to mean by them. People tend to use similar words in similar situations, but unless you have specifically agreed on what the words will mean, in terms of underlying experiences, there's no way to know what another person understands when you use them. The experience you attach to a word when you say it isn't automatically the same as the experience another person attaches to the same word when hearing it."
William T. Powers
Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
Charles Darwin, "The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals", ch.3.
Discussion of how not to get lost in the woods
Arg, this post is bringing back memories of all kinds of backcountry stupidity (including a fair amount of my own stupidity), so I can't resist adding a comment about GPS devices. Any navigation tool -- GPS device, map, compass, sextant, whatever -- only works if you are using the navigation tool to relate yourself to the surrounding landscape. And you should never trust maps, GPS devices, compasses, or any tool if it contradicts what you're seeing in the surrounding landscape. I own a top-notch brand of GPS device, I got a top-quality map to go inside it, and when I checked the map against a landscape I knew well, I found error after error (which is true with all maps, by the way; one of the reasons I like paper maps is that I can make notations on it when I find errors).
Edit: DUPLICATE
"Then the one called Raltariki is really a demon?" asked Tak.
"Yes—and no," said Yama. "If by 'demon' you mean a malefic, supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span, and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape—then the answer is no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one respect."
"Oh? And what may that be?"
"It is not a supernatural creature."
"But it is all those other things?"
"Yes."
"Then I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not—so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will."
"Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either."
Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light. (h/t zhurnaly)
Were it possible to trace the succession of ideas in the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, during the time that he made his greatest discoveries, I make no doubt but our amazement at the extent of his genius would a little subside. But if, when a man publishes his discoveries, he either through a design, or through habit, omit the intermediary steps by which he himself arrived at them, it is no wonder that his speculations confound them, and that the generality of mankind stand amazed at his reach of thought. If a man ascend to the top of a building by the help of a common ladder, but cut away most of the steps after he has done with them, leaving only every ninth of tenth step, the view of the ladder, in the condition which he has pleased to exhibit it, gives us a prodigious, but unjust view of the man who could have made use of it. But if he had intended that any body should follow him, he should have left the ladder as he constructed it, or perhaps as he found it, for it might have been a mere accident that threw it in his way... I think that the interests of science have suffered by the excessive admiration and wonder with which several first rate philosophers are considered, and that an opinion of the greater equality of mankind, in point of genius, and power of understanding, would be of real service in the present age." - Joseph Priestly, The History and present State of Electricity
The section where I've added an ellipsis is a section where he discusses Newton in more detail. That entire part of the text is worth reading. Priestly wrote the book before he did his work on the composition of air. The book is, as far as I am aware, the first attempt at actual history of science. (I'm meaning to read the whole thing at some point, but the occasionally archaic grammar makes for slow reading.)
A recent one from Linux Weekly News that gives insight into rationality:
Side note: when a respected information source covers something where you have on-the-ground experience, the result is often to make you wonder how much fecal matter you've swallowed in areas outside your own expertise. -- Rusty Russell
The necessity for marking our classes has brought with it a bias for false and excessive contrast, and we never invent a term but we are at once cramming it with implications beyond its legitimate content. There is no feat of irrelevance that people will not perform quite easily in this way; there is no class, however accidental, to which they will not at once ascribe deeply distinctive qualities. The seventh sons of seventh sons have remarkable powers of insight; people with a certain sort of ear commit crimes of violence; people with red hair have souls of fire; all democratic socialists are trustworthy persons; all people born in Ireland have vivid imaginations and all Englishmen are clods; all Hindoos are cowardly liars; all curly-haired people are good-natured; all hunch-backs are energetic and wicked, and all Frenchmen eat frogs. Such stupid generalisations have been believed with the utmost readiness, and acted upon by great numbers of sane, respectable people. And when the class is one's own class, when it expresses one of the aggregations to which one refers one's own activities, then the disposition to divide all qualities between this class and its converse, and to cram one's own class with every desirable distinction, becomes overwhelming.
A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.
-- George Iles
If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be.
-- Peter Norvig, in an interview about being wrong. When I saw this, I thought it sounded a lot like entropy pruning in decision trees, where you don't even bother asking questions that won't make you update your probability estimates significantly. Then I remembered that Norvig was the co-author of the AI textbook that I had learned about decision trees from. Interesting interview.
I don't know; the more Less Wrong I read, the more I start to think Lovecraft was on to something.
Delving too far in our search for knowledge is likely to awaken vast godlike forces which are neither benevolent nor malevolent but horrifyingly indifferent to humanity. Some of these forces may be slightly better or worse than others, but all of them could and would swat our civilization away like a mosquito. Such forces may already control other star systems.
The only defense against such abominations is to study the arcane knowledge involved in summoning or banishing these entities; however, such knowledge is likely to cause its students permanent psychological damage or doom them to eternities of torture.
Yep.
'116. You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.'
"Epigrams in Programming", by Alan J. Perlis; ACM's SIGPLAN publication, September, 1982
Yes! I'm happy that at least one person clicks on that.
The software industry is currently held back by a conception of programming-as-manual-labor, consisting of semi-mechanically turning a specification document into executable code. In fact it's much closer to "the art of improving your understanding of some business domain by expressing the details of that domain in a formal notation". The resulting program isn't quite a by-product of that activity - it's important, though not nearly as important as distilling the domain understanding.
If I close my mind in fear, please pry it open.
-- Metallica
God, grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.
-- adapted from Reinhold Niebuhr
Is this a piece of traditional deep wisdom that's actually wise?
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)
Your comment raises a very delicate point and I'm not sure that I am tactful enough to make it clearly.
Zooming out to get a broader view so that we can notice what usually happens, rather than the memorable special case, we notice that most Germans were enthusiastic about Hitler, all the way from 1933 to 1941. It is hard to reconstruct the reasons why. Looking at the broad picture we get a clear sense of people being their own worst enemies, enthusiastically embracing a mad leader who will lead them to destruction.
The message that history is sending to Alan is: if you had been a young man in Germany in 1933 you would have idolized Hitler. There are two ways to respond to this sobering message. One is to picture myself as an innocent victim. There were plenty of innocent victims, so this is easily done, but it dodges the hard question. The other response is to embrace the LessWrong vision and to search for ways to avoid the disasters to which self-deception sentences Man.
The smiley is there as the equivalent of Braille for the joke-blind.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Philip K. Dick
It's worth including the whole sentence:
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled
Knowing that one may be subject to bias is one thing; being able to correct it is another.
Jon Elster
Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.
-- Edward de Bono
"An economic transaction is a solved political problem."
I am only one, but I am still one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and just because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
-Helen Keller
There is an unfortunate optical illusion - a variant on the Doppler effect - that besets all frauds. It's unfortunate, because it has the effect of exacerbating the pecuniary losses that fraud victims endure, by unfairly leaving them, like many rape victims, irrationally ashamed of themselves.
The Doppler principle we posit holds that as a victim approaches a swindler, he sees nothing but green lights. But as soon as he realizes that his money is gone, he spins around and beholds, as if by magic, bright red flags as far as the eye can see.
-- Roger Parloff, senior editor, "More brazen than Madoff?", Fortune, 2009-03-31
I will repeat this point again until I get hoarse: a mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in the light of the information until that point. —Nicholas Nassim Taleb
I don't buy a lot of that, at least if we're referring to the 18th century.
The founders of America knew damn well that there were no such things as gods, at least not ones that actively intervened in any way we could detect.
They were wrong about some details of astronomy, but they had most of the basic outlines right (Lagrange's works describe the celestial mechanics of the solar system in quite some detail).
The theories of classical mechanics were known and well understood. Quantum mechanics and relativity weren't, of course, but I am hesitant to refer to this as people being wrong, as there were very few observations available to them which required these to be explained (the perihelion advance of Mercury, for instance, wasn't discovered until 1859).
The 18th century view of cosmology was essentially ours, except that it lacked knowledge about how it was organized on a larger scale (galaxies within clusters within superclusters and all that) due to the lack of sufficiently powerful telescopes, and many supposed the universe to be infinite instead of beginning with the Big Bang.
The structure of democratic government invented during this period works pretty darn well, by comparison with everything that came before. There have, for instance, been no wars in Western Europe for sixty years, something that has never happened before.
Lavoisier and Lomonosov's theories of chemistry were, in fact, largely correct. The periodic table wasn't known, but there was no widely used wrong system of grouping the elements.
The full theory of evolution was not known (people still believed in spontaneous generation, for instance), but the idea that groups of similar species arose from a common ancestor by descent with modification was widely known and accepted.
The proper extrapolation from this is not "everything you know is wrong", but "there are lots of things you don't know, and lots of non-technical things you 'know' are wrong."
"Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite."
--Andrew S. Grove
"Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened."
-- Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
"You cannot understand what a person is saying unless you understand who they are arguing with."
-- Don Symons, quoted by Tooby and Cosmides.
A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
-- Alexander Pope
"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"
-- attributed to George Carlin
O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
-- Mark Twain, excerpt from The War Prayer
A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual" — find out how he feels about astrology. —Robert Heinlein
They (Italians and other Europeans) still knew the Earth was round. Indeed, if you live near a sea port this is a very easy thing to figure out. The resistance Columbus faced was that everyone thought the world was much too big to get to the Indies in a reasonable period of time by sailing west. And of course everyone was right and Columbus had no idea what he was talking about.
Edit: And actually I'm pretty sure the authorities cerca 1492 were basing their beliefs about the size of the Earth on work done by the ancient Greeks.
I haven't taken this position just to be difficult. To look around, the world does appear to be flat, so I think it is incumbent on others to prove decisively that it isn't. And I don't think that burden of proof has been met yet.
-- Daniel Shenton, President of the Flat Earth Society as of 2010
What brazil84 said. Godin sounds like he's overextrapolating from personal experience. For his claim about "it's because you've been brainwashed" to work, he would need to show that people are taking circuitous routes to standard employment in preference to viable alternate means of making a living.
Yes, there are ways to make the same money with less time or "taking orders" ... but they're hard and risky to work out. If people are wrong in these assessments, it takes a heck of a lot more than just realizing, "hey, there are other ways!" You have to know one of those other ways well enough to get it to work! To borrow from Eliezer Yudkowsky, "non-wage-slave is not an income plan".
Furthermore, his claim is heavily penalized by it's assertion of conspiracy: he's saying all your teachers "needed" you to beleive this is the natural order of things, that every professor you had believed that, that all employers (not just the businesses but the hiring managers) believed that, etc. Yes, I'm aware of the history of public education (incl. Gatto's claims about it), but Godin is going further, and saying that these people need you to believe lies.
Employers don't look for college grads because they're trying to enforce an oppressive system; they do it because the existence of the university degree option sorts applicants by ability in the most efficient, legal way. Teachers teach because of a combination of liking teaching and the benefits, not out of a deep-seated need to indoctrinate people into a 9-5 lifestyle.
Don't tell me how bad it is to have a standard job; show me the viable option! Don't assume people aren't aware of the options; show that they're viable!
With that said, Godin has a good point, but standard jobs are a bad example. A better one might be how people blur the concepts of "getting a steady income until dealth" and "not working" into the same term ("retirement"), when really they should think of them as distinct.
Except that actually isn't right. You miss exactly 0% of the shots you don't take. And I'm not just being pedantic. In basketball this attitude can cost teams games. Any game of possessions (of which basketball is one) is won with efficiency. Shooting the ball means there is some chance of scoring but also some chance of missing and the ball being rebounded by the other team. When the latter happens you've lost your opportunity to score and you will never get it back. So the key to winning is to take high efficiency shots-- this means shots that are likely to go in and shots that are worth a lot of points. Now not shooting does increase the likelihood of a turnover and one can't go on not shooting forever. Moreover, quick shots before the defense is ready can often be very efficient shots. But the key is that the game is not about scoring a lot of points-- it's about scoring a lot of points efficiently. And to get good at that means cultivating a skill of waiting for the best shot, creating a better shot or deferring to more efficient teammates.
It might be that these aren't concerns in hockey: if all shots are more or less equally efficient or if a lot of points are scored of offensive rebounds "keep shooting it" might be a good message. I don't know a lot about the sport. But even hockey players aren't shooting from the other side of the rink.
Outside sports there are occasions where 'missing' is worse than 'not shooting' and if the chances of 'missing' are high enough or the cost of 'missing' sufficiently high it can be a really bad idea to 'shoot'.
An atheist walked into a bar, but seeing no bartender he revised his initial assumption and decided he only walked into a room.
http://friendlyatheist.com/2008/02/29/complete-the-atheist-joke-1/
The white line down the center of the road is a mediator, and very likely it can err substantially towards one side the other before the disadvantaged side finds advantage in denying its authority.
Source:
-- Schelling, Strategy of conflict, p144
[The book was mentioned a couple of times here on LW, and is a nice introduction to the use of game theory in geopolitics]
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to misattribute it to Voltaire."
-Voltaire
(The phrase was written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall as a summary of Voltaire's attitude toward free speech. Since then, people started attributing it to Voltaire himself, and the myth has spread far and wide, as nobody really checks to see if he actually said that. Hearing something somewhere is plenty of evidence for most people, most of the time, and the conviction gets more solid over time. Which brings me to my second rationality quote, from Winston Churchill: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.")
There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again. Then quit. There's no use in being a damn fool about it.
-- W. C. Fields
Conscious thought leads people to put disproportionate weight on attributes that are accessible, plausible and easy to verbalize, and therefore too little weight on other attributes. -- Ap Dijksterhuis
Lightning was the weapon of Zeus. Now it can be controlled by electrical engineers.
The Aztecs thought the sun was a god. Now plasma physicists can produce light via similar means.
Silas will like this one:
Menahem sighed. 'How can one explain colours to a blind man?'
'One says', snapped Rek, 'that red is like silk, blue is like cool water, and yellow is like sunshine on the face.'
-- David Gemmell "Legend"
This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.
-- Philip Gourevitch
On rationalization, aka the giant sucking cognitive black hole.
Though [Ben Franklin] had been a vegetarian on principle, on one long sea crossing the men were grilling fish, and his mouth started watering:
I balanc'd some time between principle and inclination, till I recollectd that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I din'd upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet.
Franklin concluded: "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do."
-Jonathan Haidt, "The Happiness Hypothesis"
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.
-- Christopher Morley
When I was a young man about to go out into the world, my father says to me a very valuable thing. He says to me like this... "Son," the old guy says, "I am sorry that I am not able to bank roll you to a very large start, but not having any potatoes which to give you, I am now going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice, brand new deck of cards on which the seal has not yet been broken. This man is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. Now son, do not bet this man, for as sure as you stand there, you are going to wind up with an earful of cider."
-- Sky Masterson, a character in Guys and Dolls
Young Agatha Clay: But how can they protect me if they aren't here? That's illogical.
Uncle Barry: Um...It's science.
Young Agatha Clay: Ah. You mean you'll explain when I have a sufficiently advanced educational background.
House: There's never any proof. Five different doctors come up with five different diagnoses based on the same evidence.
Cuddy: You don't have any evidence. And nobody knows anything, huh? How is it you always think you're right?
House: I don't. I just find it hard to operate on the opposite assumption.
It is often said that experiments should be made without preconceived ideas. This is impossible.
--Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis.
Huh, I'd never heard of that. Great story. Thanks for sharing -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Mucius_Scaevola
"I am Gaius Mucius, a citizen of Rome. I came here as an enemy to kill my enemy, and I am as ready to die as I am to kill. We Romans act bravely and, when adversity strikes, we suffer bravely." He also declared that he was one of three hundred other Romans willing to give their own life to kill Porsenna.(Ab Urbe Condita, II.12) Porsenna, fearful and angry, ordered Mucius to be cast into the flames. Mucius stoically accepted this punishment, preempting Porsenna by thrusting his hand into that same fire and giving no sign of pain. Impressed by the youth's courage, Porsenna freed Mucius.
I'd be concerned that this phrasing would raise more sociopaths... because that's how they think about morality.
Sociopaths and mature adults share that conception. Both of these groups of people tend to have also discovered that it is usually not in their best interest to discuss the subject with people who do not share their maturity or sociopathic nature respectively.
The reason a sociopath must arrive at the insight Powers proposes we teach earlier is that they cannot survive without it. Where a normal individual can survive (but not thrive) with a naive morality a sociopath cannot rely on the training wheels of guilt or shame to protect them from the most vicious players in the game before they work things out.
I predict that Powers' curriculum would produce no more sociopaths, make those sociopaths that are inevitable do less damage and result in a whole heap less burnt out, anti-social (or no longer pro-social) idealists.
"Ideas are tested by experiment." That is the core of science. All else is bookkeeping.
- Zombie Feynman, in xkcd 397.
The suggestion that designers should record their wrong decisions, to avoid having them repeated, met the following response: (McClure:) "Confession is good for the soul..." (d’Agapeyeff:) "...but bad for your career."
-- Proceedings of the 1968 NATO Conference on Software Engineering
When I was halfway through my Ph.D. I formulated a hypothesis: The proximate challenge that keeps you from graduating is that you have to write a thesis. But the ultimate challenge to getting your Ph.D. is this: You somehow have to learn to understand, deep down, that all your romantic notions about the Ph.D. are bunk, that you will be exactly the same person on the day after you get it that you were the day before, and that you need to stop waiting for the day when you feel like a god and just write something down and get on with life.
It may take you years to accept this, and it may drive you to drink, but after you get to that point you can graduate.
Only then will you be able to live with the fact that your thesis looks like crap to you. Your thesis will always look like crap to you. Either you will have figured out absolutely everything and your thesis will look incredibly boring to you, because you've moved on, or -- vastly more likely -- your thesis will look woefully incomplete because, geez, there is so much that you couldn't figure out, and you're just so stupid!
Or, most likely of all, you will think both of these things at the same time.
Similarly: Being the world's foremost expert on a particular scientific problem is a lot less exciting in real life than it seems in the movies. In fact, being on the frontier of science feels like being totally, hopelessly lost and confused. Why this came as a surprise to me I'll never know.
--mechanical_fish on Hacker News. Emphasis mine. source
A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse, not a remarkable mathematician.
--Samuel Johnson
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful, they are found because it was possible to find them. -J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will, Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still.
What evidence is there that Galileo was tortured?
"When I start to wonder if black swans exist, I put down my copy of Mind and pick up my copy of Nature."
-- Ariadne (former columnist in New Scientist).
time limits to tenure
Nice way to put it! To phrase it another way:
To argue in favor of mortality because of fears of entrenched conservatives is to demand capital punishment where term limits would suffice.
Isn't this true for any sort of mountains that are difficult to climb, not just the mountains of truth? For example, training makes you better at lying too!
I think this quotation actually comes not from a real papal representative but from Brecht's play "Galileo".
(Isn't it obvious that this isn't the sort of thing a real person would be likely to say? Especially not the sort of person who would be sent to Galileo by the Pope.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?
Elizabeth Anscombe: I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Well what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?
One disadvantage of having a little intelligence is that one can invent myths out of his own imagination, and come to believe them. Wild animals, lacking imagination, almost never do disastrously stupid things out of false perceptions of the world about them. But humans create artificial disasters for themselves when their ideology makes them unable to perceive where their own self-interest lies.
-- E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory as Logic [pdf].
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
"Science is interesting and if you don't agree, you can fuck off."
-- Richard Dawkins quoting a former editor of New Scientist magazine.
To say that you're agnostic about something can mean two things: That you're not 100% certain, or that you're (approximately) 50% certain. If you're using the first meaning, nothing you've said is wrong... but it is extremely pedantic. It's true we can't be 100% certain that there is no God, but it's also true that we can't be 100% certain about any of our beliefs except perhaps mathematical truths. Would you go around saying you're agnostic about the possibility that Obama is Satan in disguise, or the possibility that the keyboard in front of you is actually a specimen of an as-of-yet undiscovered species of animals with keyboard-mimicry capabilities? Of course you wouldn't. So why would you bother mentioning your agnosticism about God?
Of course, there are some people who really are agnostic about God, in the second sense of 'agnostic'. They're wrong, but at least they're not being pedantic.
What annoys atheists like me is those who take advantage of the dual meaning of 'agnostic' to make us look like overconfident fools: They'll say that no one can know "with absolute certainty" that God doesn't exist and that it is therefore arrogant to believe that he doesn't exist. To someone who hasn't come to terms with the inherently probabilistic nature of knowledge, this can sound like a convincing argument, but to the rest of us it can be rather infuriating.
Reason means truth, and those who are not governed by it take the chance that someday a sunken fact will rip the bottom out of their boat.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
The Mathemagician nodded knowingly and stroked his chin several times. "You'll find," he remarked gently, "that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that's hardly worth the effort."
-- Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
I don't know how many people I've met who hold beliefs like "in three card stud a four is more likely to come up after an eight than a six." What the fuck? Is the concept of random that hard to grasp?
It's pretty depressing. Not too long ago, someone I know expressed the belief that red is more likely to come up on a roulette table if the last five spins landed on black. He holds a graduate degree in computer science.
Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.
-- Albert Einstein
Surely, to label a statement "vague" is a higher order of insult than to call it "wrong". Newton was wrong but at least he was not vague.
Eliezer didn't say... oh sod it.
I almost believe we are ghosts, all of us. It's not just what we inherit from our fathers and mothers that walks again in us - it's all sorts of dead old ideas and dead beliefs and things like that. They don't exactly live in us, but there they sit all the same and we can't get rid of them. All I have to do is pick up a newspaper, and I see ghosts lurking between the lines. I think there are ghosts everywhere you turn in this country - as many as there are grains of sand - and then there we all are, so abysmally afraid of the light.
-- Ibsen, 1881
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
-Bertrand Russell
Reality is not optional.
Thomas Sowell
Never underestimate the difficulty of changing false beliefs by facts. —Harvard economist Henry Rosovsky
That's a terrible quote. Being wrong is the best possible outcome of an argument, as it's the one with the highest expected knowledge gain (unless you're a hardcore altruist who doesn't value their own knowledge differently from anyone else's).
Lies!
Blessed just gives you a +1 to attack while sight gives you 2 AC, half speed, -4 search, automatically failed spot checks and the 50% miss chance on every attack from total concealment!
This problem affects a question close to Frances Kamm’s work: what she calls the Problem of Distance in Morality (PDM). Kamm says that her intuition consistently finds that moral obligations attach to things that are close to us, but not to thinks that are far away. According to her, if we see a child drowning in a pond and there’s a machine nearby which, for a dollar, will scoop him out, we’re morally obligated to give the machine a dollar. But if the machine is here but the scoop and child are on the other side of the globe, we don’t have to put a dollar in the machine. --Aaron Swartz
He must be very ignorant; for he answers every question he is asked.
-- Voltaire
If you're doing business with a religious son-of-a-bitch, get it in writing. His word isn't worth shit. Not with the good lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal.
'Cause it's gonna be the future soon
And I won't always be this way
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away
The introduction of suitable abstractions is our only mental aid to organize and master complexity.
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
"People are not complicated. People are really very simple. What makes them appear complicated is our continual insistence on interpreting their behavior instead of discovering their goals."
-- Bruce Gregory
Note to self: every day, eight million things happen in New York.
She was talking to students at Harvard.
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Successful zealots don't argue to win. They argue to move the goalposts and to make it appear sane to do so."
-- Seth Godin
"Death is the most terrible of all things; for it is the end, and nothing is thought to be any longer either good or bad for the dead."
-- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
The halt can manage a horse,
the handless a flock,
The deaf be a doughty fighter,
To be blind is better than to burn on a pyre:
There is nothing the dead can do.
-- Havamal
"One thousand five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat... and fifteen minutes ago, you knew people were alone on this planet. Think about what you'll know tomorrow." -- Agent K, "Men in Black"
Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.
WIlliam Thomson, Lord Kelvin
I recall, for example, suggesting to a regular loser at a weekly poker game that he keep a record of his winnings and losses. His response was that he used to do so but had given up because it proved to be unlucky. - Ken Binmore, Rational Decisions
A side note: All three of the quotes I've posted are from Binmore's Rational Decisions, which I'm about a third of the way through and have found very interesting. It makes a great companion to Less Wrong -- and it's also quite quotable in spots.
Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical judgment, which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable.
-- John Stuart Mill
As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?
-- Ollie, The Mist, 2007
I imagine that if my friend finally came to the conclusion that he were a machine, he would be infinitely crestfallen. I think he would think: "My God! How Horrible! I am only a machine!" But if I should find out I were a machine, my attitude would be totally different. I would say: "How amazing! I never before realized that machines could be so marvelous!"
(Raymond Smullyan)
I have found it in an OB comment by Zubon, but it was never posted as a rationality quote.
To a very great extent, the term science is reserved for fields that do progress in obvious ways. But does a field make progress because it is a science, or is it a science because it makes progress?
-Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
When I was 14, my father was stationed in Japan. I went rock climbing with this kid from school. He fell and got injured, and I had to bring him to the hospital. We came in through the wrong entrance, and passed this guy in the hall. He was a janitor. My friend came down with an infection, and the doctors didn't know what to do. So they brought in the janitor. He was a doctor. And a Buraku - one of Japan's untouchables. His ancestors had been slaughterers, gravediggers. And this guy knew that he wasn't accepted by the staff, didn't even try. He didn't dress well. He didn't pretend to be one of them. People around that place didn't think he had anything they wanted, except when they needed him - because he was right, which meant that nothing else mattered. And they had to listen to him.
-- Dr. Greg House
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.
-- Mark Twain, Old Times on the Mississippi
Shame leads to a variant on guessing the teacher's password-- an effort to not piss people off, without asking them what might be problematic. After all, you're supposed to know better than to make that mistake.
Nolan's Memento is also interesting from a rationalist perspective - it gives "running on untrusted hardware" a quite concrete meaning.
Man cannot understand the perfection and imperfections of his chosen art if he cannot see the value in other arts. Following rules only permits development up to a point in technique and then the student and artist has to learn more and seek further. It makes sense to study other arts as well as those of strategy. Who has not learned something more about themselves by watching the activities of others? To learn the sword study the guitar. To learn the fist study commerce. To just study the sword will make you narrow-minded and will not permit you to grow outward.
-- Musashi, "A Book of Five Rings"
And "NihilCredo" isn't a spooky adopted name? :-)
The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with the indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
— Stanley Kubrick
A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world is suffering. (Bertrand Russell)
That seems like the extreme case of "you don't really understand something until you can explain it to somebody else", which I'm sure somebody other than me must have said a long time ago.
The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge.
-- H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica
There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.
-G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
A neighbor came to Nasrudin, asking to borrow his donkey. "It is out on loan," the teacher replied. At that moment, the donkey brayed loudly inside the stable. "But I can hear it bray, over there." "Whom do you believe," asked Nasrudin, "me or a donkey?"
-- old Sufi parable
Prompted by the discussion of Sam Harriss idea that science should provide for a universal moral code, I thought of this suitable reply given long ago:
[The] doctrine of right and wrong is perpetually disputed, both by the pen and the sword: whereas the doctrine of lines and figures is not so, because men care not in that subject what be truth, as a thing that crosses no man's ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man's right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine [would] have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
(It also provides for some interesting perspective on the current epistemological state of various academic fields that are taken seriously as a source of guidance for government policy.)
There's also a certain fun challenge in looking for jewels among the fecal matter.
Do that with the writings of Space Tetrahedron Guy, and then all further Ultimate Space Tetrahedron Documents will have a header text SPACE TETRAHEDRON THEORY IS ENDORSED BY NIHILCREDO.
God grant me the strength to change the things I can,
The intelligence to know what I can change,
And the rationality to realize that God isn't the key figure here.
Friends, help me build the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to continually update which is which based on the best available evidence.
This sounds like a bad idea.
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
-- Bertrand Russell
(Quoted, in Italian translation, on p. 174 of Amanda Knox's appeal brief.)
I shared this on another website and got this comment:
Heh, that's one way to pass the Turing Test. Don't make your bot smarter, make it seek out dumb people.
We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.
Dr. Manhattan (Watchmen)
"Look! Can your fortunetelling explain that?!"
"Ha! Can your science explain why it rains?"
"YES! Yes, it can!"
- Avatar: the Last Airbender
Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
-- Laurens Van der Post
"Empty arguments with words cannot (in any way) compare with a test which will show practical results."
Ma Jun, inventor or reinventor of the South Pointing Chariot and the differential gear.
"When in total ignorance, try anything and you will be less ignorant."
-- G.Harry Stine, A Matter of Metalaw
Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.
-- the Agnostic's Prayer, by Roger Zelazny
The greatest enemy of truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, pervasive, and unrealistic.
-- John F. Kennedy
(For those interested, I'm pulling most of these quotes from Rational Choice in an Uncertain World by Robyn Dawes, which I just began)
"The trouble with trying to be more stupid than you really are is that you very often succeed" - C.S.Lewis The Magician's Nephew
It's a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few million other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost - swallowed up in the ocean - unless you are doing it with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is why the world is divided into tribes.
-- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
I neglected to record from which character the quote came.
From a href="http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/07/the_practical_limits_of_knowledge.php#more"Ta Nehisi Coates/a:
blocikquoteBut I distrusted the whole game. Intuitively, I wonder about the honesty and proficiency of writers who opine on everything from Iran to education to drug policy to health care to cap and trade to race. Perhaps these people simply have more brains than me, but the catch-all nature of punditry, the need to speak on every policy topic as though one were an expert, is exactly what I hope to avoid./blockquote
All truth is not, indeed, of equal importance; but if little violations are allowed, every violation will in time be thought little.
-- Samuel Johnson
Defects of empirical knowledge have less to do with the ways we go wrong in philosophy than defects of character do: such things as the simple inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe.
-- David Stove, What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts
Censure yourself, never another. Do not discuss right and wrong.
-- Zengetsu
When I first saw this, I had a negative gut reaction. The second sentence especially bothered me. Over time, I've come to like it more. I'm now at the point of wanting to follow it but usually failing to do so.
Discussions here on [akrasia][] seem to focus on procrastination, but this is my own very close number two.
Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked. "Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat. "I don't know," Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter." ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
I forget if I've posted this before, but:
"I've noticed that the press tends to be quite accurate, except when they're writing on a subject I know something about." -- Keith F. Lynch
[Mathematical methods of inference] literally have no content; long division can calculate miles per gallon, or it can calculate income per capita. The statistical tools of experimental psychology were borrowed from agronomy, where they were invented to gauge the effects of different fertilizers on crop yields. The tools work just fine in psychology, even though, as one psychological statistician wrote, "we do not deal in manure, at least not knowingly."
-- Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
-- Richard Feynman The Character of Physical Law
Wisdom is not only to be acquired, but also to be utilized.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
I don't believe in the supernetural. There can be knowledge for which we do not possess the Google keywords, but to speak of knowledge that cannot be Googled even in principle is nonsense.
Well, bad enough weather in an agricultural society is murder.
When I became convinced that the Universe is natural — that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world — not even in infinite space. I was free — free to think, to express my thoughts — free to live to my own ideal — free to live for myself and those I loved — free to use all my faculties, all my senses — free to spread imagination’s wings — free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope — free to judge and determine for myself — free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the “inspired” books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past — free from the popes and priests — free from all the “called” and “set apart” — free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies — free from the fear of eternal pain — free from the winged monsters of the night — free from devils, ghosts, and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought — no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings — no chains for my limbs — no lashes for my back — no fires for my flesh — no master’s frown or threat — no following another’s steps — no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.
And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave for the liberty of hand and brain — for the freedom of labor and thought — to those who fell in the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains — to those who proudly mounted scaffold’s stairs — to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn — to those by fire consumed — to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear. —Nicholas Nassim Taleb
(i.e.: don't forget to put, in your utility functions, the damn appropriate weight of those highly-improbable-but-high-negative-impact tragedies!)
Since all things related to akrasia and self motivation are relevant here:
"As a final incentive before giving up a difficult task, try to imagine it successfully accomplished by someone you violently dislike." -K. Zenios
A good point - but also note that, when Galileo argued against Artistotelian physics in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he set forth instead the idea of the inertial reference frame - but Galileo also never felt the need to perform an experiment to verify that his shipboard "experiments" would work as he predicted. Both the wrong conclusion, and the right conclusion, were arrived at via thought-experiment. And when Einstein took the next step by proposing the special theory of relativity, that too was a thought-experiment with no validation.
"But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil." - Robert Heinlein (SISL)
If you’ve never broken the bed, you’re not experimenting enough.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
-- Carl Sagan
People will torture their children with battery acid from time to time anyway -- and who among us hasn't wanted to kill and eat an albino? I sincerely hope that my "new atheist" colleagues are not so naive as to imagine that actual belief in magic might be the issue here. After all, it would be absurd to criticize witchcraft as unscientific, as this would ignore the primordial division between mythos and logos. Let me see if I have this straight: Belief in demons, the evil eye, and the medicinal value of a cannibal feast are perversions of the real witchcraft - -which is drenched with meaning, intrinsically wholesome, integral to our humanity, and here to stay. Do I have that right?
I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.
Johannes Kepler
I'll start incorporating crazy counter-intuitive notions about the nature of the universe when the cold implacable hand of the universe starts shoving them down my throat, not before!
-- PZ Myers
I see this is being downvoted badly. I got it. Anyway, for those interested in the nature of reality, check out the discussion about the above quote here: http://www.thebigquestions.com/2009/12/17/non-simple-arithmetic/
I'd delete it here, but since there are comments referring to it, I won't.
Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey..., without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.
--Samuel Johnson
By definition, all but the last doomsday prediction is false. Yet it does not follow, as many seem to think, that all doomsday predictions must be false; what follow is only that all such predictions but one are false.
-Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13
Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain comes joy, delights, laughter, and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations. And by this, in an especial manner, we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear and know what are foul and what are fair, what are bad and what are good, what are sweet, and what are unsavory. ... And by the same organ we become mad and delirious, and fears and terrors assail us. ... All these things we endure from the brain. ...In these ways I am of the opinion that the brain exercises the greatest power in the man.
-- Hippocrates, On the sacred disease (ca. 4th century BCE).
[ In this and other of his writings, Hippocrates shows such an incredible early sense for rationality and against superstition that was only rarely seen in the next 2000 after that -- and in addition, he was not just a armchair philosopher, he actually put these things is practice. So, hats off for Hippocrates, even when his medicine was not without faults of course...]
"Sanity is conforming your thoughts to reality. Conforming reality to your thoughts is creativity."
-- Unknown
A certain mother habitually rewards her small son with ice cream after he eats his spinach. What additional information would you need to be able to predict whether the child will: a. Come to love or hate spinach, b. Love or hate ice cream, or c. Love or hate Mother?
-- Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind"
Despite the fact that you arrived in this world with nothing but an unborn Buddha-mind, your partiality for yourselves now makes you want to have things move in your own way. You lose your temper, become contentious, and then you think, "I haven't lost my temper. That fellow won't listen to me. By being so unreasonable he has made me lose it." And so you fix belligerently on his words and end up transforming the valuable Buddha-mind into a fighting spirit. By stewing over this unimportant matter, making the thoughts churn over and over in your mind, you may finally get your way, but then you fail in your ignorance to realize that it was meaningless for you to concern yourself over such a matter.
From The Dharma Talks of Zen Master Bankei, translated by Norman Waddell. Quoted by Torkel Franzén as a perfect description of Usenet flamewars.
Prevent all problems and get nothing done, or accept an allowable level of small problems and focus on the big things. --Timothy Ferriss
"Anyone who believes that the theory of evolution implies moral darwinism, and who also believes in the theory of gravity, has a moral duty to go jump off a cliff." -- Ari Rahikkala
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than yesterday.
Jonathan Swift (also attributed to Pope)
I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
Abraham Lincoln
Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.
At the Mountains of Sanity
This "Mary's Room" argument, like the "Chinese Room" argument†, contains a subtle sleight of hand.
On the one hand, for the learning to be about just the qualia rather than about externally observable features of vision processing, the subject would need to learn immensely more than the physical properties of red light. (The standard version of Mary's Room does so, postulating Mary to also deeply understand her own visual cortex and the changes it would undergo upon being exposed to that color.) In fact, the depth of conscious theoretical understanding that this would require is far beyond any human being, and it's wrong and silly to naively map our mind-states onto those of such a mind.
On the other hand, it plays on the everyday intuition that if I've never seen the color red, but have been given a short list of facts about it and am consciously representing my limited intuition for that set of facts, that doesn't add up to the experience of seeing red.
The equivocation consists of thinking that a superhuman level of detailed understanding of (and capability to predict) the human brain can be analogized to that everyday intuition, rather than being unimaginably other to it. So I don't see that an agent who was really possessed of that level of self-understanding would necessary feel that the actual experience added an ineffable otherness to what they already knew.
That sense of ineffable otherness, IMO, comes from the levels of detail in the mental processing of color which we don't have conscious access to. Our conscious mind isn't built to understand what we're doing when we visually perceive, at the level that we actually do it-- there's no evolutionary need to communicate all the richness of color perception, so the conscious mind didn't evolve to encompass it all. And this limitation of our conscious understanding feels to us like a thing we have which cannot in principle be reduced.
† The application of this same principle to the Chinese Room argument is a trivial exercise, left to the reader.
"Because this is the Internet, every argument was spun in a centrifuge instantly and reduced down into two wholly enraged, radically incompatible contingents, as opposed to the natural gradient which human beings actually occupy." -Tycho, Penny Arcade
No, they don't want a dogmatic and intolerant pilot. They want an empirical pilot who trusts his observations and instruments and uses them to make the best judgement regarding how to operate the plane.
On the other hand, a dogmatic, absolutist pilot who is absolutely sure as to the best way to land the airplane under all conditions, ignores his instruments, weather conditions and data from the control towers, and never listens to his flight crew... is a recipe for disaster.
Dogmatic absolutists mistake observation, skepticism, tolerance and empiricism for "fuzzy thinking". They don't realize that their own thinking is the very opposite of scientific thinking- which is based on observation, not fixed dogmas.
I assumed that the firefighters didn't accept the offer to pay them on the spot because that would send the signal to all the other houseowners that they could skip the regular fire department fee and then make an emergency payment when their house catches fire.
The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe," I'd have been lying!
-- René Magritte, on his painting The Treachery of Images depicting a pipe with "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe") written under it
Yes, and don't forget the dual result that a comathematician is a device for turning cotheorems into ffee.
Not always. I know someone who narrowly avoided Auschwitz who would beg to differ; her worst enemies were definitely external.
You're right, and I think that the reason it's so hard to make that point tactfully is because of how scary it is. If we go down that line of thought honestly, we can imagine ourselves firing up the ovens, or dragging manacled people into the belly of a slave ship, and feeling good about it. This is not a comfortable idea.
But there's another, more hopeful side to this. As MartinB points out, it's possible to understand how such monstrous acts feel to the people committing them, and train yourself to avoid making the same mistakes. This is a problem we can actually attack, as long as we can accept that our own thoughts are fallible.
(On a lighter note: how many people here regularly catch themselves using fallacious logic, and quickly correct their own thoughts? I would hope that the answer is "everyone", or at least "almost everyone". If you do this, then it shows that you're already being significantly less wrong, and it should give a fair amount of protection against crazy murderous ideologies.)
Can't you say "not always" about pretty much any quote? They aren't meant to be taken as universal truths that apply to all people and all circumstances across all of time ;-).
It isn't racist, it's realistic. If an entity thinks with something that we don't even call a brain, we shouldn't trust it because we have no way of knowing its motivations.
Yes, but it says "never trust", not "don't trust by default". It should be possible for non-brain-based beings to demonstrate their trustworthiness.
Edit: Also, you can't spell "REALISTIC" without "RACIST LIE". Proof by anagram. So there.
"Imagine being told you were made for a purpose, and that longevity and happiness are not in the list of design objectives." -David Eubanks, Life Artificial
The splitting of the atom has changed everything save the way men think, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
-- Albert Einstein
And the answer is, "Yes! I run the world's biggest honeypot for teenage idiots who want to post pics of themselves racing on a freeway with a suspended license and a beer in the cupholder."
The word empty spoils the quotation. The point is that
Powerful arguments with words cannot compete with a test which will show practical results
or
Good arguments with words that lose to a test which shows practical results are reduced thereby to empty arguments.
(Isn't it obvious that this isn't the sort of thing a real person would be likely to say? Especially not the sort of person who would be sent to Galileo by the Pope.)
Shhh! That quote is a soldier for Our Side, don't break it! ;)
The quote isn't accurate. There was argument over what was being seen through the telescope, not about whether to look through it. Details from a guy who wrote a book on Galileo here.
Truth emerges much more readily from error than from confusion.
Francis Bacon
"They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan
...natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the misalignment.
"People will then often say, 'But surely it's better to remain an Agnostic just in case?' This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I've been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I think I would choose not to worship him anyway.)" -- Douglas Adams
We consider ourselves distinguished from the ape by the power of thought. We do not remember that it is like the power of walking in the one-year-old. We think, it is true, but we think so badly that I often feel it would be better if we did not.
-- Bertrand Russell in Faith and Mountains
I worry far more about the "promising" stock market, particularly the "safe" blue chip stocks, than I do about speculative ventures -- the former present invisible risks, the latter offer no surprises since you know how volatile they are and can limit your downside by investing smaller amounts... I am very aggressive when I can gain exposure to positive Black Swans -- when a failure would be of small moment -- and very conservative when I am under threat from a negative Black Swan. I am very aggressive when an error in a model can benefit me, and paranoid when an error can hurt.
-- Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan
Some people revel in complexity, and what's worse they have the brain power to deal with vast systems of arcane equations. This ability can be a handicap because it leads to overlooking simple solutions.
William T. Powers
Truth comes out of error more readily than out of confusion.
-- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)
And when he cannot answer and stares at you dumbfounded while drooling a little,then you tell him he's crazy :)
Some people dream of great things. Others stay awake and do them.
-Poster found in school classrooms
(Anyone know the original source?)
It's a paraphrase of T.E. Lawrence:
All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
Only if you think violence is never justified ;)
It's a warning to rationalists, especially Hollywood Mister Spock type rationalists, that even though promoting true beliefs is a charitable act on par with patching up someone's slashed tires, people will often take rather unkindly to it.
American flag manufacturers
So... China?
"Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons." - Michael Shermer
It's easy to put down the shallow concerns of life, but in a way they are what life is about. Deeper concerns that don't connect in any way to economic wealth, social status, physical pleasure, etc., are not really deep but pointless. The shallow concerns all pertain to the lowest common denominator of human life because they really are the basic fabric of everyone's life. They're concerns that everyone shares and that everyone can easily understand.
—Ben Kovitz, Shallowness
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw
“If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be” -- Thomas Jefferson
According to an old story, a lord of ancient China once asked his physician, a member of a family of healers, which of them was the most skilled in the art.
The physician, whose reputation was such that his name became synonymous with medical science in China, replied, "My eldest brother sees the spirit of sickness and removes it before it takes shape and so his name does not get out of the house."
"My elder brother cures sickness when it is still extremely minute, so his name does not get out of the neighborhood."
"As for me, I puncture veins, prescribe potions, and massage skin, so from time to time my name gets out and is heard among the lords."
-- Thomas Cleary, Introduction to The Art of War
"On the contrary, it's because someone knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance... so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about! "
-- Richard Feynman
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
John Von Neumann
"I am about to discuss the disease called 'sacred'. It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine orgin is due to men's inexperience, and to their wonder at its peculiar character"
--Hippocractic treatise on epilepsy
We all know many things about the world. What form or shape does our knowledge take? We may be able to say some of what we know, though in many people there is a deep and dangerous confusion between what they say and think they believe and what they really believe. But all of us know much more than we can say, and many times we cannot really put it into words at all.
For example, if we have eaten them, we know what strawberries taste like. We have in us somewhere knowledge---a memory, many memories---of the taste of strawberries. Not just one berry either, but many, more or less ripe, or sweet, or tasty. But how can we really speak of the taste of a strawberry? When we bite into a berry, we are ready to taste a certain kind of taste; if we taste something very different, we are surprised. It is this---what we expect or what surprises us---that tells us best what we really know.
We know many other things that we cannot say. We know what a friend looks like, so well that we may say, seeing him after some time, that he looks older or no older; heavier or thinner; worried or at peace, or happy. But our answers are usually so general that we could not give a description from which someone who had never seen our friend could recognize him.
---John Holt, What Do I Do Monday?
"To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods."
-- Robert A. Heinlein (to be precise, his character Lazarus Long, but I don't think there's much difference)
I view it as the opposite. It seems to suggest figuring out what people are rather than throwing up our hands and calling them good/evil/crazy/etc. Kind of like this. YMMV.
There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
-- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.
John Von Neumann
"The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. ... Perception is inference."[emphasis added]
"It’s hard to argue with a counter-example."
-- Roger Brockett
No artist tolerates reality.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
That way of looking at it is attractive but I don't think it is accurate. Most of religion is the outcome of that extra 10% and definitely part of what we identify as 'person'. Rejecting religion, and other equivalent institutions is an act of rebellion of 2% against the other 8%.
A formula is worth a thousand pictures.
—Edsger Dijkstra
Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you're wrong.
-- Unknown
This kind of sentiment pops up in Plato a lot, esp. in discussions of rhetoric, like here in Gorgias:
"For I count being refuted a greater good, insofar as it is a greater good to be rid of the greatest evil from oneself than to rid someone else of it. I don't suppose that any evil for a man is as great as false belief about the things we're discussing right now." (458a, Zeyl Translation)
In fewer words: we can imagine things that cannot exist.
„The hard part is actually being rational, which requires that you postpone the fun but currently irrelevant arguments until the pressing problem is solved, even perhaps with the full knowledge that you are actually probably giving them up entirely. Delaying gratification in this manner is not a unique difficulty faced by transhumanists. Anyone pursuing a long-term goal, such as a medical student or PhD candidate, does the same. The special difficulty that you will have to overcome is the difficulty of staying on track in the absence of social support or of appreciation of the problem, and the difficulty of overcoming your mind’s anti-religion defenses, which will be screaming at you to cut out the fantasy and go live a normal life, with the normal empty set of beliefs about the future and its potential.”
– Michael Vassar
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers
Quotation - yes, but how differently persons quote! I am as much informed of your genius by what you select, as by what you originate. I read the quotation with your eyes, find a new fervent sense... For good quoting, then, there must be originality in the quoter - bent, bias, delight in the truth, only valuing the author in the measure of his agreement with the truth which we see, which he had the luck to see first. And originality, what is that? It is being; being somebody, being yourself, reporting accurately what you see are. If another's words describe your fact, use them as freely as you use the language the alphabet, whose use does not impair your originality. Neither will another's sentiment or distinction impugn your sufficiency. Yet in proportion to your reality of life perception, will be your difficulty of finding yourself expressed in others' words or deeds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, Oct.-Nov. 1867
[...] Probability theory can tell us how our hypothesis fares relative to the alternatives that we have specified; it does not have the creative imagination to invent new hypotheses for us.
-- E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory
My two worst business experiences have been with ostentatiously 'spiritual' people. It's not that they're insincere in their beliefs, it's just a lot easier for them to deceive themselves that the selfish things they do have justifications in them somewhere.
-- PeteWarden
Nobody wants to die. They just want the pain to stop.
I argue that people are primarily driven by envy as opposed to greed, so they are mindful of their relative, as opposed to absolute, position, and this leads to doing what others are doing as a mechanism of minimizing risk. --Eric Falkenstein
"It is therefore highly illogical to speak of 'verifying' (3.8 [the Bernoulli urn equation]) by performing experiments with the urn; that would be like trying to verify a boy's love for his dog by performing experiments on the dog." - E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory
Doesn't catpenny cost less than a penny (in terms of dollars spent)? You can recover most, if not all, of the pennies.
Presumably not per unit exposure, which is the relevant measure when you're near a pig or shark. If he's talking about abstract worry, then he might have a point.
'Nash equilibrium strategy' is not necessarily synonymous to 'optimal play'. A Nash equilibrium can define an optimum, but only as a defensive strategy against stiff competition. More specifically: Nash equilibria are hardly ever maximally exploitive. A Nash equilibrium strategy guards against any possible competition including the fiercest, and thereby tends to fail taking advantage of sub-optimum strategies followed by competitors. Achieving maximally exploitive play generally requires deviating from the Nash strategy, and allowing for defensive leaks in ones own strategy. -- Johannes Koelman
I always saw a close kinship between the needs of "pure" mathematics and a certain hero of Greek mythology, Antaeus. The son of Earth, he had to touch the ground every so often in order to reestablish contact with his Mother; otherwise his strength waned. To strangle him, Hercules simply held him off the ground. Back to mathematics. Separation from any down-to-earth input could safely be complete for long periods — but not forever.
-Benoit Mandelbrot
If people don't realise that the river is dirty and that's causing problems, changing that is valuable work by itself.
"As one shocked 42-year-old manager exclaimed in the middle of a self-reflective career planning exercise, 'Oh, no! I just realized I let a 20-year-old choose my wife and my career!'"
-- Douglas T. Hall, Protean Careers of the 21st Century
Solar power requires heavy industry to build, and that has loads of externalities. It takes up a lot of space and affects local climate and ecology. And then there's the unreliability of the sun, which can have economic consequences.
As for the nuclear externalities you mentioned, the evacuation planning and government safety things are paid for by power plant fees, and budgeted into the cost of building and operating the plants. Defending the plants is something you have to do with all forms of power generation, and I actually think you're miscalculating the risks by looking at the power plants themselves, which (in the case of nuclear) tend to be pretty beefy and well-guarded. Attacking the transmission lines would be much easier, and much harder to defend against. This goes double for wind and solar farms that are located far away from everything and have to use longer power lines.
(And really, what are the odds you'll ever have to use those evacuation plans? I'd worry more about crossing the street. No water-moderated reactor has ever had an accident that made evacuating people nearby a good idea, even after all these decades of operating them, and there are good theoretical and practical reasons to believe that it never will.)
And while we're looking at externalities, consider this: nuclear is the only option that's currently competitive with coal on a cost-per-kWh basis. Very cautious safety regulations, by holding nuclear power back, are responsible for a lot of coal emissions -- which are far more dangerous than anything people are talking about for nuclear plants. Paradoxically, our worries about nuclear safety have made us much less safe. What we have here is a widespread failure to shut up and multiply.
I really like this as a test-case for rationality, because it's important and we really can look at it probabilistically for insight.
Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.
--Admiral Hyman G. Rickover
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all. —Nietzsche
Five hundred years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat...
Not true! The ancient Greeks measured the circumference of the Earth to within 1%.
And the Earth is slowly curving in its orbit, generating an apparent centrifugal force that decreases your weight at midnight, and increases your weight at noon. Except for a very tiny tidal correction, these two forces exactly cancel which is why the Earth stays in orbit in the first place. This argument would only be valid if the Earth were suspended motionless on two giant poles running through the axis or something.
"Torture the data long enough and they will confess to anything."
--via The Economist, "a saying of statisticians".
Are the winners the only ones actually writing the history? We need to disabuse ourselves of this habit of saying things because they sound good. ----- Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates runs a popular culture, black issues, and history blog with a very strong rationalist approach.
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
[Discarding game] theory in favor of some notion of collective rationality makes no sense. One might as well propose abandoning arithmetic because two loaves and seven fish won't feed a multitude. -- Ken Binmore, Rational Decisions
Rephrase that and it sounds nonsensical: "If you can't outperform the stock market, then how can you be sure of anything?" I think Carnegie was just looking for a glib rationalization for his advice to avoid contradicting people whom you want to like you.
Unless one of the toys in question is a cryostat. Then there's still hope.
it can't be ineffable if you're effing it.
"History is like the weather. Themes do repeat themselves, but never in the same way. And analogies became rhetorical flourishes and sad ex post facto justifications rather than explanations. In the end, they explain nothing."
-Errol Morris
Here is what he said prior to making the statement I quoted (to give you some context):
Take historical analogies. I believe that historical analogies are always wrong. This a long discussion, but, to me, the most dangerous thing about Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler at Munich is not the fact that Munich happened and it led to further Nazi aggression and so on and so forth, but that the example of Munich has been used to support thousands upon thousands of bad policies and inappropriate decisions. LeMay called JFK’s recommendation for a “quarantine” (that is, a blockade) in the Cuban Missile Crisis “worse than Munich”. Would nuclear war have been a better alternative? But nuclear war was averted by Kennedy’s policies. And thirty years later the Soviet Union collapsed without the need for nuclear war. Was LeMay right? I don’t think so. But again, the example of Munich was invoked to justify the invasion of Iraq. Appeasing Saddam, appeasing Hitler. The use of the Munich analogy does not clarify, it obscures.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley
I agree. But, as a slight tangent, I think that after we've dealt with basic problems of rationality - that cause much confusion when poetic language is mixed with science - there is still the fact that science has undeniable aesthetic and emotional effects on people familiar with it. Those things are part of the fun, apart from doing science strictly in order to win, which may have gave Eliezer the idea of weirdtopia with secretive science. Also, I think that being artistically refined and poignant about science differs greatly from plain mysticism. The latter is often a vacuous and cheap trick to invoke a warm fuzzy feeling. The real feat would be to be artistic with the purpose of making people feel emotions that fit the facts.
When you interact with someone, you may think, I will do this, so that they will do that, or think such-and-such, or feel thus-and-so; but what is actually going on for them may bear no resemblance to the model of them that you have in your head. If your model is wrong at the meta-level -- you are wrong about how people work -- then you will either notice that you have difficulty dealing with people at all, or not notice that the problem is with you and get resentful at everyone else for not behaving as you expect them to.
Here, Mrs. B.F. Skinner imagines that she is reinforcing the behaviour that she desires, of eating spinach, by providing the reinforcer, ice-cream. Or is she really punishing the consumption of ice-cream by associating it with spinach? Or associating herself with an unpleasant situation? Or any number of other possibilities.
I reject that entirely," said Dirk, sharply. "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something which works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, `Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.'"
Douglas Adams
What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.
--Anatole France
For an even somewhat rational person, pain is far stronger than necessary as a warning sign. As someone generally concerned with my own body's welfare, the mental equivalent of popping up a politely worded dialog box would be sufficient. I find that shame is likewise overkill for solving this problem.
Speaking in terms of real pop-up boxes, you might be surprised at how easy it is for people to ignore the content of even the most blaring, attention-grabbing error messages.
A typical computer user's reaction to a pop-up box is to immediately click whatever they think will make it go away, because a pop-up box is not a message to be understood but a distraction from what they're actually trying to accomplish. A more obnoxious pop-up box just increases the user's agitation to get rid of it.
As rationalists, we try hard to avoid falling into traps like these (I'm not sure if there's a name for the fallacy of ignoring information because it's annoying, but it's not exactly a high-utility strategy), but part of the way we should do that is to design systems that encourage good habits automatically.
I like Firefox's approach; when it wants you to choose between Yes or No on an important question ("Really install this unsigned plugin?"), it actually disables the buttons on the pop-up for the first 3 seconds. You see the pop-up box, your well-honed killer instinct kicks in and attempts to destroy it by mindlessly clicking on Yes so you can get back to work already... but that doesn't work, you're surprised, and that jolt out of complacency inspires you to actually read the message.
I suspect a "Hey, have you noticed that something has penetrated the skin of your left foot?" warning might benefit from having the same mechanism.
He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool - shun him
He who knows not, and knows that he knows not is a child - teach him
He who knows, and knows not that he knows is asleep - wake him
He who knows, and knows that he knows is wise - follow him
- Persian proverb
I am shamed by my failure. I will master the Search, so that the Search can not master me.
I think that while this quotation is true if we take "SCIENCE!" to mean intelligent optimization pressure, it is far more likely to create affective death spirals around anything that calls itself science than get people to try to fix problems.
In short, whatever emotional impulse we may have toward altruism and empathy, and to whatever extent it may be genetically hardwired, it does not obviate the need for explicit judgments about right and wrong. If it did not seem correct to act with kindness and fairness, even at a net personal cost—if there were no sensible reason for so acting, beyond a raw impulse to do so—then we would have reason to regard the raw impulse as pointlessly self-destructive—like a disposition to alcoholism or a purely visceral (so to speak) aversion to surgery—and we would have a reason to attempt to overcome it.
- Gary Drescher, Good and Real
This is a good example of how some areas are most concisely dealt with by ridicule.
Superstition produces bad luck
-- Anonymous
Sounds like Caveman Science Fiction to me. "Why should we risk learning about new things, when there's a possibility they'll be scary?"
"Test Your God.... Test[s] cannot harm a God of Truth, but will destroy fakes. Fake gods refuse test[s]."
~ Dr. Gene Ray
The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
--T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Elphaba, where I'm from, we believe all sorts of things that aren't true. We call it - "history."
A man's called a traitor - or liberator.
A rich man's a thief - or philanthropist.
Is one a crusader - or ruthless invader?
It's all in which label is able to persist.
There are precious few at ease, with moral ambiguities. So we act as though they don't exist.
- The Wizard of Oz, during the song Wonderful from Wicked
What I like about the serenity prayer (at least the way I interpret it) is that it puts the priority on changing things; serenity is just a second-best option for things that are unchangeable.
In that respect, it's like a transhumanist slogan. With something like life extension, I want to point to the serenity prayer and say we can change this, which means we need to have the courage to change. Death at the end of the current lifespan isn't something that we should serenely accept because we can change it. The serenity prayer calls for courage and action to follow through and make those changes.
Part of the difficulty is that the wisdom to know the difference also requires the wisdom to change your mind. Once people accept that something cannot be changed, then their serenity-producing mechanisms prevent them from reconsidering the evidence and recognizing that maybe it really can (and should) be changed.
If I was going to alter the serenity prayer, that's one thing I'd add. In Alicorn's version, that means the strength as a rationalist to distinguish what I can and cannot change, and to update those categorizations as new evidence arises.
The analogy I use in my head instead of games is languages. They both have rules, but "games" implies something fake, not productive, and not to be taken seriously. "Languages" are tools we're accustomed to using for everyday functional reasons, and it's clearer that breaking their rules arbitrarily has a more immediate detrimental effect on their purpose (communication).
The most common way I use the metaphor explicitly is during a misunderstanding with a friend. "Wait--what does X mean in Sammish? Z? Ohh, now I get it. In Relsquish, X means Y. That's why I thought you were talking about Y."
The nice thing about this model is that, in a game, you expect everyone to know the rules before you sit down to play. If someone doesn't follow them, they're either too ignorant to play or cheating. When you're talking to someone who speaks a different language from you (even if they're just different versions of English, like Sammish and Relsquish are), occasional confusion is a matter of course. When you misunderstand each other, no one has "broken" the rules; it's just a mismatch. You identify that, explain in other words, and move on, with much fewer hard feelings or blame.
What is required is less advice and more information. – Gerald M. Reaven
Found at The Healthy Skeptic.
If you state any two propositions abstractly enough, they will appear to be the same because you subsume them under the same generalization. But this does not mean they have anything to do with each other; it means only that you prefer not to see the differences.
William T. Powers
If, instead of welcoming inquiry and criticism, the admirers of a great author accept his writings as authoritative, both in their excellences and in their defects, the most serious injury is done to truth. In matters of philosophy and science, authority has ever been the great opponent of truth. A despotic calm is usually the triumph of error. In the republic of the sciences, sedition and even anarchy are beneficial in the long run to the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
William Stanley Jevons, Theory of Political Economy, 1871: p.275-6
I am still learning.
-- Michaelangelo's motto
Actually my first thought upon reading that was "follow the improbability" -- be suspicious of elements of your world-model that seem particularly well optimized in some direction if you can't see the source of the optimization pressure.
... unfortunately, there is a flaw in the reasoning. ... [T]o say that each of two numbers cannot be bigger than the other is to repeat the statement that is to be proved. It is not correct in logic to prove something by saying it over again; that only works in politics, and even there it is usually considered desirable to repeat the proposition hundreds of times before considering it as definitely established.
— Carl E. Linderholm, "Mathematics Made Difficult"
(There are many more good quotes to be found in this book.)
With this in mind, I suppose the difficult part would be correctly identifying the range you're climbing.
God is nowhere treated worse than by the natural scientists who believe in him. Materialists simply explain the facts, without making use of such phrases, they do this first when importunate pious believers try to force God upon them, and then they answer curtly, either like Laplace: Sire, je n’avais pas, etc., or more rudely in the manner of the Dutch merchants who, when German commercial travellers press their shoddy goods on them, are accustomed to turn them away with the words: Ik kan die zaken niet gebruiken [I have no use for the things] and that is the end of the matter: But what God has had to suffer at the hands of his defenders! In the history of modern natural science, God is treated by his defenders as Frederick William III was treated by his generals and officials in the Jena campaign. One division of the army after another lays down its arms, one fortress after another capitulates before the march of science, until at last the whole infinite realm of nature is conquered by science, and there is no place left in it for the Creator. Newton still allowed Him the “first impulse” but forbade Him any further interference ‘in his solar system. Father Secchi bows Him out of the solar system altogether, with all canonical honours it is true, but none the less categorically for all that, and he only allows Him a creative act as regards the primordial nebula. And so in all spheres. In biology, his last great Don Quixote, Agassiz, even ascribes positive nonsense to Him; He is supposed to have created not only the actual animals but also abstract animals, the fish as such! And finally Tyndall totally forbids Him any entry into nature and relegates Him to the world of emotional processes, only admitting Him because, after all, there must be somebody who knows more about all these things (nature) than John Tyndall! What a distance from the old God – the Creator of heaven and earth, the maintainer of all things – without whom not a hair can fall from the head!
~Frederick Engels, Notes and Fragments for Dialectics of Nature
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.
--Daniel Dennett
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
John McCarthy
The fundamental insight triggered by memetic studies is that a belief may spread without necessarily being true or helping the human being holding the belief in any way.
-- Keith Stanovich, The Robots Rebellion (p. xii)
"Fifth Law of Decision Making: Decisions are justified by benefits to the organization; they are made by considering benefits to the decision makers." - Archibald Putt
Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.
-- Scott Adams
We learn about who someone is by the choices they make when the choice isn't obvious.
-- Ben Casnocha
Don't forget, your mind only simulates logic.
Used as .sig quote by Glen C. Perkins e.g. here.
People normally read only their own horoscope in the newspaper. If they forced themselves to read the other 11 they'd be far less impressed with the accuracy of their own.
-- Richard Dawkins, "Unweaving the Rainbow"
In the future, as science becomes more and more oriented to thinking in terms of information content, Godel's result will be seen as more of a platitude than a paradox.
--E. T. Jaynes (on the infamous eponymous theorem)
As a rule of thumb, anything particularly ridiculous in an otherwise reasonable context is probably due to a law.
-- "TheWama" on Reddit
I heard an interview with the guys who do South Park that for their 9/11 conspiracy episode they were considering making the real culprits the American flag manufacturers, because they clearly benefited the most.
In the King-on-the-Mountain style of conversation, one person (the King) makes a provocative statement, and requires that others refute it or admit to being wrong. The King is the judge of whether any attempted refutation is successful. [...] The King's behavior comes down to "you can't stop me". By the rules of his game, no one can make him back down. He treats conversation as a negotiation with his opponent. If his opponent wants him to back down, it's his opponent's responsibility to make him back down, not his responsibility to do something to help his opponent. He himself feels no responsibility to learn or understand or cultivate his mind.
—Ben Kovitz, King on the Mountain
We shall not cease from exploration and the end of our exploring shall be to return where we started and know the place for the first time.
-- T.S. Eliot
"A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it."
Marvin Minsky, Why Programming Is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly-Understood and Sloppily-Formulated Ideas
Mathematics is the only good metaphysics.
Lord Kelvin
[N]ot just our actions and reactions but our very perceptions, what we think we see, feel, smell, and so on, are deeply affected by our mental model, our assumptions and beliefs about the way things really are. In a great variety of experiments with perception, many people, many times over, have shown this to be true. Therefore it is not just fancy and tricky talk to say that each of us lives, not so much in an objective out-there world that is the same for all of us, but in his mental model of that world. It is this model of the world that he experiences. We are not, then starting an impossible contradiction, or using language carelessly, when we say that I live in my mental model of the world, and my mental model lives in me.
---John Holt, What Do I Do Monday?
At the other end of the spectrum are the opponents of reductionism who are appalled by what they feel to be the bleakness of modern science. To whatever extent they and their world can be reduced to a matter of particles or fields and their interactions, they feel diminished by that knowledge....I would not try to answer these critics with a pep talk about the beauties of modern science. The reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works.
--Steven Weinberg
Yeah... I understand the sentiment, but as someone who delivers those pep talks, I do think, in all seriousness, that the guy's wrong. If we weren't made out of particles we'd be made out of something else. Particles is just the stuff that stuff turns out to be made of. Anyone who has a problem with this has misunderstood something, or their real problem is something else.
For example, it is very depressing that people who die are gone forever. But this is not a matter of them being made out of particles. It would be just as bad if they were made out of freeplegrunge and then ceased to exist forever.
Albert grunted. "Do you know what happens to lads who ask too many questions?"
Mort thought for a moment.
"No," he said eventually, "what?"
There was silence.
Then Albert straightened up and said, "Damned if I know. Probably they get answers, and serve 'em right."
-Terry Pratchett, Mort
Your job as a scientist is to figure out how you’re fooling yourself.
Saul Perlmutter
There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
[ while in general I value philosophy, there is also much nonsense and, especially, little progress ]
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716): Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.
In J. R. Newman (ed.), The World of Mathematics, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.
"Can't I do things without the results being guaranteed?"
Yes; it's called ignorance. It's not called freedom.
Even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground
(Self-promotion: this is the epigraph to the novella I'm working on, which is not really about rationality but is about what we're pleased to call "human nature", and which you may read the beginning of here if so inclined.)
"If you’ve never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports."
-- Umesh Vazirani (as quoted by Scott Aaronson)
I sure wished I knew what the hell I was talking about, but I'd picked up enough terms and felt the importance attached to them, so that I could use them properly without knowing what they meant. But they felt right, so very right...
-- Roger Zelazny, as Corwin ("Nine Princes in Amber").
It is better to have an approximate answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong question.
-- John Tukey
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them; this skill is most needed in times of stress and darkness.
-Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
The kind of epistemology that allows you to be that certain about something so false is immoral.
To wit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5cFKpjRnXE=player_embedded
Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned. —Avicenna (980–1037 AD)
The script:
A grad student in humanities has been called before a hearing to justify his existence.
Student: "It's hard to explain monetarily, but how can you put a price tag on the human soul?"
Student: "The humanities help us appreciate beauty and grow as individuals."
Student: "What good are science and technology if we don't ask ourselves the question, what does it mean to be a human being?"
Chair: "So how's the answer coming along?"
Student: "Oh no, we just ask the question, not actually answer it."
The unwillingness to tolerate or respect any social forces which are not recognizable as the product of intelligent design, which is so important a cause of the present desire for comprehensive economic planning, is indeed only one aspect of a more general movement. We meet the same tendency in the field of morals and conventions, in the desire to substitute an artificial for the existing languages, and in the whole modern attitude toward processes which govern the growth of knowledge. The belief that only a synthetic system of morals, an artificial language, or even an artificial society can be justified in an age of science, as well as the increasing unwillingness to bow before any moral rules whose utility is not rationally demonstrated, or to conform with conventions whose rationale is not known, are all manifestations of the same basic view which wants all social activity to be recognizably part of a single coherent plan. They are the results of that same rationalistic "individualism" which wants to see in everything the product of conscious individual reason.
Friedrich Hayek, Individualism: True and False
The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white phial there still remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake and active for four long nights. Each day, serene, explicit, patient as ever, he had given his lecture to his students, and then had come back at once to this momentous calculation. His face was grave, a little drawn and hectic from his drugged activity. For some time he seemed lost in thought. Then he went to the window, and the blind went up with a click. Half way up the sky, over the clustering roofs, chimneys and steeples of the city, hung the star.
He looked at it as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy. "You may kill me," he said after a silence. "But I can hold you--and all the universe for that matter--in the grip of this little brain. I would not change. Even now."
-- H.G. Wells, "The Star", 1897
I've never seen a UFO. When I went to places that were rumored to be haunted, nothing showed up. Two hours of intense staring didn't make my pencil move a single millimeter, and glaring at my classmate's head didn't reveal his thoughts to me, either. I couldn't help but get depressed at how normal the laws of physics were.
-- Kyon, The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi
"I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this." - Emo Phillips
"Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms." - Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
There are two different types of people in the world,those who want to know,and those who want to believe.--Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche
A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.
From the Yes, Minister TV show.
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
-- G. K. Chesterton
"One mark of a good officer... the ability to make quick decisions. If they happen to be right, so much the better."
--Ringworld, Larry Niven
It's possible, and not undesirable, to achieve perfection. For example, the majority of words I type are spelled perfectly, and the perfect answer to "what is two plus two?" is "four". It's just not possible or desirable to achieve it everywhere.
... by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
— Henri Poincaré
Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.
— Alain Robbe-Grillet
"If I were wrong, then one would have been enough."
Einstein's reported response to the pamphlet One Hundred Authors Against Einstein.
Mathematical folklore contains a story about how Acta Quandalia published a paper proving that all partially uniform k-quandles had the Cosell property, and then a few months later published another paper proving that no partially uniform k-quandles had the Cosell property. And in fact, goes the story, both theorems were quite true, which put a sudden end to the investigation of partially uniform k-quandles.
"Do not ask permission to understand. Do not wait for the word of authority. Seize reason in your own hand. With your own teeth savor the fruit."
-"The Way of Analysis", Robert S. Strichartz
Believe me, breaking the bed is a bit more worrying when you're tied to it.
One of the things that keep religion alive in western society in the 21st century is the dogma, widespread even among atheists, that even if religious beliefs are false they're sane enough to deserve respect. In other words, most non-believers treat mainstream religious beliefs as if they were like the belief that the Washington Redskins are going to win the 2010 Superbowl rather than like the belief that Tom Cruise is the son of Xenu, Lord of the Galactic Confederacy.
The first step towards a society in which ridiculous beliefs are acknowledged to be ridiculous, is to stop acting as if these beliefs aren't ridiculous. The point of ridicule is first to make those who hold ridiculous beliefs feel ashamed or at least uncomfortable, and second to help make rationalists feel the appropriate emotion when dealing with such extremes of irrationality. The end goal is a society in which people have the same attitude towards religious beliefs than they do towards belief in alien abductions.
"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." - Richard Dawkins
Right, so Charlie Brown is frustrated with commercialism and asks if anyone knows what Christmas is all about, and Linus replies by quoting the Bible, reminding Charlie Brown about the religious significance of the day and thereby guarding against loss of purpose. (In our state of knowledge, we don't regard religious observance as a legitimate purpose, but conditioning on the premise that Christianity is true, it would be important to make sure your holidays remain being about Christ, rather than wandering off and becoming about gifts or something.)
I like the indirectness of Linus's reminder (the scene would have been much less effective if Linus had just said, "Well, it's about Jesus"), which is why I referred to the Eliezer's "twelfth virtue" in my (apparently still too opaque) attempt at explanation above. Mere words can only be pointers; they don't in themselves contain the complexity of a thought. The thoughts that you can only invoke indirectly are important. ("You may try to name the highest principle with names such as 'the reason for the season,' 'the true spirit of Chirstmas,' or 'God's word,' but what if c.)
I like the seeming incongruity of using a religious quote in a Rationality Quotes thread, which on a meta level illustrates that specific ideas can be accepted or rejected on their own merits. Of course Christianity is false, but if a religious quote also demonstrates something true or useful, the irrationality of the source doesnt matter.
Maybe too subtle (judging by the downvotes), but I'm not so sure.
It's amazing the things people would rather have than money.
-- Garfield
Or at least of maintaining friendships with people who have cats.
There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny.
-- Han Solo
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today -- but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
-- Isaac Asimov
The reason you feel most comfortable with a job (unless, like me, you're in the minority - a job would destroy my psyche) is that you've been brainwashed by many years of school, socialization and practice. I pick the word brainwashed carefully, because it's more than training or acclimation. It's something that's been taught to you by people who needed you to believe it was the way things are supposed to be.
-- Seth Godin
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
-- Gautama Buddha
This is more important than it looks. Most people's beliefs are just recorded memes that bubbled up from their subconscious when someone pressed them for their beliefs. They wonder what they believe, their mind regurgitates some chatter they heard somewhere, and they go, "Aha, that must be what I believe." Unless they take special countermeasures, humans are extremely suggestible.
"Face the facts. Then act on them. It's the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it's harder than you'd think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don't pray, don't wish, don't buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don't give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of... whatever. FACE THE FACTS. THEN act."
--- Quellcrist Falconer, speech before the assault on Millsport. (Richard Morgan, Broken Angels)
"A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it."
-David Stevens
"In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined."
Well, clearly we can assert anything we want, so the quote becomes:
That without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
And we notice that evidence doesn't change depending on whether you're considering something for belief or dismissal, so the quote becomes:
That without evidence can be dismissed.
So Hitchens is really telling us that prior probabilities tend to be small, which is true since there are almost always many possible hypotheses that the probability mass is split between.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
-- Christopher Hitchens
Accuracy was sacrificed for a pleasant parallel construction. Anything can be so asserted.
And, without supporting evidence, such assertions demonstrate nothing.
The mere fact that an assertion has been made is, in fact, evidence. For example, I will now flip a coin five times, and assert that the outcome was THHTT. I will not provide any evidence other than that assertion, but that is sufficient to conclude that your estimate of the probability that it's true should be higher than 1/2^5. Most assertions don't come with evidence provided unless you go looking for it. If nothing else, most assertions have to be unsupported because they're evidence for other things and the process has to bottom out somewhere.
Now, as a matter of policy we should encourage people to provide more evidence for their assertions wherever possible, but that is entirely separate from the questions of what is evidence, what evidence is needed, and what is demonstrated by an assertion having been made.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
John Gall, "Systemantics"
Evolved from both simpler winged aircraft and simpler rockets.
All the base components that went into the space shuttle still existed on a line of technogical progress from the basic to the advanced. Actually, the space shuttle followed Gall's Law precisely.
The lift mechanism was still vertically stacked chemical rockets of the sort that had already flown for decades. The shuttle unit was built from components perfected by the Gemini and Apollo programs, and packed into an aerodynamic form based on decades of aircraft design.
Reducing technologically, the shuttle still depends on simple systems like airfoils, rockets and nozzles, gears, and other known quantities.
Then if that qualifies, what would falsify Gall's Law?
No, currently we don't. If we want our values to survive, then we must win. If we want to win, we have nothing else to place our values on besides this "apparently barren soil".
Think of it as the converse of the following Terry Pratchett dialog between Susan and Death in Hogfather:
"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
"REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE"
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little- "
"YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES"
"So we can believe the big ones?"
"YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING"
"They're not the same at all!"
"YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET-- " Death waved a hand. "AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED"
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point---"
"MY POINT EXACTLY"
If scientists do believe that they are ethically bound to improve the lot of ordinary people, or at least to decrease violence and increase possibilities for the pursuit of happiness, as I do, then perhaps the greatest challenge — and one that has been wholly overlooked here — is "how do we as scientists advance reason in an inherently unreasonable world?" This is a very difficult issue and one that cannot be seriously addressed by simply trying to muscle science and reason into everyday or momentous human affairs. I am privy to hostage negotiations, and be assured that simply telling hostage takers their beliefs are bullshit will get you the opposite of what you want, like the hostage's head delivered on a platter. Of course, that's an extreme case; but reason by backward induction towards the less extreme cases in the actual political and social conditions of our present world and you will find that the tactics proposed at the conference for an unlikely strategic shift in humankind's thinking will most probably blowback and backfire. And I almost thank God that even the best of our scientists are not prominent political negotiators or policymakers.
-- Scott Atran
Only slightly less interesting in the same comment:
I used to hike a fair amount in the White Mountains in northern New England, and I made a point of reading the accident reports in Appalachia, the annual mountaineering journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club (see www.outdoors.org/publications/appalachia/index.cfm). Every fatality of the year is presented as a case study, and analyzed in terms of what went wrong. Reading those accident reports helped me to learn that people die in the mountains at all times of the year. Knowing how to get out of the woods before hypothermia sets in could in fact save one's life. Appalachia is a great learning tool.
This matter of case studies is intensely valuable.
Science is not ’organized common sense'; at its most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against the ancient, anthropocentric prejudices that we call intuition.
-- Stephen J. Gould
In that same vein:
Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan p.203
It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness
Two comments:
1) Magic: the Gathering strategy was developed and refined almost entirely through the Internet. If you want to be a competitive Magic player, you need the Internet.
2) If you need narrow advice - "how to fix a broken faucet" is pretty narrow - than the Internet works pretty well. If you want to learn to be a plumber, yeah, the Internet kinda sucks, but if you have relatively limited needs, it works.
A fun quote, but not an especially rational one, I think. Just as I can't stand people who try to recast mysticism in the language of science (Deepak Chopra, etc.), I think we should avoid recasting science in the language of mysticism. Who's going to better understand stars after hearing them compared to Jesus? It won't even increase people's appreciation of science; it'll increase their appreciation of some other unrelated thing that they'll learn to refer to by the word "science".
"This is the first test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible value to him."
Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
-Thomas Carlyle
This reminds me of something I read in C.S. Lewis which is quite rational: the purpose of curiosity is finding answers. It's not dithering for the sake of dithering, or debate for the sake of debate. The goal is to find out what the right answer is, as accurately as possible, not to eternally keep all the options open. That's how I understand the quote.
Of course, real curiosity can look like dithering and endless debate because people are being very careful not to get things wrong.
Not strictly a rationality quote, but screw it, it's beautiful anyway:
I take it as a given that, during the course of my lifespan, there's always been television (not color to start with, but there was TV), that indoor plumbing and lights have always been around, flight is not only possible but commonplace and pretty much always has been, and the moon landing happened before I was born.
A part of me regrets missing the introduction of all of those exciting technologies and innovations, because to me they are all background things that just are. They aren't wondrous, they just are.
No matter where you live in history, there are always improvements that you'll appreciate, but there's always amazing stuff that was there before that you will only see as part of the world as it's always been, and will be even more amazing stuff that will come after you that would probably blow your mind if you ever had the chance to see it (or would be so far beyond your comprehension you couldn't appreciate it).
You don't truly appreciate the amazing parts of an advance unless you've watched those parts happen.
To me, computers (and video games, etc), color/stereo televisions, microwaves, mobile phones, digital wristwatches, and many of the things you no doubt take for granted are marvels. When I was a kid, they largely did not exist. Which is not to say they all of them were completely unavailable, but when I was growing up no one I knew owned any of them and they were brand new.
I both envy my grandparents (now all dead) and my yet-to-be-born grandchildren the wonders of their lifetimes that I will never see they way they do. The wonders of my grandparents are my commonplace items. The wonders of my grandchildren are probably beyond my imagination.
But that's just human nature. We want to see it all. And eventually we learn we'll never succeed. It's both heartening and saddening at the same time.
-- natehoy
all arguments online seem to follow that format. It's like a giant straw man ate a radioactive non sequitor and began rampaging through downtown Tokyo.
-- jman3030
People who can see through the conventions of entertainment and who enjoy posting about those conventions for free are likely to be much more awake than usual.
You make a good case. I repudiate my previous statement.
speak for yourself Sir, I intend to live forever
-Jonathan Frakes, as William T Riker
"We are selfish, base animals crawling across the earth. But because we got brains, if we try real hard, we may occasionally aspire to something that is less than pure evil."
-- Gregory House
Human stupidity is formidable but not invincible.
-- Robert C. W. Ettinger, The Prospect of Immortality
"A joke told by Warren Buffett comes to mind: a patient, after hearing from a doctor that he has cancer, tells the doctor, “Doc, I don’t have enough money for the surgery, but maybe could I pay you to touch up the x-ray?” Hope and self-deception are not a strategy."
~ Vitaliy Katsenelson
I noticed that too; of course not eating fish is an ethical non-issue given how much other low-hanging consequentialist fruit there is.
However, note that his justification for his change of heart is pure rationalization. Whatever good reasons there might be for eating fish, or for abandoning vegetarianism, "they eat each other" is a bad one, a confabulation.
Fish and other animals are not capable of reflecting ethically on their actions, so they are ethically blameless for whatever they do. That does not mean their suffering doesn't count. Franklin knew that.
Your imaginings can have as much power over you as your reality, or even more.
-- Charles T. Tart
I never read Lovecraft as being any kind of metaphor for the real world, so I wouldn't vote this up as a rationalist quote for that reason.
But I like it as a device used Lovecraft to try to convey a sheer magnitude of horror. Can you imagine discovering something so horrific you wished you could delete the whole thing from your memory ? The more you pride yourself as a rationalist, the more horrific it would have to be.
What is it that you feel/see/touch/taste/think/etc. instead of simply acting?
Why do you group together sense perceptions (which I have) with thoughts (which I have), and call them qualia (which I don't have)?
Why is there a "you" you experience, instead of mere rote action?
How are these different?
We label these sorts of things that we use to distinguish between empty existence and our own subjective (personally observed/felt) experience.
How can existence be "empty"? Is subjective experience just sense perception? Because sense perception doesn't seem like it warrants all this mysteriousness.
The thing about humans that distinguish them from P-zombies.
That's odd. I thought the sequence on P-zombies made it pretty clear that they don't exist. Why do we need to be distinguished from confused, impossible thought experiments?
...while apparently unaware that they may very well be both right.
Did Russell ever provide an argument in favor of this assertion? I am interested in hearing it.
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. (Bertrand Russell)
Ignoring the trees to see the forest doesn't mean that one is more important than the other - it just gives a different perspective.
-- Michael Sipser, Introduction to the Theory of Computation (2nd ed., page 257)
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
-- Peter Drucker
AI makes philosophy honest
-- Dan Dennet
I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and in many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about a little, but if I can't figure it out, then I go to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.
-- Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
In the game "Alpha Protocol", one of the characters is a conspiracy theorist. When he sends you an email about the Federal Reserve (which, according to him, is deliberately engineering a financial crisis so the banks can foreclose on all the houses and get everyone's property), you can respond by quoting Time Cube at him. Which makes him like you more.
Compare:
Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite.
Neither do Americans.
Sure we do. It's all the other party's fault.
The essential problem is the way health insurance works in the US. The basic function of insurance is to protect people from strongly adverse events that would put them into financial distress. Insurance companies have to charge more than an actuarially fair rate for insurance in order to make a profit. This means that it is inefficient to run small or high probability expenses through an insurance scheme. The only reason this happens in the US is the tax deductibility of insurance and the mandates on coverage in some states. This turns health insurance into an inefficient health savings scheme.
Furthermore community rating produces very adverse outcomes. By preventing insurance companies from pricing insurance policies at a different rate for each customer (thus creating an expected profit from each customer), the insurance company has an incentive to refuse cover to high risk people (i.e. those that need insurance the most) or drive them away by making their life a misery every time they try to lodge a claim. To the extent they can't do this it drives low risk people out of the market, which leave them exposed if they suddenly need emergency health care (this is especially problematic since low risk people are generally young and therefore have little savings) and insurance companies have to raise premiums further to make up for the loss of the highly profitable young people.
My advice to the US government would be to end community rating, guaranteed issue and mandated coverage. I would suggest eliminating the tax deductibility of insurance (or failing that, make putting money into a Health Savings Account tax deductible). Medicare and Medicaid should be discontinued and replaced with a system of income support where poor or unusually sick people would receive extra money in a health savings account that could be spent on healthcare or health insurance. If you have to include old people in the scheme explicitly to make it politically possible, that would be OK as a second-best solution.
The basic principle in this is to let market mechanisms work in the absence of a clear market failure and then deal with people who can't afford vital services by helping them directly. To what extent you provide that help is a terminal values question so I won't venture an opinion here, but however much or little you want to help, this system should result in cheaper insurance for most people and essential coverage for the poor or those in need of extraordinary levels of health care. It should also arrest the escalating health costs of the US government.
I apologize for poor conversational form.
Let me try again, hopefully more nicely: You made a very strong claim with very weak evidence.
You claimed our thoughts were fundamentally affected by our language, and that someone can control how people think by tweaking the language. Your evidence was your own sense (not a paper, not even a survey) that people think differently when writing in a different programming language.
If you have more evidence, I would really like to see it, I am not just saying that to score points or to make you angry.
Why does something called a "brief" have 174-plus pages?
That's because it's easy to misvalue assets if you're disconnected from the production process. So when you have specialized bookkeepers, others will typcially see them as ignorant of the true value of the assets, and associate this with bookkeeping per se, rather than bookkeeping with a screwy incentive structure and/or knowledge flows. Because this is the context in which most people interface with accountants, they tend to be associated with misvaluing assets. And thus:
"Beancounters didn't think a soldier's life was worth 300 [thousand dollars]." -- Batman Begins
Edit: Sorry, I forgot to translate all that: P(observe "accountant" | believe accountant misvalued assets) P(observe "accountant" | ~believe accountant misvalued assets)
I know this is well known, but to supplement the T-Rex:
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
-Alfréd Rényi/Paul Erdős
I'm not sure this makes sense. Empirically many human cultures have deities that are shaped like animals.
A more direct paraphrasing would be, Just because I don't have all the answers doesn't mean that your answers are correct.
A concrete example: just because scientists don't currently know everything about how evolution happened, that doesn't mean that Young Earth Creationists are right. Typical YEC debating strategy is to look for gaps (real or imagined) in our current theories, and act as if that proves that God created the world in six days, and from the dust created every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, etc.
So far as I know, he wasn't, just placed under house arrest. It jumped out at me too; you really have to get these poems exactly right on a factual level or it takes a lot away.
The modern conception of Galileo as someone harshly prosecuted for his beliefs seems rather exaggarated: in reality, he was even explicitly encouraged to write a book on the subject by the church. It was only when he offended the Pope in his book that he got sent to house arrest.
In the end, Cardinal Bellarmine, acting on directives from the Inquisition, delivered him an order not to "hold or defend" the idea that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still at the centre. The decree did not prevent Galileo from discussing heliocentrism hypothesis (thus maintaining a facade of separation between science and that church). For the next several years Galileo stayed well away from the controversy. He revived his project of writing a book on the subject, encouraged by the election of Cardinal Maffeo Barberini as Pope Urban VIII in 1623. Barberini was a friend and admirer of Galileo, and had opposed the condemnation of Galileo in 1616. The book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was published in 1632, with formal authorization from the Inquisition and papal permission. [...]
Earlier, Pope Urban VIII had personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book, and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism. He made another request, that his own views on the matter be included in Galileo's book. Only the latter of those requests was fulfilled by Galileo. Whether unknowingly or deliberately, Simplicio, the defender of the Aristotelian Geocentric view in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was often caught in his own errors and sometimes came across as a fool. Indeed, although Galileo states in the preface of his book that the character is named after a famous Aristotelian philosopher (Simplicius in Latin, Simplicio in Italian), the name "Simplicio" in Italian also has the connotation of "simpleton."[48] This portrayal of Simplicio made Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems appear as an advocacy book: an attack on Aristotelian geocentrism and defence of the Copernican theory. Unfortunately for his relationship with the Pope, Galileo put the words of Urban VIII into the mouth of Simplicio. Most historians agree Galileo did not act out of malice and felt blindsided by the reaction to his book.[49] However, the Pope did not take the suspected public ridicule lightly, nor the Copernican advocacy. Galileo had alienated one of his biggest and most powerful supporters, the Pope, and was called to Rome to defend his writings.
The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner.
--John Holt
"Any fool can have an opinion; to know what one needs to know to have an opinion is wisdom; which is another way of saying that wisdom means knowing what questions to ask about knowledge."
--Neil Postman, "Building a Bridge to the 18th Century"
Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
-George Bernard Shaw
There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free.
Robert Anton Wilson, The Trick Top Hat
Up voted, although I think 'wasted' is a bit harsh. I would call lost time to unsuccessful research a necessary cost. If we all knew exactly which problems to study and which approaches to use it wouldn't be research, it would be divination.
When the spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, the cat who lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. So the teacher ordered that the cat be tied up during the evening practice. Years later, when the teacher died, the cat continued to be tied up during the meditation session. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up. Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.
-- Zen Stories to Tell Your Neighbors http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/zenstory/ritualcat.html
There will always be a large difference between those who'd ask themselves "why won't things work as they are meant to" and those asking themselves "how could I get them to work". For the moment being, the human world belongs to those who would ask "why". But the future belongs, necessarily, to those who'd ask themselves "how".
"I have no need of that hypothesis." -- Laplace to Napoleon
"The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), 'That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.' When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion."
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume
Philosophy easily triumphs over past and future evils. But present ones, prevail over it.
Maxim 22 François de La Rochefoucauld
“Whether and when law is more effective than code is an empirical matter — something to be studied, and considered, not dismissed by banalities spruced up with italics.” - Lawrence Lessig
Depends what "it" is.
If the alternatives are killing 10 people efficiently at a cost of $100 a head vs. killing ten people inefficiently at a cost of $1000 a head, then killing them inefficiently is worse: I've not only killed 10 people, I've wasted $9000 worth of resources that could have been used to do something actually useful.
But if I've been given a $10,000 killing budget, then it's clearly better for the world if I spend this inefficiently and only manage to kill 10 people rather than 100.
That quote seems silly. If there were hidden elements to 9/11 (or JFK, or anything) obvious enough for lone nuts to find, then it's reasonable to assume the government investigation would have found them also. Given that the government investigation didn't say anything about it, then, it's reasonable to assume it's because they have something to hide.
"A few intellectually rigorous killjoys argued that any explanation to which humans could relate was probably anthropomorphic nonsense, but nobody invited them onto talk shows."
--Greg Egan, "Quarantine".
"The people who are already born into money never know a real struggle, and for the others so often this struggle is so hard that it kills all pity. Our own painful struggle, that the selfish say we need, destroys our feelings for the misery we cause on our rise to become this so called success. I was forced back into a world of material insecurity, this fact has removed the curtain of this narrow minded and selfish world, and after reading, writing, searching, and questioning, that I may not have been able to do if distracted by the relentless pursuit of material wealth that seems to be the driving force in most people's lives, did I truly come to know humanity...
"I don't know what is worse, intention to social misery or inattention to it. We see both everyday among those who have been favored in fortune by birth or luck, or those who have risen to it by their own efforts. Or else the snobs, or at times the tactless and obtrusive condescension of the social elite who apparently 'feel' for the people. In any case these people sin against moral justice farther than their narrow little minds and twisted hearts are probably even capable of understanding or feeling. Consequently and much to their amazement, the results of their pathetic social charity efforts is next to nil, frequently infact an indignant rebuf, though this is passed off by them as proof of the ingratitude of the 'lazy street bums', that they themselves are partly responsible for helping to create in the first place."
-- Adolf Hitler
"I don't, I've come to believe, have to agree with you to like you, or respect you."
--Anthony Bourdain.
Never forget that your opponents are not evil mutants. They are the heroes of their own stories, and if you can't fathom why they do what they do, or why they believe what they believe, that's your failing not theirs.
"Wisdom seems to come largely from curing childish qualities, and intelligence largely from cultivating them."
--Paul Graham
"Fierce battles are fought within the confines of our goal systems. Inside the closed walls the essence of right and wrong is at stake as the rebels engage the guards of the evolutionary past. After the violent confrontations, the old kings rejoice their triumph or get beheaded to become but ghosts of their former glory. And again and again our inner book of morals gets revised... — Nevertheless, whatever the outcome is, it is, by definition, good."
-- Mika
It is ridiculous, silly to watch and excruciatingly embarrassing to perform when sober.
Fixed.
It sounded blatantly false, so I looked up the paper; and it seems Taleb might be saying that the road is not simply reversible and that one direction is not just the same as the other. I hope. Because, I mean, really, what do you call a nuclear weapon if not a practical application of theoretical knowledge? Fission weapons did not exist in nature before they were envisioned based on abstract knowledge (by Leo Szilard, in his bathtub).
"I’m moved to laughter at the thought of how presumptuous it would be to reject mathematics for philosophical reasons. How would you like the job of telling the mathematicians that they must change their ways…now that philosophy has discovered that there are no classes? Can you tell them, with a straight face, to follow philosophical argument wherever it leads? If they challenge your credentials, will you boast of philosophy’s other great discoveries: that motion is impossible, that a Being than which no greater can be conceived cannot be conceived not to exist, that it is unthinkable that anything exists outside the mind, that time is unreal, that no theory has ever been made at all probable by evidence (but on the other hand that an empirically ideal theory cannot possibly be false), that it is a wide-open scientific question whether anyone has ever believed anything, and so on, and on, ad nauseam? Not me!"
-- David Lewis, 'Parts of Classes'
"The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice that failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."
-- R.D. Laing, Knots
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
-- Neil Gaiman Terry Pratchett, 'Good Omens'
Feedback phenomena and human intuition are uncomfortable bedfellows. When people dislike where an equilibrium argument takes them, it is therefore unsurprising that they invent simpler arguments that lead to more palatable conclusions. However, the first principle of rational thought is never to allow your preferences to influence your beliefs.
Ken Binmore
True, it would be some kind of bland comfort if no one had any cause for which they would be willing to kill. It would be an unimaginable horror, though, if no one had a cause for which they were willing to die.
-- Tailsteak
Being willing to die for a cause is being willing to kill for a cause, with the caveat that your devotion is so lukewarm that you limit yourself to killing at most one person.
A true superhero would die or kill to save the world, as the situation dictated.
The point of a quote is usually obvious, but this one isn't. The original writers were simply laying down their sexist laws - but why are you quoting it?
You won't gain knowledge by drinking ink.
-Arab proverb
The quotes are, by and large, selected for their ability to be appreciated out of context, and so there's a low threshold of understanding: you don't have to read a lengthy top post or six layers of ancestor comments to understand a quote.
What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so. —Mark Twain
You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. —Daniel Moyniham
On a similar note, but from a different author:
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.
—Socrates
"Experience does not ever err, it is only your judgement that errs in promising itself results which are not caused by your experiments."
Leonardo Da Vinci
I won’t teach a man who is not eager to learn, nor will I explain to one incapable of forming his own ideas. Nor have I anything more to say to those who, after I have made clear one corner of the subject, cannot deduce the other three.
Confucius
A behavioral policy based on an inside strategy permits the alcoholic to sit at the bar and rehearse the reasons to abstain. An outside strategy identifies a principle or rule of conduct that produces the most accurate or desirable available outcome, and sticks to that rule despite the subjective pull to abandon the principle. A behavioral policy based on an outside strategy recommends that you avoid the bar in the first place.
-- Michael Bishop, 50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough: Lessons for Philosophy of Science
Our minds are like inmates, captive to our biology, unless we manage a cunning escape.
-- Nassim Taleb
Dear Meg,
Please don't try to trisect the angle. . . It's not a matter of being clever.
Ian Stewart, Letters to a Young Mathematician
I don't know if I like this one. One ought to try some things, if for no other reason to learn which sources of information are reliable.
A pair of the same species:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. —Yeats
The trouble with this world is that the ignorant are certain, and the intelligent are full of doubt. —George Bernard Shaw
No man knows the state of another; it is always to some more or less imaginary man that the wisest and most honest adviser is speaking.
-- Thomas Carlyle, Advice to Young Men
"You can tell the truth but you better have a fast horse." - Rita Mae Brown
Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has come, stop thinking and go in.
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
The whole of science consists of data that, at one time or another, were inexplicable.
— Brendan O’Regan
Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience, it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.
— Leonardo da Vinci
Whats wrong with identifying with sports teams
A very funny video comparing identifying with a team to assuming you were there in your favorite movies.
You're always in a box. Being aware of the box can help you tremendously. It's when you think that you've left the box that's dangerous, because you're still in the box, but now you don't know it.
-- Nazgulnarsil
When someone tells you that anything is possible, tell them to dribble a football.
-- Anon
No effect is ever the effect of a single cause, but only a combination of causes.
-- Herbert Samuel
"The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted."
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
-- Mark Twain
Clearly Dennett has his sources all mixed up.
Margaret Mead made a world-wide reputation for herself with her book Coming of Age in Samoa. After visiting the island of Samoa and talking to some teenage girls, she came away convinced that the Puritanism of the American sexual code was cultural artifact. In Samoa, by contrast, sex was freely practiced, with little attention to any niceties. Unfortunately, she was wrong about this, as we learned almost a half a century later, when Derek Freeman, who actually spoke Samoan, went to Samoa and interviewed the now grown women who had been interviewed by Margaret Mead many years earlier. He discovered that they had been putting her on. Decency and sexual restraint were as important to Samoans as to Americans.
- James Q. Wilson, Moral Intuitions
Rewarding people for prompt attention to housekeeping tasks seems more appropriate than punishing them.
"Seeing is believing, but seeing isn't knowing." -- AronRa
Organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs. Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological.
-- http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/
If you can't feel secure (and teach your children to feel secure) in nightmare scenarios with 1-in-610,000 odds, the problem isn't the world. It's you.
To take advantage of professional specialization, gains from trade, capital infrastructure, comparative advantage, and economies of scale, the way grownups do it when they actually care, I'd say that the activist is the one who pays someone else to clean up the river.
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.
-- Groucho Marx
During a conversation with a Christian friend, during which my apostasy was challenged sincerely and politely but with the usual arguments and style...
Christian: And the Bible tells us that if we have Faith as small as a mustard seed...
Me: Yeah, we can move mountains. Matthew 17:20. So, tell me. Could God make an argument so circular that even He couldnt believe it?
Christian: Of course! He's God, God can do anything.
'Made in His Image' seems to apply all too well.
The derivation of (yes, incomplete, but useful) arithmetic from basic axioms, or the derivation (in another sense) of reasonably reliable arithmetic from our evolved intuition, is a perfect example of complexity arising from simplicity. There's no comparison.
And in a more abstract sense — the transuniversal truth of arithmetic, not the practical discovery or application of it, nor any attempts to formalize it — there's nothing to "arise" at all.
In any case, the "Therefore Dawkins and his opponents are equally wrong" sounds like a non-sequitur. A more understandable conclusion would be "I am wrong about the implications of the beliefs of Dawkins and his opponents." He basically says "If you believe in Intelligent Design, you must believe that God decided that 2+2 would equal 4. You don't believe that, therefore your belief system is inconsistent or you are a hypocrite. If you believe in evolution by natural selection, you must believe that 2+2 evolved to equal 4. You don't believe that, therefore your belief system is inconsistent or you are a hypocrite." He's just making up new beliefs, ascribing them to his opponents, and pointing out their ridiculousness.
Do you consider the law regarding car liability insurance to be a subsidy? It requires you to carry liability insurance up to a finite amount, despite the fact that you can do much more damage than that with your car, and then bankruptcy law will shield you from paying the full amount.
This is the same kind of insurance nuclear plants have: they're require to have an insurance on up to $X of damages, and then "someone else" bears any cost beyond this.
Nuclear plants can't be insured for the damages in a meltdown. Not because the risk is so huge that it should never be done, but because any jury award would be effectively infinite, irrespective of the actual damage. There's no point to buying insurance when the uncovered liability increases in lockstep with your insurance coverage. However, the actual meltdown risk is extremely small and even the required insurance is effectively overinsuring the plants.
This nuclear plant "insurance" can't be compared to what FM/FM had because they are able to continue operation and making profits after a "meltdown", while a nuclear plant would be over and done with.
If you don't like the kind of uncovered liability nuclear plants have, they're the least of your concerns -- you really should be advocating an end to driving, since no driver can meet the insurance standard you seem to expect out of nuclear plants.
Now, with that said, you are correct that comparisons of green technologies to coal do conveniently leave off the damage that coal plants spill off onto other people and are therefore misleading. I've long railed against assessments of coal that ignore the cost of dumping toxic crap into people's lungs. Example. (ETA: Better example.) Still, that requires an objective accounting of environmental costs, not just (as is often the case) assuming they're infinite.
"The formal study of complex systems is really, really hard." -David Colander
"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." ~William Kingdon Clifford
This is the quote that got me thinking about rationality as something other than "a word you use to describe things you believe so that you can deride those who disagree with you."
What if I am right 9 times out of 10 when I say I am 90% sure of something, but I am never or very rarely more than 50% sure of propositions of the form "This stock's price will go up/down, over a relevant time frame"?
True Knowledge:
Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for theirselves. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything.
All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil.
This is the true knowledge.
We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anesthetics and piety with immortality. The universal acid of the true knowledge had burned away a world of words, and exposed a universe of things.
Things we could use.
--Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Albert Einstein
This relates well to my earlier frustration about the cop-out of vaguely appealing to life experience in an argument, without actually explaining anything.
Does the length of his sequences imply that Eliezer doesn't understand their subject matter, or that the universe is sometimes actually complicated?
Maybe this detracts from my previous agreement with the quote, but there's a difference between explaining in person, vs. explaining in writing for a general audience. With the former, you can get immediate feedback as to which parts you're not explaining well and appropriately redirect your focus, while in the latter you have to cover all the possible confusions.
This phenomenon was revealed most starkly in one of the articles in the quantum physics sequences, when I replied to the article by saying,
So, decoherence is a valid scientific theory because it makes the same, correct predictions as the one involving collapse, but is simpler.
There, that didn't take 2800 words, now, did it?
And Eliezer Yudkowsky said in response:
Silas: I've tried just saying that to people, it doesn't work. Doesn't work in academic physics either. Besides which, it may not be the last time the question comes up, and there's no reason why physicists shouldn't know the (epistemic) math.
The fact that something can be explained simply doesn't deny the problem of inferential distance, in my view; it just means that each step is simple, not that there won't be many steps depending on how much of the listener's knowledge you can build on.
Q: How much does the smoke weight?
A: Subtract from the weight of the wood that was burned the weight of the ashes that remain, and you will have the weight of the smoke.
--Immanuel Kant
Dedication, absolute dedication, is what keeps one ahead -- a sort of indomitable, obsessive dedication and the realization that there is no end or limit to this because life is simply an ever-growing process, an ever-renewing process.
-- Bruce Lee
"If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are turning around in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims, if he could understand what they are losing, he would understand that there can be only one thing that is serious for him---to escape from the general law, to be free. What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death? Only one thing: How to save himself, how to escape: nothing else is serious."
P.D. Ouspensky, "In Search of the Miraculous", ch.17
What I cannot build, I do not understand.
— Richard Feynman
"You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is."
--Jukka Sarasti, rationalist vampire in Peter Watts's Blindsight. Great book on neuroscience and map != territory.
The fact of information being available does not make it known. Billions of people have never read The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, despite it being freely available in most places around the world, for example. The use of spoilers is not to protect the copyright of the writers, but to protect the surprise of the readers when they discover what has been written.
This was a nice exercise in generating a host of just-so stories.
Perhaps it's due to the fact that TV Tropes' mission is essentially to perform inference on the entire body of human fiction, and create generalised models (tropes or trope complexes) from that data. In many ways, it's science applied to things that are made up!
That article is full of goodies.
The most common mistake is to assume that logic and emotion are somehow naturally opposed and that employing one means you can't have the other. Excluding emotion doesn't make your reasoning logical, however, and it certainly doesn't cause your answer to be automatically true. Likewise, an emotional response doesn't preclude logical thinking — although it may prevent you from thinking in the first place — and if an emotional plan is successful, that doesn't make logic somehow wrong.
For a plan to be reasonable or sensible, it just has to get you in the direction you want to go by avoiding the stuff you don't want to happen. The rational plan, in the strictest sense of "rational", is the one that best achieves this. It is therefore by definition impossible for the plan with the best chance of working to be irrational, no matter how crazy it sounds when you first hear it.
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.
-- Stephen Jay Gould
Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
-- Democritus
Hate spinach, love ice cream, love mother. What's so difficult?
The value of a sword cannot be judged when the sword stands alone in a corner; only when it is wielded by an expert can one see its true worth.
-- old Chinese saying
You wouldn't believe how much time people spend looking for evidence that something couldn't possibly work for them. If they spent one-tenth the time looking for something that DID work, they'd have their problem solved almost immediately.
-- Eric Pepke
"Perhaps the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in a few words.
We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because, for a time, they are not remembered; and he may therefore be justly numbered among the benefactors of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and taught by frequent recollection to recur habitually to the mind."
--Samuel Johnson, Rambler #175, November 19, 1751
Their judgment was based more upon blind wishing than upon any sound prevision; for it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy.
-- Thucydides, Greek Historian, ca. 5th century BCE (Book IV, 108)
I like Thucydides for the way he tries to explain history in terms of real-politik, people, their drives and especially without including the gods in an explanation, somewhat similar to Hippocrates.
Interestingly, a modern version of this appeared in Neal Stephenson's Anathem:
Never believe a thing simply because you want it to be true
where it's called Diax's Rake.
Anathem is a great book, I'd like to add, and quite well aligned with many of the LW themes.
Man, n. An irrational animal whose irrationality is best demonstrated by his irrational belief in his rationality.
-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon
It's a dreadful graphic. No information leaps out at the viewer, you have to hunt through two tables for the meanings of the letters and numbers. It takes an effort to find the letter for any given block, or to find the block for any given letter, in radii far from where the letters appear. It's difficult to tell apart yellow and gold, or grey and silver: the key only serves to highlight how indistinguishable the colours are.
And since this graphic does not work, I cannot see it as beautiful. It is an ugly sacrifice of function to superficial prettiness.
I don't think it would be controversial to say that "useless" is way too strong a term for describing shortcomings of computers.
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
- Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894), ch. III
Therefore, after intellectually evaluating your problems through common sense and drawing on what psychiatry has taught us, if you still cannot emotionally release yourself from unwarranted guilt, and put your theories into action, then you should learn to make your guilt work for you. You should act upon your natural instincts, and then, if you cannot perform without feeling guilty, revel in your guilt. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, but if you will think about it, guilt can often add a fillip to the senses. Adults would do well to take a lesson from children: children often take great delight in doing something they know they are not supposed to.
-- Howard Stanton Levey, The Satanic Bible
(hopefully unnecessary disclaimer: I am in no way a Satanist)
This belongs on the parody site http://morewrong.com. Please build it :-)
Since 1900, perhaps 1800 or even earlier, people have been letting markets make their decisions for them. When the Bolsheviks decided to turn off the markets by bringing the means of production and exchange into common ownership they found that the decisions necessary to keep the system running were so complex that human beings were incapable of making them intelligently.
That is Mises Economic calculation argument against socialism. Perhaps Mises argument is wrong. Free markets and private property offer a system that is roughly incentive compatible. Perhaps the real issue is that we do not know how to design a burearocracy in which the incentives of the bureaucrats are sufficiently aligned with the over-arching goal. Whatever. My main point is that people only make decisions locally and have never been in charge in the sense that quote claims.
How do you get new ideas? That you do by analogy, mostly, and in working with analogy you often make very great errors. It's a great game to try to look at the past, at an unscientific era, look at something there, and say have we got the same thing now, and where is it?
-- Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist, page 114
Yes, and explaining it to a computer (i.e. writing working code) is the hardest version of this test, because it's the closest thing to a blank slate -- you can't rely on anything being "understood" like you would with a person, in which case you can just start from the NePOCU (nearest point of common understanding, learn to live with the acronym).
Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.
-- Spinoza
"The conversation eventually turned to the fact that Palanpur farmers sow their winter crops several weeks after the date at which yields would be maximized. The farmers do not doubt that earlier planting would give them larger harvests, but no one, the farmer explained, is willing to be the first to plant, as the seeds on any lone plot would be quickly eaten by birds.
I asked if a large group of farmers, perhaps relatives, had ever agreed to sow earlier, all planting on the same day to minimize the losses. 'If we knew how to do that,” he said, looking up from his hoe at me, "we would not be poor.'"
--Microeconomics, pg 39, Samuel Bowles
Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing 'Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down, down. Amen!' If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.
- Dan Barker
You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.
— Timothy Leary
I was once in a debate in which I pursued that point at some length. I don't think most people who believe in Hell find that particular point more difficult to rationalize than most of their other religious beliefs, but I bring it up because it led to a quote which, while only tangentially relating to rationality, strikes me as pretty memorable.
"That seems like an awfully selfish reason not to kill a million babies."
Ralph: When's Bart coming back?
Lisa: He's not. He thought he was better than the laws of probability. Anyone else think he's better than the laws of probability?
(Nelson raises his hand.)
Lisa: Well, you're not!
— The Simpsons, Season 22, Episode 3, "MoneyBART"
I rate it above Decartes.
Okay, point taken. But to nitpick, that sounds more like epistemological relativism than cultural -- though he can be forgiven for not expecting his audience to be sensitive to the difference. And the context makes it clear too.
Ooh, they are insane. You can read many or all of them online. This one (Dark Dungeons) is a favorite of mine.
Edit: As mentioned in the Wikipedia article, an earlier version of "Dark Dungeons" (the one that was my introduction to Chick tracts a couple decades ago) listed C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as occult authors whose books should be burned.
A real-world example of Parfits Hitchhiker was prominently in the news recently, about firefighters that watched a guys house burn down because didn't buy a subscription, even though he offered to pay when they arrived at the scene (which I assume means with all the penalties for serving a non-member, etc.). The parallel to PH became clear from this exchange with a writer on Salon:
Yes, he offered to pay, while his house burned. I can’t prove what would have happened, but the FD would probably have had to sue him to gain full reimbursement. ...
A man whose house is on fire will say anything to a guy with the means to put the fire out -- best not to trust him, unless you can get it in writing.
Obviously, this doesn't carry over the "perfect predictor" aspect, but I'm guessing the FD's decision maker could do much better than chance in guessing whether they'd be able to recover the money -- and the homeowner suffered as a result of not being able to credibly tell the FD (which, of course, has its own subjunctive decision-theoretic concerns about "if I put out the fires of non-payers when they ...") that he would pay later.
(Sorry if this has been posted already, and let me know if this belongs somewhere else like the new discussion forum.)
Update: Okay, it looks like details are in dispute -- by some accounts, he wasn't offering the penalty rate, and people dispute whether the nonpayment was deliberate or an oversight (and the evidence strongly favors the former). "You'll say anything", indeed.
I did a little reading about General Semantics after running into it in SF like Frank Herbert's; my general take on it is that it's an extended reminder that 'the map is not the territory' and that we do not have access to any eternal verities or true essences but only our tentative limited observations.
Exercises like writing in E-Prime remind us of our own fallibility. We should not say 'Amanda Knox is innocent' (who are we, an omniscient god judging her entire life?) but 'Amanda Knox likely did not commit that murder and I base this probability on the following considerations...' (note that I don't hide my own subjective role by saying something like 'the probability is based on').
(I've never found E-Prime very useful because I've always been rather empiricist in philosophy outlook and aware that I should always be able to reduce my statements down to something referring to my observations, and I suspect most LWers would not find E-Prime useful or interesting for much the same reason. But I could see it being useful for normal people.)
In this specific anecdote, the students are mistaking map for territory. The biscuit is perfectly good to eat as dog food is produced to pretty similar quality levels (and health problems would be very unlikely even if the quality were much lower), they have just eaten and enjoyed some anyway, the label 'dog biscuit' only refers to one potential use out of a great many, and yet they still have these incredible reactions to a particular label being put on this agglomeration of wheat and other agricultural products, a reaction that has no utility and no reason behind it.
EDIT: an earlier comment of mine on E-Prime: http://lesswrong.com/lw/9g/eprime/6hk
Grownups have already learned the reason to follow the rules: it's what society expects, so your life will be easier and you will be able to accomplish more if you follow them. But for the most part they learned it by osmosis, intuition, and implication--as you presumably did when you grew up--because nobody made it explicit to them, either. I think that most people don't explain this to their kids because they don't understand it themselves; they've never verbalized the reason, so they're just passing on the social pressure which worked for them.
The sad thing about this is not only that it leads to parroting "courtesy" without real understanding. It's that without being able to articulate the purpose of the social contract in general, one can't evaluate the reasons for specific clauses within it. When they seem arbitrary, they're difficult to remember, and even more difficult to respect. Consciously examining the structure allows you to see patterns in it (e.g. if X is rude, putting someone in a position where they must do X is also rude), as well as compare their implied goals against your actual goals.
For example, there are a few situations where I consider a clear understanding of the situation more important than courtesy, and will press someone to explain something which would otherwise be rude to ask for. But, unless they already know me well not to need it, I'll also explain what I'm doing and why, so they know it's not simply out of disregard. Like many things (grammar, musical composition), you have to understand the rules well before you can break them intelligently. It's a lot more acceptable to violate the social contract if you understand why the part you're violating exists and have made a conscious choice not to follow it.
I suspect that, for that reason, real understanding of society and its rules would make social change easier and bring the rules themselves more in line with peoples' actual goals. The key word there is "real," though. Just a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
I'd be concerned that this phrasing would raise more sociopaths... because that's how they think about morality.
The idea of teaching relativism for moral specifics is good, but consider that there are aspects of morality common to all sustainable cultures. Powers' framing would describe these as "common game elements" or "aspects common to all these different games". I think they should be emphasized/emotionalized as a little more than that (even if they aren't), so to avoid sociopathy (if that's even possible).
Less specifically, and with more confidence: emotional intelligence is a thing, and children need to be taught that, too. Perhaps Powers could achieve this by teaching kids that "feeling good about doing good things" is part of the game, and maybe one of the objectives of the game.
Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has, nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some bright morning to find it gone, clean vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of his life gone with it. I have myself known such a man; and who can tell how many histories of circle-squarers, metaphysicians, astrologers, and what not, may not be told in the old German story?
Charles Sanders Peirce
Science works by scientists not doing all their thinking for themselves. That's also how it fails. Getting the balance right may be hard, but no-one has really tried very hard, so it may not be. Trying to do that is largely what I see SIAI as being about.
This was especially exciting due to my newfound knowledge that ballad meter can be sung to the tune of the Gilligan's Island theme.
So far as I know, he wasn't, just placed under house arrest.
According to Owen Gingerich's The Great Copernicus Chase, the 1633 decree calling Galileo to be interrogated* read, in part, as follows:
Galileo Galilei ... is to be interrogated concerning the accusation, even threatened with torture, and if he sustains it, proceeding to an abjuration of the vehement [suspicion of heresy] before the full Congregation of the Holy Office, sentenced to imprisonment....
(Emphasis added.) Gingerich goes on to say:
On the next page the results of the interrogation are recorded. In Italian are Galileo's words: 'I do not hold and have not held this opinion of Copernicus since the command was intimated to me that I must abandon it.' Then he was again told to speak the truth under the threat of torture. He responded: 'I am here to submit, and I have not held this opinion since the decision was pronounced, as I have stated.' Finally, there is a notation that nothing further could be done, and this time the document is properly signed in Galileo's hand. Galileo was sent back to his house at Arcetri, outside Florence, where he remained under house arrest until his death in 1642.
(Emphasis added.) These quotes can be seen using Amazon's "Look Inside" feature. This link worked for me. These passages are also excerpted in this pdf.
So, Galileo was explicitly threatened with torture, though he was not actually tortured and may not even have been "shown the instruments of torture" (which is the strongest claim made in reputable sources). As I argue in this thread, I believe that this justifies saying that the Church used torture (as an institutionalized practice) to force Galileo to recant.
* An earlier version of this comment referred here to "the 1633 sentence entered against Galileo" because I misread Gingerich's use of the word "sentence" to refer to a sentence of punishment, but he just meant a grammatical sentence .
That's the thing about power, I think. To some people --those of us who have none-- anyone who has it and uses it is a villain. To those who have it, anyone who tries to stop them from using it is a villain. Because we're all the heroes of our own story, no matter what horrible things we might be doing.
Sometimes people do terrible things with the best of intentions. I don't think that makes them any less guilty. But if you understand their reasons, you might find it more difficult to condemn them out of hand. You might find it more difficult to call them villains.
On the other hand, sometimes people do terrible things with the absolute worst of intentions. But even there, I don't think they're supervillains. I think they're just people.
(emphasis added)
- David J. Schwartz, "Superpowers"
Witching was turning out to be mostly hard work and really short on magic of the zap!-glingle-glingle-glingle variety. There was no school and nothing that was exactly like a lesson. But it wasn’t wise to try to learn witching all by yourself, especially if you had a natural talent. If you got it wrong, you could go from ignorant to cackling in a week ...
When you got right down to it, it was all about cackling. No one ever talked about this, though. Witches said things like “You can never be too old, too skinny, or too warty,” but they never mentioned the cackling. Not properly. They watched out for it, though, all the time.
It was all too easy to become a cackler. Most witches lived by themselves (cat optional) and might go for weeks without ever seeing another witch. In those times when people hated witches, they were often accused of talking to their cats. Of course they talked to their cats. After three weeks without an intelligent conversation that wasn’t about cows, you’d talk to the wall. And that was an early sign of cackling.
“Cackling,” to a witch, didn’t just mean nasty laughter. It meant your mind drifting away from its anchor. It meant you losing your grip. It meant loneliness and hard work and responsibility and other people’s problems driving you crazy a little bit at a time, each bit so small that you’d hardly notice it, until you thought that it was normal to stop washing and wear a kettle on your head. It meant you thinking that the fact you knew more than anyone else in your village made you better than them. It meant thinking that right and wrong were negotiable. And, in the end, it meant you “going to the dark,” as the witches said. That was a bad road. At the end of that road were poisoned spinning wheels and gingerbread cottages.
What stopped this was the habit of visiting. Witches visited other witches all the time, sometimes traveling quite a long way for a cup of tea and a bun. Partly this was for gossip, of course, because witches love gossip, especially if it’s more exciting than truthful. But mostly it was to keep an eye on one another.
Today Tiffany was visiting Granny Weatherwax, who was in the opinion of most witches (including Granny herself) the most powerful witch in the mountains. It was all very polite. No one said, “Not gone bats, then?” or “Certainly not! I’m as sharp as a spoon!” They didn’t need to. They understood what it was all about, so they talked of other things. But when she was in a mood, Granny Weatherwax could be hard work.
- Pratchett, "Wintersmith"
If they genuinely believed in the moral excellence of burglary, penal servitude would simply mean so many happy years for them; all martyrs are happy, because their conduct and their principles agree.
That sounds all deep and wise... until you observe that it seems to be an arbitrary redefinition of 'happy', redefinition of 'genuinely believe in the moral excellence' or blatantly wrong as a matter of fact. The accuracy of the claim doesn't seem to be an important part of the intent, that is, it is bullshit.
Other parts of the excerpt are not bad - that part is just a point that people often try to take too far. The benefits of internal coherence and happiness are not tautological. Not even close.
I pick up my spraypaint and find a swan. Soon I don't have to wonder anymore.
"When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my yogurt"
[EDIT: Found to be erroneous! Sorry!]
I don't feel frightened, not knowing things; I think it's much more interesting.
-Richard P. Feynman
| Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.
-- Linus Torvalds
Yes, but you can at least knowingly commit to following the advice. Build a robot that detects whether you are in total ignorance, and takes a random action if so. Then forget about the robot.
It's not necessarily rhetorical even for actual people in the real world. At least, I often find that when I ask myself questions and answer them out loud (or in writing), I get surprising answers. (Arguing with myself is not uncommon.)
Also, you might enjoy Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep.
The brighter you are, the more you have to learn. -- Don Herold
I don't know the context of this, I came across it as a quote, but I can see two totally different interpretations, both true.
ADDED: Make that five interpretations.
The two I had in mind were:
Epistemic responsibility - you have an ethical obligation to learn because you can.
The more you have to learn - I don't know about you, but I am about as likely to stop learning as to stop breathing - I'm not likely to do either voluntarily.
Over on Hacker News mechanical_fish explains science
I don't believe anything which hasn't been replicated by a skeptic, because people are too trusting and hopeful and are blind to their own mistakes. Frankly, your equipment is probably broken and your students are probably ignorant; I only trust myself. And, come to think of it, I don't even trust me very much -- I should convince my skeptics to replicate my results so that I can believe me.
"Dear is Plato, dearer still is truth."
-Aristotle
We're descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half truths who in order to convince others, simultaneously convinved themselves. Over generations success had winnowed us out, and with success came our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track—when it didn't suit us we couldn't agree on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing. That's why there are divorces, border disputes and wars, and why this statue of the Virgin Mary weeps blood and that one of Ganesh drinks milk. And that was why metaphysics and scince were such courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the wheel, bigger than agriculture, human artifacts set right against the grain of human nature.
-- Ian McEwan, Enduring Love (1998, p. 181)
You're never aware of your current point of view, only of previous ones.
-- William T. Powers
Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
-- St. Paul. (Phillipians 4:8)
(Yes, yes, someone who had a major hand in creating Christianity. I know. As context, I first encountered these words in the 1999 "Doomwatch" pilot, where they are spoken at the funeral of Dr Quist, and then googled it.)
Life is short, and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
"Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly." -- (unknown)
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong." -- Wolfgang Pauli, on a paper submitted by a physicist colleague
"[T]he purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity." - Calvin, Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes"
Protein engineering is often approached as if it were part of biology. Imagine approaching aerospace engineering as if it were part of ornithology: Although the pioneers of human flight learned a lot about wings from birds, if they had waited for success in making artificial feathers and artificial muscle, we’d still be on the ground.
"Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned." -- Avicenna, Medieval Philosopher
A competitive game, to me, is a debate. You argue your points with your opponent, and he argues his. “I think this series of moves is optimal,” you say, and he retorts, “Not when you take this into account.”
Debates in real life are highly subjective, but in games we can be absolutely sure who the winner is.
-- David Sirlin, Playing to Win
Most of us, I suspect, would rather believe that the devil is running things than that no one is in charge, that our lives, our loves, World Series victories, hang on the whims of fate and chains of coincidences, on God throwing dice, as Einstein once referred to quantum randomness. I've had my moments of looking back with a kind of vertigo realizing how contingent on chance my life has been, how if I'd gotten to the art gallery earlier or later or if the friend I was supposed to have dinner with had showed up, I might not have met my wife that night, and our daughter would still be in an orphanage in Kazakhstan.
It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest assured with that degree of precision that the nature of the subject admits, and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible.
-- Aristotle
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
-- Donald E. Knuth
"If our Gods and our hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then let us admit it must be said that our love is scientific as well." -Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
I desire to know which interpretation of this quote was intended by the author, but I know which one I prefer.
I voted it down because, among rationalists, the value of an idea shouldn't depend much on the author (although sometimes the author's identity sheds more light on the quote). I mean, hell, Eliezer found an interesting quote from Piers Anthony.
It's a very bad habit to let your assessment of a person affect your valuations of isolated remarks to that degree.
Yes, it's a bit of a koan, and somewhat tangential. It's about the ineluctability of reality, saying that while you must win, you may not win, even if you do everything right. Even the ultimate in rationality is not a get out of jail free card, neither in the backcountry nor anywhere else.
Maybe you can read Swahili. Maybe you are so familiar with hunting rifles you could assemble it blindfolded. Great -- today you get to win. Or maybe the tiger comes by RIGHT NOW. You lose.
"You have before you the Alcor prospectus. In fifty years your body will wear out and die."
"Although the first solution is the one usually given, I prefer this second one because it reduces the need to think, replacing it by the automatic calculus. Thinking is hard, so only use it where essential."
--Dennis Lindley, Understanding Uncertainty
Well, I "dance" when sober, and I enjoy it! It's a socially acceptable way to be close to, and touch, attractive members of the appropriate sex. Furthermore, the physical arousal caused by vigorous exercise tends to promote sexual arousal as well. Not to mention that watching people writhe to suggestive music is also extremely popular.
Then again, from a certain point of view, almost every kind of sexual activity is extremely ridiculous. I mean, you put the what in the where? That's disgusting! Who would want to do something like that?
I would note that orthodox statistics and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory are just two different manifestations of a single intellectual disease, closely related to logical positivism, which has debilitated every area of theoretical science in this century. The symptoms of this disease are the loss of conceptual discrimination; i.e., the inability to distinguish between probability and frequency, between reality and our knowledge of reality, between meaning and method of testing, etc.
-- E.T. Jaynes, summarizing all of Eliezer's posts
“Do as I say, not as I do:” this is considered the very motto of hypocrisy. But does anyone believe that having a good character is as easy as wanting it? If virtue is as difficult as other excellences, there must be few or none who are perfectly virtuous. If the rest of us are not even to talk about virtue or express admiration for it, how shall anyone improve? A hypocrite is one who claims virtue beyond what he possesses, not one who recommends virtue beyond what he claims. If a man’s principles are no better than his character, it is less likely to be a sign of an exemplary character than a sign of debased principles.
All my life I've had one dream, to achieve my many goals.
-- Homer Simpson
In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.
-- Edward de Bono
"Stupidity is always a capital crime."
--Larry Niven (N-Space)
Downvoted for improper use of quotation. The comic is successful because it effectively communicates its message by cleverly juxtaposing two panels that are identical except for the implied sex of one character, and one word in the other character's line. To simply quote the second panel out of context doesn't make any sense at all. Linking to the comic does not redeem this mistake---quotes are supposed to be able to stand on their own. Comics are a visual medium; sometimes, like in this case, they simply aren't quotable.
I think this should go at the top of all monthly Rationality Quotes posts as an epigraph.
It's great to be able to stop When you've planned a thing that's wrong, And be able to do something else instead-- Fred M. Rogers, "What Do You Do?"
"What's that saying?" he said, smiling crookedly. "When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever it is that remains--- "
"--- however improbable, must be the truth. Yes, the problem is, the man who wrote that believed in faeries, and that he could photograph them."
- S. M. Stirling, The Peshawar Lancers
Follow the man who seeks the truth; run from the man who has found it.
-- Vaclav Havel
Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
-Benjamin Franklin
What of Göögle's theorem?
You need to be careful of supposed Chinese proverbs; I recently found that the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times" was actually created in the fifties by Eric Frank Russell.
"Whoso wishes to grasp God with his intellect becomes an atheist."
--Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf
(M. Aug. Gottlieb Spangenbergs Apologetische Schluß-Schrift (Leipzig and Görlitz, 1752; http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/quotations/quotations_by_ib.html )
There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth…not going all the way, and not starting.
Buddha
I checked Aristotle's 'On the Heavens' and 'Physics'. Nowhere could I find him saying that a heavy object falls faster than a light one. Aren't it the Aristotelian scholars who said that and who are to blame? Aristotle distinguished relative weight (our mass) and absolute weight (our mass density) and gives practical examples to check that denser objects move faster downwards in water than less dense objects, if the objects have the same shape.
"A theory which cannot be mortally endangered cannot be alive."
W. A. H. Rushton, quoted in J.R. Platt, Strong Inference, Science vol.146, n.3642, 1964.
Besides porking (really) hot babes, flipping out, wailing on guitars, and cutting off heads, a ninja has to train. They have to meditate ALL THE TIME. But most importantly, each morning a ninja should think about going a little crazier than the day before. Beyond thinking about going berserk, a ninja must, by definition, actually go berserk.
Robert Hamburger, REAL Ultimate Power, The Official Ninja Book
Mathematics is rational, not reasonable.
-- Terry Padden, in "Ultimately, in Physics the Rational shall become Reasonable!"
I agree with you, but I don't think that makes it a terrible quote. I personally don't seem to be psychologically able to avoid that awful sinking feeling when I realise I'm wrong, and it does suck. But recognising that it sucks is an important part of allowing the sinking feeling to wash over you, not be personally offended by it, and realise that if you update on this piece of wrongness, you're slightly less likely to be wrong again next time. For me at least, if I just try to pretend the sinking feeling isn't happening, because "rationally" it shouldn't, it just means I'm pretending the wrongness itself isn't happening. And that's a bad idea.
Being wrong is the best possible outcome of an argument, as it's the one with the highest expected knowledge gain
No, that's backwards. Learning that you are wrong is good if and only if you are wrong. But it's only good because you were already wrong, which was bad - you were making bad decisions before. It's like saying that it is better to win the lottery than to be born rich. Roughly speaking, it doesn't matter when or where the money or knowledge comes from, only that you can use it.
So if you are surprised to find a $20 bill in your couch, your disappointment at having lost $20 some time in the past is equal to your pleasure at now having $20 more than you did a moment ago?
My current level of ignorance is a fact of life, I already know that there must be things that I'm wrong about. How is finding out something in particular that I am wrong about anything but a positive outcome?
In information theory, there's the concept of the surprisal, which is the logarithm of the inverse of the expected probability of an event. The lower the probability, the higher the surprise(al). The higher the surprisal, the greater the information content.
(Intuitively, the less likely something is, the more you change your beliefs upon learning it.)
So, yeah, it's pretty enshrined in information theory. Entropy is equivalent to the (oxymoronic) "expected surprisal". That is, given a discrete probability distribution over events, the probability-weighted average surprisal is the entropy.
Incidentally, as part of a project to convert all of the laws of physics into information-theoretic form, I realized that the elastic energy of a deformable body tells you its probability of being in that state, and (by the above argument), it's information content. That means you can explain failure modes in terms of the component being forced to store more information than it's capable of.
Well, it's interesting to me.
You got to have a dream,
If you don't have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?
- Bloody Mary, South Pacific
I wasn't especially impressed by Aretae's reasoning. For example,
Why would I not believe that the future will be different from the past? . . . This is silly. Bayes disposes of that rather rapidly. Unless one embraces radical skepticism (why should I believe in the past at all?), Bayesian statistics takes both theses (the future is different than/same as the past) and applies updating. What is left standing is the future resembles the past.
You will not be able to perform this updating unless you have already assigned prior probabilities to propositions connecting the past to the future. That's why Bayesian updating will never get it right if you start out with the anti-induction prior. Hence, to address Hume's problem, you have to come up with a justification for preferring certain prior distributions. We may have good reasons for preferring those distributions that posit that the past is like the future, but, contra Aretae, those reasons are outside the scope of mere Bayesian updating.
If making a major contribution seemed so easy, and would be harder in some other field, it sure would suggest that his comparative advantage in the easy field is much greater; would not that suggest that he ought to devote his efforts there, since other people have proven relatively capable in the harder fields?
Phfft! Facts. You can use them to prove anything.
-- Homer Simpson
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
-- Alan Kay
"It is always disconcerting to disagree with Einstein." Nevertheless, I think I disagree with this; or at least believe it is vague enough to be abused.
"Isn't it pretty to think so."
-- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun also Rises
"In Life's name, and for Life's sake, I say that I will use the Art for nothing but the service of Life. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way; and I will change no object or creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is right to do so---till Universe's end."
-- The Wizard's Oath (from So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane)
"I once spent a whole day in thought, but it was not so valuable as a moment in study. I once stood on my tiptoes to look out into the distance, but it was not so effective as climbing up to a high place for a broader vista. Climbing to a height and waving your arm does not cause the arm's length to increase, but your wave can be seen farther away. Shouting downwind does not increase the tenseness of the sound, but it is heard more distinctly. A man who borrows a horse and carriage does not improve his feet, but he can extend his travels 1,000 li [~500km] A man who borrows a boat and paddles docs not gain any new ability in water, but he can cut across rivers and seas. The gentleman by birth is not different from other men; he is just good at "borrowing" the use of external things."
-- Xunzi, An Exhortation to Learning (勸學) 4, translated by John Knoblock in "Xunzi: A Translation and study of the Complete Works"
"With my eyes I can see you. With your eyes I can see myself."
K. Bradford Brown
Heh. Make that, "tell them to basketball-dribble an American football."
People in the rest of the world dribble footballs all the time.
Funny, when I was a kid I sometimes used to try to basketball-dribble a US football for fun. Never got it down very well.
Matter flows from place to place
And momentarily comes together to be you
Some people find that thought disturbing
I find the reality thrilling
—Richard Dawkins quoted in Our Place in the Cosmos
Humans are social animals. Inducing shame and discomfort might be useful if the believer is isolated away from other believers and cannot rely on them for emotional support. If not, he or she will likely relieve their shame by seeking the company of fellow believers, reinforcing the affiliation with the believing group.
So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.
-- Benjamin Franklin
Unfortunately, she was wrong about this, as we learned almost a half a century later, when Derek Freeman, who actually spoke Samoan, went to Samoa and interviewed the now grown women who had been interviewed by Margaret Mead many years earlier.
Freeman's case is not so clear-cut. From Skeptic Magazine:
The Trashing of Margaret Mead: How Derek Freeman Fooled Us All on an Alleged Hoax
The analysis fails to take into account the cost of buying and raising of cats.
Ok, but most people who are more worried about sharks than pigs are going on vacation to the beach and don't work on a swine farm. And I don't think those people are wrong to worry about sharks more than pigs. It is also quite likely that swine farmers do worry about pigs more than the rest of us.
I heard recently that when The Wizard of Oz came out, more people would have realized how dangerous it was when Dorothy fell in the pig pen. Today, we watch that movie and think it was just about her losing her balance, and maybe wonder why the farmer who saved her was so visibly upset about it. (I contacted my source and he said it was 'just common knowledge', and that pigs have since been domesticated from the wild boars they were, and that I should google, "pigs aggression".)
"In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become."
Mary Roach - from her book Spook
Yet whenever I see that, I think "European Union". And when I first saw Star Wars fans talk about the OT, my first though was, "Old Testament". Actually, that's not far off, in a sense! (It's actually "Original Trilogy".)
ETA: A "Jew" of Star Wars would, I guess, be someone who accepts the OT, but rejects everything thereafter. There seem to be many...
The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river.
-- H. Ross Perot
Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself.
--- James Stephens
Learn to criticize ideas, especially your own. Most new ideas are wrong or inadequate. If you don't reject most of your ideas promptly, then you're almost surely fooling yourself, and if you also spread them, you're almost surely polluting the intellectual world. But if an idea really seems to stand up under testing, try filling in more details, and criticizing it again.
— K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation 2.0: Advice To Aspiring Nanotechnologists
The terrible truth is that postmodernism is what happens when somebody who believes what he reads, reads the Philosophy canon.
-- Quee Nelson, The Slightest Philosophy
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science
—Charles Darwin
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
-- William Ernest Henley (1875)
You can make the calculation return any result you want, for example by including cost of millennia of nuclear waste storage in price of nuclear power;
You can calculate arbitrarily high costs for anything if you try hard enough. What of it? We're not going to deal with nuclear waste by sticking it in Yucca Mountain and guarding it for thousands of years; that would be silly. Heres a summary of how to realistically deal with nuclear waste. We have more than enough money for this budgeted as part of every nuclear plant's operating and maintenance fees.
another thing - nuclear power gets massive federal insurance subsidies
Not true (PDF warning). The nuclear industry runs its own insurance pool, paid for out of their own pocket. The regulations requiring this do say that the federal government may help out in extreme circumstances (i.e. something on the scale of Chernobyl) but to date the feds haven't spent a dime on this. And I see no reason to believe that they ever will.
If you know what result you want, you will be able to come up with it.
If you're motivated to play games with the figures, consciously or not, then sure you can. But I try to avoid that sort of thing, and it tends to be pretty obvious.
Note that I'm not accusing you of dishonesty -- but I'm guessing that you ultimately got those arguments from someone who was trying to make the numbers fit his position, rather than the other way around.
You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand. Leonardo da Vinci
I highly recommend anyone interested in hard sci-fi to read Blindsight.
The parent comment originally read, "pain chips", which was apparently more thought-provoking than intended.
To look around, the world does appear to be flat
Even this isn't true!
No, because it pulls you, your scale and the Earth all (very close to) equally.
“Still seems it strange, that thou shouldst live forever? Is it less strange, that thou shouldst live at all? This is a miracle; and that no more.” Edward Young
Can we have a norm of using the Custom Search bar to check if a quote has already been posted?
The way I would put it is that it is difficult and unnatural to be an entrepreneur, or to work under someone's direction in a management hierarchy. An efficient economy requires both kinds of people, and it's arguable that our current educational system overemphasizes the latter at the expense of the former. But rather than conspiracy, I think a more reasonable explanation for this is inertia: rapid technological change means we need more entrepreneurs than we used to, but the educational system hasn't kept up.
For those wondering about viable alternatives to being a wage slave, here's something that worked for me. About ten years ago, I took a one-year break from my regular job, and used the time to write a piece of software that I saw a market niche for. While I went back to work, I found a partner to continue its development and to sell it over the Internet. It hasn't made me rich, but eventually I got enough income from it to to quit my job and spend most of my time working on whatever interests me.
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Alfred North Whitehead
We originally want or desire an object not because it is agreeable or good, but we call it agreeable or good because we want or desire it.
-- Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics
If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can't be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
But blowing out the candle actually would make it easier to find your way (it ruins your night vision).
O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!
--Voltaire
The "inverse proposition" given is actually the contrapositive of (i.e. is equivalent to) the original statement.
It doesn't qualify 100%, because there were little prototype shuttles. Still, you have a point. If we have good theories, we can build pretty big systems from scratch. Gall's law resonates especially strongly with programmers because much of programming doesn't have good theories, and large system-building endeavors fail all the time.
Further reply:
I was contemplating this exchange and wondering whether Gall's Law has any value (constrains expected experience).
I think it does. If an engineer today claimed to have successfully designed an Albucierre engine, I would probably execute an algorithm similar to Gall's Law and think:
The technology does not yet exist to warp space to any degree, nor is there an existing power source which could meet the needs of this device. The engineer's claim to have developed a device which can be bound to a craft, controllably warp space, and move it faster than light is beyond existing technological capability. We are too many Gall Steps away for it to be probable.
In addition to NMJablonski's point, it is perhaps arguable just how well the Space Shuttle worked. In hindsight it seems that the same amount of orbital lift capacity could have been done rather more cheaply.
As you can easily imagine we often ask ourselves here despairingly: "What, oh, what is the use of the war? Why can't people live peacefully together? Why all this destruction?"
The question is very understandable, but no one has found a satisfactory answer to it so far. Yes, why do they make still more gigantic planes, still heavier bombs and, at the same time, prefabricated houses for reconstruction? Why should millions be spent daily on the war and yet there's not a penny available for medical services, artists, or for poor people?
Why do some people have to starve, while there are surpluses rotting in other parts of the world? Oh, why are people so crazy?
I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.
-- Anne Frank, 3 May 1944, aged 14
On the surface, yes.
It's an anecdote that the "numinous" feelings that the religious sometimes cite as evidence of God can equally well be interpreted the opposite way. We can pull out Bayes' Theorem to show that these numinous feelings really don't make belief in God more rational. This isn't a hugely controversial point here, but I think what this says about seizing on how evidence supports one's side without considering the ramifications for the other is worth remembering.
True, but I had the feeling that some readers here would like it anyway. (I view this as more of a "quotes LW readers would like" thread than a literal "rationality quotes" thread.)
Also, it does fit into the joy in the merely real ethos, which in turn makes it emotionally easier to accept rationalism and reductionism.
Its a shame the idea that "god" is a person with a personality has competed-out other ways of thinking of god. Is there a deep mystery that our own consciousness even exists? Are we connected in that mystery with the billions of other consciousnesses around us? In ignorance of what even consciousness is, are we sure it inheres in our bodies and not somewhere else?
Read the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence and the Twelve Virtues (especially that of Curiosity). We can't be "connected in that mystery" because the feeling of mysteriousness is a type of ignorance, and ignorance of some phenomenon is a fact about our minds, not about the phenomenon. When something seems mysterious to us, the proper thing to do is to think about how to solve it, not to worship our ignorance.
If god is the label for consciousness beyond your own consciousness, AND you admit the probability that god is not an angry-father-like personality that wants to help some people, hurt other people, and COULD fix everything if he wanted to, the world gets a lot more interesting.
If God means all that, then you've just changed the definition so much that there's no point in calling it "God" anymore. To make sure you're not just sneaking in connotations, try describing whatever it is you're calling "God" but giving it a different label — say, "spruckel". "Spruckel is the consciousness beyond your own consciousness". Does that feel different to you than "God is the consciousness beyond your own consciousness"? If so, you need to consider what the word "God" is doing in your mind when you hear it, and specifically notice that it's something the word is doing rather than anything about what you claim to be defining it as. If not, then... well, then you won't mind henceforth using the word "spruckel" for this thing you're describing instead.
Skeptic, n. One who doubts what he does not want to believe and believes what he does not want to doubt.
-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon
Fear invasion from Mars!
Unfortunately the classic essay "Understanding Neurotypicality" is gone, the owner's web pages removed. But there are similar pages still available, for instance, this from Greg Egan
I said, if autism is a lack of understanding of others... and healing the lesion would grant you that lost understanding -"
Rourke broken in, "But how much is understanding, and how much is a delusion of understanding? Is intimacy a form of knowledge - or is it just a comforting false belief? Evolution is not interested in whether we grasp the truth, except in the most pragmatic sense. And their can be equally pragmatic falsehoods. If the brain needs to grant us exaggerated sense of our capacity for knowing each other - to make pair-bonding compatible with self-awareness - it will lie, shamelessly, as mush as it has to, in order to make the strategy succeed."
In http://wlug.org.nz/GregEganOnNeurotypicalSyndrome
And more indexed here: http://www.neurodiversity.com/neurotypical.html
He left out the weight of the air...
No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking.
--Voltaire
Alas, rigorous truth is the constant enemy of the aphorism.
At least we have the Internet, so we are better able to find directions on how to do something we've never done by ourselves before.
Like Marcus Aurelius, Beethoven, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche?
"We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance" - John Archibald Wheeler
Everyone who takes basic statistics has it drilled into them that "correlation is not causation." (When I took psych. 1, the professor said he hoped that, if he were to come to us on our death-beds and prompt us with "Correlation is," we would all respond "not causation.") This is a problem, because one can infer correlation from data, and would like to be able to make inferences about causation. There are typically two ways out of this. One is to perform an experiment, preferably a randomized double-blind experiment, to eliminate accidental sources of correlation, common causes, etc. That's nice when you can do it, but impossible with supernovae, and not even easy with people. The other out is to look for correlations, say that of course they don't equal causations, and then act as if they did anyway.
-- Cosma Shalizi on Graphical Models
clippy.paperclips: how many humans, as a fraction of total humans, have a belief about whether or not they are a human, and believe they are not a human?
me: this is a subculture of humans that believes they are really animals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom
clippy.paperclips: so those are the normal ones? and it's like a war against the irrational majority?
me: bad example.
"This achievement is often praised as a sign of the great superiority of modern civilization over the many faded and lost civilizations of the ancients. While our great skill lies in finding patterns of repetition under the apparent play of accident and chance, less successful civilizations dealt by appealing to supernatural powers for protection. But the voices of the gods proved ignorant and false; they have been silenced by the truth."
--James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
I'm not entirely sure what your criticism is. I'll take it as meaning 'isn't it just an arbitrary accident that the vampires happen to be more rational than humans, and not an intrinsic part of those characters?'
No. It isn't. If you remember, one of the running suggestions in Blindsight is that consciousness is a useless spandrel that sucks up tons of brainpower, and which can/will be discarded with much benefit. The vampires may be rationally superior to humans because they are p-zombies, and they evolved that way in order to effectively predict human actions and hunt them. The arbitrary accident was the cross glitch - otherwise the vampires would have won rather than died out. If the vampires could as well have been less-rational-than-humans p-zombies, that would undo that major theme.
Using language that is appropriate in one linguistic framework in a different linguistic framework is what causes philosophical confusion and pseudo puzzles, also known as the history of philosophy.
-- Thomas Cathcart Daniel Klein, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... : Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes
Looked it up in Google Books and found this gem as a chapter lead-in:
"Without logic, reason is useless. With it, you can win arguments and alienate multitudes."
I'll have to get a copy sometime.
It looked like a joke along the lines of:
Q (on discovering a pile of eggs in a strange place): Where did these eggs come from?
A: Chickens.
Things are only tropes if they happen more often in fiction that in reality, so to detect them you need an accurate map.
ETA: And everyone is already in hole-picking mood. So any cognitive biases showing up will be jumped on.
ETA2: What does ETA stand for anyway?
The last part deserves extra emphasis:
Correct logic is very often counter-intuitive, however, which is to be expected, as logic is meant to prevent errors caused by relying on intuition.
See also here.
Euler is one of the few mathematicians who provide an exception to this rule. To quote Polya (Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning):
Euler seems to me almost unique in one respect: he takes pains to present the relevant inductive evidence carefully, in detail, in good order. His presentation is "the candid exposition of the ideas that led him to those discoveries... Natural enough, he tries to impress his readers, but, as a really good author, he tries to impress his readers only by such things as have genuinely impressed himself.
(the quoted passed in the text is apparently from Condorcet, although I don't know the initial source)
Polya is, of course, one of the few other mathematicians who break this mould. Explicitly writing books about the process of discovery.
Many receive advice; few profit by it.
-- Publius Syrus
Before finishing (or perhaps as a sequel?) you should make sure to watch Cristof's Koch's neural correlates of consciousness talk. He's been giving variations on this talk for something like 10 years that I know of and its pretty polished. Its gotten better over the years and the speaker is the source of my current working definition of consciousness (quoted below). Which is not about language I/O and compression but about internal experiences themselves and what systems implement them.
The core insight is that you can show someone a visual trick (like the faces or goblet image) and you can go back and forth "seeing different interpretations". When you're in one or the other state "internal state" this is you having different kinds of "qualia", and presumably these distinct perceptual states have "biological correlates".
Manipulation of these internal mental states and study of the associated physical systems become the "object of study" in order to crack the mind-body problem. Once you've got the neural level you can ask about high level issues like algorithms or ask about deeper mechanisms like neurotransmitters and genes and so on. Full understanding would imply that we could create mutant "zombie mice" and that they would have no qualia (of certain sorts) and be incapable of whatever behavior was "computed" in a way that involved (that sort of) qualia.
Ideally we would have a theory to predict and and explain such phenomenon and perhaps we'd be able to invent things like a pill that lets you "become a p-zombie" for an hour (though I suspect part of that would involve shutting down enough memory formation processes that you would not be able to remember the experience except via something external like videotape).
The QA has much more sophisticated objections/questions than you usually get on the subject of minds. The final question ends with Koch's working theory which sounds about right to me. Quoting Koch when asked why he thinks bees are probably conscious and why he became vegetarian:
Rather than endless speculation there has to be some complex behavior, so forget about plants or even simple single celled organisms. If they do very simple stereotypical things I see no reason to ascribe consciousness to them. This may be wrong ultimately, but I think right now that's my index for consciousness: reasonably complex, non-stereotypical behavior that involves online dynamic storage of information.
That infographic would have been much better as a regular table, instead of this circular thing. It seems to me as if it is not intended to be actually used, only to look nice.
I only judge something as a repeat if it's already appeared in a quotes thread. Sometimes it's worth pulling out something quoted in the middle of a discussion and presenting it here.
...science will save the world. Science is the only thing that can save the world. Science is unstoppable, reason cannot be killed, logic cannot be stopped, there is no force on Earth which can stop a scientist from learning, and turning our backs on science will doom us all. Even the gods are rational and obey laws. The future is not something which happens by just waiting for time to pass. And if you want to be assured of a life after death, you have to build it yourself.
From Fine Structure, by Sam Hughes.
Farnsworth: My god, is it possible?
Fry: It must be possible. It's happening.
— Futurama: "The Late Philip J. Fry"
On the nature of ethics:
There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us.
~ Eliezer Yudkowsky c/o Harry Potter, Methods of Rationality chapter 39.
I entered the Lager (Auschwitz) as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my nonbelief. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice. . . . I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death . . . naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the “commission” that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed; one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected the temptation; I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it
-- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (quoted by Damon Linker at The New Republic ; h/t Andrew Sullivan)
I know I'm bringing Drescher up a lot recently, but this exchange reminds me of some of his points, and how, after reading Good and Real, I see Haidt's work (among other people's) in a different light.
Drescher's theory of ethics and decision making is, "You should do what you [self-interestedly] wish all similarly situated beings would do" on the basis that "if you would regard it as the optimal thing to do, then-counterfactually they would too".
He claims it implies you should cast a wide net in terms of which beings you grant moral status, but not too wide: you draw the line at beings that don't make choices (in the sense of evaluating alternatives and picking one for the sake of a goal), as that breaks a critical symmetry between you and them.
Taking your premise that fish don't reflect on their actions, this account would claim that they likewise do not have the moral status of humans. But it would also agree with you that it's insufficient to point to how they eat each other, because "I would not want some superbeing to eat me simply on the basis that I eat less intelligent beings."
Also, Drescher accounts for our moral intuitions by saying that they are a case of us being choice machines which recognize acausal means-end links (i.e. relationships between our choices and the achievement of goals that do not require the choice to [futurewardly] cause the goal). This doesn't necessarily contradict Haidt's argument that we judge things as right because of e.g. ingroup/outgroup distinctions (he says that functional equivalence to acausal means-ends links is all that matters, even if the agent simply feels that they "care" about others), but it does tend to obviate that kind of supposition. [/show-off]
"Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society's understanding." (Compare to counterfactual reasoning: if we would sympathize with every defection, and felt that “the past is the past”, those wishing to defect would have no reason not to.)
It's a complicated issue-- as nearly as I can tell, the people who argue for no understanding assume that they can just use their intuitions about punishment, and not update about whether they're getting the effects they want.
His failing in one area, does not make his quotes untrue. Just a bit iffy. Thats why I try not to quote Gandhi or Churchill anymore.
I don't believe in qualia as a real entity, but when people talk about them they're referring to a genuine phenomenon which you also experience: that your conscious understanding of the experience of perception is only the merest shadow of the perception itself. Seeing red doesn't mean seeing something with a little XML "red" tag attached, but something much more complicated that happens beyond your conscious introspection. You can imagine the state of having switched that "red" experience with the "green" experience, in all your memories as well as in current perception, and still instantly knowing that the switch had occurred. This phenomenon is not an illusion, just a blind spot of conscious knowledge which happens to confuse the hell out of naive philosophers.
Well, of course a verbal description of red light is different from seeing red light. One is an auditory stimulus, and one is a visual stimulus. They do different things to my neurons. Are qualia about something other than neurons?
Let’s consider what an economist would do if he wanted to study horses. [...] What would he do? He’d go to his study and think, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’ And he’d come up with the conclusion that he’d maximize his utility.
-- Ronald Coase, quoting Ely Devons
The longer, less soundbite-y quote is also interesting:
Now what’s wrong with this situation? What’s wrong with economists acting in this sort of way? I’ll tell you a tale about an English economist, Ely Devons. I was at a conference and he said, “Let’s consider what an economist would do if he wanted to study horses.” He said, “What would he do? He’d go to his study and think, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’ And he’d come up with the conclusion that he’d maximize his utility.” That wouldn’t take us very far if we were interested in horses, but we aren’t really interested in horses at all. What Devons said was, I think, part of the problem, but not the whole of it. I think it’s not really the most important objection – the lack of realism.
What I think is important is that economists don’t study the working of the economic system. That is to say, they don’t think they’re studying any system with all its interrelationships. It is as if a biologist studied the circulation of the blood without the body. It is a pretty gory thought, but it wouldn’t get you anywhere. You wouldn’t be able to discuss the circulation of the blood in a sensible way. And that’s what happens in economics. In fact the economic system is extremely complicated. You have large firms and small firms, differentiated firms and narrowly specialized firms, vertically integrated firms and those single-stage firms; you have in addition non-profit organizations and government entities – and all bound together, all operating to form the total system. But how one part impinges on the other, how they are interrelated, how it actually works – that is not what people study. What is wrong is the failure to look at the system as the object of study.
I'm looking for a Darwin quote I used to have, but lost. It was something about how whenever he encoutered a fact that seemed wrong to him, he immediately noted it down, as such facts are both important and easy to forget.
It's harder to find than you think. It's not on the master list of rationality quotes or any of the top 10 google results for "darwin quotes". And the problem with 19th century thinkers is that their vocabulary is too big, and so Google is crippled against them.
(Edit: good job. I had tried "fact", but not limiting the source. And some other words I attempted - "note", "write", "remember", "forget" - are not there.)
Anyone who upvotes this comment is committing to upvote the person who finds the quote.
If there were a party of those who are not sure they are right, I'd belong to it.
--Albert Camus
I was sure I'd heard that before, so I had to try to track it down. I found this.
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death
I don't think that's true. In fact, it sound close to "Well, if those people don't agree with me, it must be because they are afraid of my thoughts!", which is a convenient excuse to ignore other people's opinions, with an implicit ad hominem ("They must be disagreeing with me for irrational reasons!").
If you don't agree with me, you're probably just afraid of my ideas.
Programming is the art of figuring out what you want so precisely that you can tell even a machine how to do it.
I disagree. I don't see why doing that which shouldn't be done at all inefficiently wouldn't be even more useless.
I'm not sure of the exact context, but Drucker is primarily a writer on management and business. He wrote a really high number of books outlining management principles, he's considered one of the fathers of the discipline of management.
So to his audience, he's saying "Don't get excited how efficient your card-puncher-tallying system is, when your real goal is high quality output." I think he's reminding people to not get caught up in doing a process well if the process doesn't produce real results.
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
-- Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor
This one is rather long, but I think makes a point worth considering for anyone writing to instruct the public.
One who hopes to effect any good by his writings, must be so pure in his life, that what he proposes for instruction or imitation must be a transcript of his own heart. But general improvement is so little to be anticipated, that almost any attempt which may be made by an individual in his zeal to do good, seems to be lost labour. Those whose character has attained to the greatest perfectness, are at all times the persons most willing and anxious to avail themselves of any hint or suggestion which might tend to improve them in virtue and knowledge, so that what is intended for universal benefit serves but to instruct a very few, and those few the individuals who require it least. Serious works, meant to reform the careless, are read only by those who already are serious, and disposed to assent to what such works set forth. In that case their object, humanly speaking, is in a great measure defeated. It seems hopeless to attempt to infuse a taste for serious reading into the minds of the thoughtless multitude. Write down to the capacity of the weak and slenderly informed, or write up to the taste of the intellectual portion of them; give it cheap, or give it for nothing, it is all the same--a man will not thus be forced or induced to read what you put in print for his especial benefit.
The most powerful means, therefore, of promoting what is good, is by example, and this means is what is in every individual's power. One man only in a thousand, perhaps, can write a book to instruct his neighbours, and his neighbours in their perversity will not read it to be instructed. But every man may be a pattern of living excellence to those around him, and it is impossible but that, in his peculiar sphere, it will have its own weight and efficacy; for no man is insignificant who tries to do his duty--and he that successfully performs his duty, holds, by that very circumstance, a station, and possesses an influence in society, superior to that which can be acquired by any other distinction whatever. But it is only those who propose to themselves the very highest standard, that attain to this distinction. There are many different estimates of what a rationalist's duty is, and society is so constituted, that very false notions are formed of that in which true excellence and greatness consists; besides, many men who are theoretically right are practically wrong--all which detracts from the weight of rational influence upon human society. But however much human opinion may vary, and however inconsistent human practice may be, there is but one right rule; and it is only he who has this rule well defined in his own mind, who can exhibit that preeminence in the rational life which is the noblest distinction to which man can attain. It is deeply to be regretted that they who seek for this preeminence are a very small number compared with the mass of the professedly rational world. But small though the number be, the good which might be effected through their means is incalculable, if they were bound as in solemn compact to discountenance all those vices and habits which the usages of society have established into reputable virtues--thus becoming as it were a band of conspirators against the formless lord of this world and his kingdom--transfusing and extending their principles and influence, till they draw men off from their allegiance to that old tyrant by whom they have been so long willingly enslaved.
The italicised words are where I made some systematic substitutions from the original text, and of course the hyperlink is not in the original. Here's the attribution, rot13'd:
Sebz gur 1842 cersnpr ol Tenpr Jrofgre gb Yrjvf Onlyl'f Gur Cenpgvpr bs Cvrgl: Qverpgvat n Puevfgvna Ubj gb Jnyx, gung Ur Znl Cyrnfr Tbq (1611). Jvgu "Puevfgvna" ercynprq ol "engvbany".
Just in case the writer's actual subject would have provoked a reflexive rejection.
Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
-- Mark Twain
I am momentarily breaking hiatus specifically to say that you don't even need marijuana or alcohol to suffer from this. The normal human capacity for self-delusion and need for self-esteem are more than deadly enough all by themselves.
Personally, I'm still struggling to accept this lesson: that it's not enough to be a smart person who has good ideas; you need to do something that actually works. It is, in its own way, a highly counterintuitive idea, much like this notion that plausibility isn't enough, and beliefs should actually predict experimental results. I keep wanting to protest that I was morally right. Well, say that I was. In order for that moral rightness to change anything, I still need a method that really actually works, not just morally works.
In its original, atheist Carvaka writings contained much verse (as Indian philosophy/theology usually does); see http://www.humanistictexts.org/Carvaka.htm In translation, they almost sound like senryū:
If a beast slain as an offering to the dead
will itself go to heaven,
why does the sacrificer not straightway offer his father?
Reminds me of the doctrine that some Christians have, where anybody who dies before a certain age automatically goes to heaven, while people above that age can go to hell. The question then becomes: why don't parents kill their children, thus saving them from the all-too-likely possibility of eternal torture?
(Fun fact: most people who believe in hell can be made very uncomfortable if you look at the unfortunate implications of what they believe.)
Therefore, one-box. FOR THE EMPEROR.
I have a notion that the Chick flavor of Christianity is trying to set itself up as the monopoly supplier of fantasy.
Wow. I just felt a surge of patriotism. I had no idea that sort of system was in place in any first world country. I'm sure it's all Right, True, and Capitalistic but I must say I prefer the system here.
In fact, in rural areas (where I grew up) most firefighters are actually volunteers. Those that I knew considered the drastic enhancement to sexual attractiveness to be more than enough payment. ;)
It's a government-run fire station, so it's not all that capitalistic.
I'm an economist and it makes no sense to me at all. It seems almost like someone carefully identified the efforts insurance markets make to mitigate the failures in health markets and then crippled them. I actually have trouble convincing some of my colleagues that I'm serious when I describe the regulatory structure.
Rationality quotes: almost everything from @BadDalaiLama on Twitter.
(Edit: there's also this handy archive.)
If you can't tell whose side someone is on, they are not on yours. -Warren E. Buffett
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
Richard Feynman
It is still an unending source of surprise for me how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a piece of paper can change the course of human affairs. -Stanislaw Ulam
There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
-Samuel Butler
Here's another Newton ID quote. This one complements PeterS's because the true naturalistic explanation requires physics that was not implicit in Newton's mechanics.
But how the matter should divide itself into two sorts, and that part of it, which is fit to compose a shining body, should fall down into one mass, and make a sun, and the rest, which is fit to compose an opaque body, should coalesce, not into one great body, like the shining matter, but into many little ones; or, if the sun, at first, were an opaque body, like the planets, or the planets lucid bodies, like the sun, how he alone should be changed into a shining body, whilst all they continue opaque, or all they be changed into opaque ones, whilst he remains unchanged, I do not think more explicable by mere natural causes, but am forced to ascribe it to the counsel and contrivance of a voluntary agent.
—Isaac Newton, Four Letters From Sir Isaac Newton To Doctor Bentley Containing Some Arguments In Proof Of A Deity.
It's good art advocating for science.
Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.
Charles H. Spurgeon
"Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the Sun."
I can't help but ask whether you've ever found this advice personally useful, and if so, how.
Theories have four stages of acceptance. i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view, iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so.
-- J.B.S. Haldane
"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." -Oscar Wilde
"The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year.
Unless you give at least forty-five minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your ninety minutes of a night are chiefly wasted. This means that your pace will be slow.
Never mind. " - Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 hours per day.
"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune... to lose both seems like carelessness." - Oscar Wilde (though he didn't mean it to refer to cryogenics).
You have to realize that a great number of things are discussed in these proceedings that the mind just can't deal with, people are simply too tired and distracted, and by way of compensation they resort to superstition.
-- Kafka, The Trial
A small leak can sink a great ship.
-Benjamin Franklin
That reminds me: when I was little, there was a puzzle in a happy meal that said, "Rearrange these letters to spell something that can make a canoe sink: ELAK." The correct answer, of course, was "leak". I was upset, because my answer was "a elk". (And now that I think about it, if you draw this as a causal diagram, "lake" should be a valid answer too.)
Well, strictly speaking, if you pile KALE high enough on your canoe, it will also cause it to sink due to excess weight. But that doesn't make KALE the best or most likely answer.
I do like your answer, though.
You're only going to give me 100 years to study mathematics, uninterrupted?
B-b-but! That's nowhere near enough time!
I suspect the answer is "making as much money as I possibly can", and he's doing much better than all of us. He can convert that to other forms of value later.
I felt a desire to argue against this quote, but of course a better idea would be to ask what it means.
I'm guessing that "practice" means "the way people are solving this problem now," while "theory" means "the study of what makes a problem-solving method good."
If theorists invent some method that they think is good, but which has already been rejected by practitioners, then I would guess that the theorists have a wrong notion of "good," and they should update their theory on the evidence. If the theorists invent a new method, then there is a chance that it is an improvement, and it may catch on.
My first reading of this quote was essentially the map loses to the terrain. I interpreted "theory" as "our beliefs" and "practice" as "reality".
Torvalds is an engineer applying engineer's thinking, and here "practice" means engineering. The context was problems with a particularly awful API that just wasn't fit for purpose, but which had twenty years' encrusted usage to work around. He was responding to an ext4 filesystem programmer who was complaining that KDE4 users suffering dataloss on ext4 just weren't using the bad API the way he thought they should, even though other filesystems did not exhibit the dataloss.
I must confess that, reading the email, I don't see how he derives the last line from what he's saying above ... it doesn't seem to follow from taking about a 20-years-encrusted SNAFU. Perhaps it does follow from a programmer demanding people use an API the way he thinks they should, rather than the way everyone conventionally had for two decades. Real-world use winning over abstractions of how things should be:
So rather than come up with new barriers that nobody will use, filesystem people should aim to make "badly written" code "just work" unless people are really really unlucky. Because like it or not, that's what 99% of all code is.
It is, however, a widely-quoted statement - it resonates with people somehow. This is not, of course, the same as constituting or being about rationality.
If it were true that every innate predisposition of an organism were the result of some selectional pressure, then I would have to conclude that my dog has been selected for chasing tennis balls.
-- John Searle
Information wants to be anthropomorphized. ~ Anonymous
Not exactly a quote, but close enough - http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1993-02-07/
"Even in the games of children there are things to interest the greatest mathematician." G.W. Leibniz
In science there are no “depths”; there is surface everywhere[.]
Otto Neurath, ‘The Scientific Conception of the World: the Vienna Circle’, in Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen (eds.), Otto Neurath: Empiricism and Sociology, Dordrecht, 1973, p. 306
The man of science, whatever his hopes may be, must lay them aside while he studies nature; and the philosopher, if he is to achieve truth, must do the same. Ethical considerations can only legitimately appear when the truth has been ascertained: they can and should appear as determining our feeling towards the truth, and our manner of ordering our lives in view of the truth, but not as themselves dictating what the truth is to be.
Bertrand Russell, ‘Mysticism and Logic’, in John G. Slater (ed.), The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, London, 1986, vol. 8, p. 33
Nature understands no jesting. She is always true, always serious, always severe. She is always right, and the errors are always those of man.
--Goethe
That, I think, is part of the nature of beliefs about justice—they are absolute, bright edged, in a way in which preferences are not. The point is summed up in the Latin phrase Fiat justicia, ruat coelum—let justice be done though the sky falls. Those whose bumper stickers read "If you want peace, work for justice" simply take it for granted that there is no question what is just; if you want to find out, just ask them. The problem with the world as they see it is merely that other people are insufficiently virtuous to act accordingly.
-- David D. Friedman, If you want war, work for justice
Polemic—persuasive writing—only works when it doesn't feel like propaganda. The audience must feel that you're being absolutely fair to people on the other side.
-- Orson Scott Card, "Characters and Viewpoint"
The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.
Edsger W. Dijkstra, "Selected Writings on Computing"
Relevant anecdotal evidence: I have a cousin who was really in to astrology a few years ago: so obviously my sister and I insisted she partake in an experiment. We had her do three specific readings (not just with signs but with the mercury rising nonsense for which she needed exact birth-dates and birth locations): for me, my sister and my brother who wasn't there. She read them to us without indicating who they belonged to and we tried to see if we could tell which ones referred to us. The second one she read was just shocking to hear. It described me perfectly. I was in awe for about 10 minutes until the experiment finished and I learned that the reading that described me perfectly belonged to my sister.
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
"Anything you don't understand is dangerous until you do understand it."
Larry Niven, "Flatlander" (1967)
...look at 9/11 tower destruction theories. They want to believe something other than the planes caused the buildings to collapse. OK fine, let them bark up that tree if they want, but why must they leap to bizarre stories about government agents and secret operations? None of that is necessitated by the idea that another mechanism was fully or partially responsible. Why don't they suspect that Al-Quaeda planted a bomb in the basement in order to hasten the building's collapse, as a secondary part of their operation? Why leap to the US government as the culprit? Why not suspect that there was a flaw in the building construction, and that the blueprints don't reflect it because the building contractor covered it up? Why not suspect Martians? They create an incredibly open-ended doubt into which you could plug anything, and then they fill this void with (you guessed it) a story, with completely arbitrary elements.
-- Mike Wong
Maybe I'm weird, but I don't use or interpret quotes that way (as an appeal to authority). I use quotes that express an idea succinctly or cleverly, and the point for me is the language, not the source. I'm careful not to accidentally imply that the wording is mine, but other than that quotes are pretty independent of their originators in my mind.
(But I do frequently introduce a quote by saying "as someone said" to avoid derailing the conversation to be about that person)
if you can't fathom why they do what they do, or why they believe what they believe, that's your failing not theirs.
Interestingly though, by accepting this symmetry between you and your enemy, you potentially thereby break it. If you can understand why they believe what they believe, but they don't understand why you believe what you do, then you can justifiably consider yourself in a superior epistemic position.
That world is called dreams, and we visit it every night.
Without context, I'm afraid I don't understand what this is supposed to signify regarding rationality.
It reminds me very much of this quote attributed to Gautam Buddha:
"Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings -- that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide."
I counter with:
Many things do not happen as they should, and most things do not happen at all. It is the duty of the conscientious historian to correct these defects.
-- Herodotus
I thought about med school again, the anatomy class I had told Jason about. Candice Boone, my one-time almost-fiancée, had shared that class with me. She had been stoic during the dissection but not afterward. A human body, she said, ought to contain love, hate, courage, cowardice, soul, spirit ... not this slimy assortment of blue and red imponderables. Yes. And we ought not to be dragged unwilling into a harsh and deadly future.
But the world is what it is and won't be bargained with. I said as much to Candice.
She told me I was "cold". But it was still the closest thing to wisdom I had ever been able to muster.
- Robert Charles Wilson, Spin
...and then I came over here, and then I told you the story, and then it was now, and then I don't know what happened.
-Fry of the show Futurama perceives the future well
"The reader in search of knock-down arguments in favor of my theories will go away disappointed. Whether or not it would be nice to knock disagreeing philosophers down by sheer force of argument, it cannot be done. Philosophical theories are never refuted conclusively. (or hardly ever. Gödel and Gettier may have done it.) The theory survives its refutation - at a price. Perhaps that is something we can settle more or less conclusively. But when all is said and done, and all the tricky arguments and distinctions and counterexamples have been discovered, presumably we will still face the question which prices are worth paying, which theories are on balance credible, which are the unacceptably counterintuitive consequences and which are the acceptably counterintuitive ones. On this question we may still differ. And if all is indeed said and done, there will be no hope of discovering still further arguments to settle our differences."
-- David Lewis (thousand-year-old vampire)
Do stuff, read stuff, think and make up your mind. Have you actually selected an entity which you think of as "objective"? This is like having a slave port in your brain.
-- yosefk
Observing that we nobly analyse distant things, and in the present do whatever the hell we want.
Both these quotes sound nice, but do we have evidence for them?
Speak to us more of this book.
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. ~Andre Gide
The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy, but they were listening in gibberish.
-- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
"Most men are so thoroughly subjective that nothing really interests them but themselves. They always think of their own case as soon as any remark is made, and their whole attention is engrossed and absorbed by the merest chance reference to anything which affects them personally, be it never so remote: with the result that they have no power left for forming an objective view of things, should the conversation take that turn; neither can they admit any validity in arguments which tell against their interest or their vanity."
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Richard didn't say otherwise.
believed in faeries, and that he could photograph them.
Better than fairies he couldn't photograph.
"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into." (Jonathan Swift )
A person's greatest virtue is his ability to correct his mistakes and continually make a new person of himself.
-Wang Yang-Ming
We see things as we are, not as they are.
-Leo Rosten
We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined). We believe there is much more evidence in favour of Google's divinity than there is for the divinity of other more traditional gods.
We reject supernatural gods on the notion they are not scientifically provable. Thus, Googlists believe Google should rightfully be given the title of "God", as She exhibits a great many of the characteristics traditionally associated with such Deities in a scientifically provable manner.
(Moved from the LW/OB Rationality Quotes thread, where is was previously posted by accident)
talking to an author more insightful than reading the 200 page thesis,
Find the right books, and it'll probably be far more rewarding than talking to an author, simply because of the information density and better organization that you can get in written form.
An hour of reading Hennessy and Pattersons excellent book on CPU design will teach you a hell of a lot more than six hours of classes. I speak from recent quantitative experience here, which is where I got those specific numbers. The exceptions to this rule are local: particularly hard-to-understand concepts like the Tomasulo algorithm are a lot easier to wrap your head around if you have someone to walk you through them. But for the most part, a well-written textbook can teach you better than a person talking with you.
One problem is that most textbooks just aren't written that well. Often they're too concerned with signaling academic status, and they forget to make the book something that people will want to read. Just because an author can go off on a tangent about graph isomorphisms doesn't mean they should. Other times they get bogged down in obscure details up front, killing off people's interest. There are other failure modes, too depressing to list here.
By the way, I think that one reason why wikis are so easy to learn from is because you can skip past the boring stuff until you need it. This makes reading a wiki more fun, and also leads to tab explosions, keeping you hooked. I figure that this could significantly improve on the traditional textbook model, despite all those nice things I said about it earlier in the post.
(In honor of the tab explosion, I've stuck in a bunch of links to pages that might be interesting.)
talking to an author more insightful than reading the 200 page thesis
Only if he were an exceptionally bad writer. 200 pages contains a lot more information than you can fit into most conversations. Not to mention being more logically structured.
Of course, a conversation is more interactive and lets you ask about the things that were left unclear, as well as clear up misunderstandings... but I don't think that anywhere near compensates.
What you could argue is that talking to the author is time more efficiently spent, as it gives you a better idea of whether her thesis is worth reading.
MY mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,—
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
-Shakespeare, Sonnet 130
(Incidentally, I find it annoying that I can't post properly formatted poetry or song lyrics in comments. I can't use a single carriage return, and am instead forced to choose between putting a blank line in between every line of the quote, or putting everything on one line.)
Edit: Thank you! Now, is there a way to add spaces to the beginning of a line? HTML has a tendency to ignore whitespace; does the code block override that?
You must engage in these internal dialogues all the time, and you must let yourself lose the arguments gracefully. Writing may be a game of solitaire, but it isn’t a game at which you can cheat.
-Theodore Cheney, Getting the Words Right
Well, at least Buddha started. If he'd gone a bit further along that particular road he may have added:
- Going the wrong way.
- Making sacrifices to further a journey along the road to truth that do not give commensurate reward.
- Trying to go further or faster than you are able and damaging your existing progress in the process.
- Building (and continuing to build) your model of truth on inefficient foundations.
- Spending resources (time, money, attention) on truth seeking now when such resources could have been used to generate far more resources for truth production later on.
- Learning low value truth before higher relevance truth.
- Assuming that it is possible to go all the way on the road to truth. Apart from the potential for ever more precision, every moment that passes allows matter to slip out of the reach of your future light cone. So if you manage to grab all the truth in one direction you're probably never going to get the chance to build an accurate model of the other extreme.
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. -Oscar Wilde
Okay, I'm over my quota, but I really have to reproduce this from an ensuing discussion between myself and Michael Vassar, in which Michael Vassar commented that Galileo seemed to have accomplished his feats through character traits other than ultra-high-g:
"Wait, I just called myself 'not that smart, like Galileo'. What does that do to my Crackpot Index?!" -- Michael Vassar
"My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there."
Charles F. Kettering
"Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."
Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 239–251
Why is it believed that what pictures you can make in your head, and what is true or necessarily true, are terribly well connected? If there is not a substantial connection between the (necessarily) true and your conception of the (necessarily) true, then Hume's argument goes up in smoke.
-- Aretae
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair
Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference. —Stephen Jay Gould
The book is similar to Eliezer's posts in content, but with different examples and a focus more towards refuting non-materialism. If there's something you don't understand from reading LW, it's probably explained differently in Good and Real. The different arguments and examples may or may not be more enlightening.
You should probably buy Good and Real if any of the following are true:
You dislike Eliezer's attitude or writing style.
You are often distracted by other things while reading on your computer.
You prefer the structured organization of a book to the Wiki-link effect of blog posts.
You like to show how smart you are by having shelves of books with important-sounding titles.
OK, that last one might have been a joke.
I believe that scientists can change fields easily and sometimes make bigger impact in the new fields they enter. I think it’s because people who move do not look at the same problem from the traditional point-of-view. This enables us to come up with unique solutions. We are not trapped by dogma and if we are bold we can rise quickly.
-- Aubrey de Grey
Substituting "has perpetuated" for "has settled" in that quote results in a statement of essentially the same veracity.
"And what is it about selfishness exactly that is so bad?"
It's fine and dandy in me, but I tend to discourage it in other people. I find that I get what I want faster that way.
Now give me some cash.
It's not really surprising, though, is it?
No, just appalling.
"Those who are free from common prejudices acquire others."
--Napoleon Bonaparte; quoted by his secretary in Memoirs of Napoleon (1829-1831)
Our actions generally satisfy us: we recognize that they are in the main coherent, and that they make appropriate, well-timed contributions to our projects as we understand them. So we safely assume them to be the product of processes that are reliably sensitive to ends and means. That is, they are rational, in one sense of that word. But that does not mean they are rational in a narrower sense: the product of serial reasoning.
-- Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
There have, for instance, been no wars in Western Europe for sixty years, something that has never happened before.
That has almost nothing to do with democracy, and everything to do with the new world order after WW2. Half of Europe was inside the Soviet Union. The other half was mostly being used as an American front against the Soviets and didn't dare to have internal wars. Later, EU precursor organizations cemented the Western European alliances among the more important countries.
Of course all this hasn't stopped the Western European countries from having wars outside Europe, and there have been plenty of those in the last 60 years.
Today, European politics are such that multinational business industry organizations, and private international alliances, are vastly more powerful than any hypothetical nationalistic power. So we can't have an internal European war. This is unrelated to democracy, and would work just as well in any other well integrated pan-European system.
We have no evidence and reasoning about morality that doesn't depend on morality in the first place, is-ought problem which I won't repeat here.
Empirically, everyone derives their morality from society's norm developed in messy historical processes. Why one messy historical process is better than other by any objective standard is not clear.
By some standards we have less suffering than past times, but we're also vastly wealthier. It's not clear at all to me that wealth-adjusted suffering now is lower than historically - modern moral standards say its fine to let 1.5 million children a year die of diarrhea because they happen to be born in a wrong country. I can imagine some of the past moral systems would be less happy about it than we are.
Can't find the link to this Dilbert strip, but I saved it a while ago to my computer.
Dogbert is running for office:
Dogbert: Vote for me or the terrorists will use your skulls for salad bowls.
Dogbert: I promise to take money from the people who don't vote for me and give it to the people that do.
Dogbert: Pollution has vitamins!
Person in audience: I like how he makes me feel.
ETA: Uploaded it here. Now accepting pledges for my copyright infringement legal defense fund.
The history of the world is the history of the triumph of the heartless over the mindless.
From the Yes, Minister TV show.
Never give in - never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
Winston Churchill, 29 October 1941
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first. —Mark Twain
Google Books is your friend.
There is a perception among the people who are in charge of this monkey that if you just turn the rankings over to a computer, the computer will figure those things out. The reality is that it can't. It is very difficult to objectively measure anything if you don't know what it is you are measuring.
He thought he knew that there was no point in heading any further in that direction, and, as Socrates never tired of pointing out, thinking that you know when you don't is the main cause of philosophical paralysis.
-- Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Just out of curiosity, who is being discussed, and what direction did he discount?
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition.
Or maybe that is just what a lonely man might think so he can feel deep. Like a high status emo.
What is it about us, the public, and what is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?
-- Ben Shahn, "The Shape of Content"
"If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever.
But luckily we are only men - and cowards."
--Erwin Schrodinger, Mind and Matter
Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement / Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément
Rough translation: "What is well understood can be told clearly, and words to express it should come easily."
ETA: it is worth pondering the converse; just because something rolls off the tongue doesn't mean it's well understood. It could be that it's only well-rehearsed.
What the quote is aimed at is work of a supposedly high intellectual caliber, which just so happens to be couched in impenetrable jargon. Far more often, that is in fact evidence of muddled thought, not that the material is "beyond me".
Your friend must be pretty hungry by now.
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.
-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Karl Marx's writings glorifying communism (though Western capitalists regard it as grim and joyless) may well have reflected merely his alienation from society due to a lifelong series of excruciatingly painful boils, according to a recent British Journal of Dermatology article. In an 1867 letter, Marx wrote, "The bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day." [Reuters, 10-30-07]
-- News of the Weird (relevance)
I've decided to spend today abstractly worrying about sharks.
Perfecting my warrior robot race,
Building them one laser gun at a time.
I will do my best to teach them
About life and what it's worth,
I just hope that I can keep them
From destroying the Earth!
--SIAI
Yeah, let me do it.
I find this (the unspoken and un-agreed-upon array of connotations behind a word) is a major source of disagreement even on this site.
The more I read this quote the more I hate it. It is an anti-rationality quote. It says, if you are not rich enough to run as an independent Presidential candidate, if you're not in a position to make a difference by yourself, if all the power you have is your voice, then shut up; leave action to the rich and powerful, without criticism. That your voice has power is part of the point of democracy, and it's not hard to see why a man like Perot might prefer to make that sound less legitimate.
Excuse the cameo. I hope the extra context doesn't distract you too much from the SMBC quote or the reply.
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
John Maynard Keynes
The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all the other things we know. That's why it's almost always wrong to seek the "real meaning" of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.
Marvin Minsky -- The Society of Mind
Gary Drescher's "Good and Real" is an example of this sort of Deep Book done right. Landsburg seems to make a lot more errors - like he tried to write Good and Real but failed.
"If it works for you, it works because of you." -- Mark Greenway on marriage
...it would be a mistake to suppose that the difficulty of the case [for gender equality] must lie in the insufficiency or obscurity of the grounds of reason on which my convictions rests. The difficulty is that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of feeling to be contended against. So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old. And there are so many causes tending to make the feelings connected with this subject the most intense and most deeply-rooted of those which gather round and protect old institutions and custom, that we need not wonder to find them as yet less undermined and loosened than any of the rest by the progress the great modern spiritual and social transition; nor suppose that the barbarisms to which men cling longest must be less barbarisms than those which they earlier shake off.
— John Stuart Mill, 1869
Develop the habit of asking yourself, "Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?"
-- Timothy Ferriss - The 4 Hour Workweek
up-voted, but I don't think it's simple arithmetic that they're missing, there's a lot of ideological baggage preventing the masses from seeing nuclear as the better alternative.
I'd caution against such under estimation of people's mental capacities, if only they knew how to add and subtract almost entirely misses the point-and is too condescending, not good PR.
politics is the mind killer seems to be relevant here.
I never said that they're incapable of doing the math, just that they don't. For whatever reason. No further condescension is intended; just a really helpful suggestion.
Ditto. On the Mohs scale of sci-fi hardness, Blindsight is aggregated diamond nanorod.
What about a scale that tells us how much a work of fiction deals with paperclip manufacturing and resource harvesting?... wouldn't you be interested in in fictional explorations of possible future ways of manufacturing paperclips? And wouldn't you want to know which of those explorations was the least fantasy and most based on reasonable extrapolations from current knowledge?
In theory, yes. In practice, humans have very little to offer in terms of the ultra-efficient methods of paperclip production I normally use. I don't expect any book to be rated higher than 1, if you compare to what I already have.
Surely you need some way of communicating the traditions and norms of paperclip creating to your youth.
What are you talking about? I don't have to do biological self-replication (or sexual semi-replication at the genetic level) like humans do. I just make a perfect copy of myself. It already has all my knowledge and values.
But five hundred years ago ancient Greeks hadn't lived for centuries already.
Reading through it now. There are two relevant words in Roko's description, only one of which is obvious from the outset.
Still I'm not sure I fully agree with LW's spoiler policy. I wouldn't be reading this piece at all if not for Roko's description of it. When the spoiler is that the text is relevant to an issue that's actually discussed on Less Wrong (rather than mere story details, e.g. C3PO is R2D2's father) then telling people about the spoiler is necessary...
"non-wage-slave is not an income plan".
Agreed. Shorter version of Godin's point: how many different income plans have you typically become familiar with by the time you exit the education system?
What do you envision as the alternative to having a job? Running your own business? Being unemployed? Being a hunter-gatherer? Living off of a trust fund? Sustenance farming? Living in your mother's basement?
From a different angle, an employer solves a set of problems for employees-- smoothing out the income stream, and doing a bunch of logistical details associated with finding work, having what's needed to do the work, and getting paid. This is apparently so valuable that free-lancers get paid between 2 and 3 times as much per hour as employees.
This sounds very Foucauldian, almost straight out of Discipline and Punish.
I'm not Seth Godin, by the way.
I prefer Yeats' phrasing:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
it's not found in any Buddhist primary source
What is a Buddhist primary source? None of the discourses were written down until some centuries after the Buddha's time. The discourses that we have do themselves exist and whatever their provenance before the earliest extant documents, they are part of the canon of Buddhism. The canon has accreted layers over the centuries, but the Kalama Sutta is part of the earliest layer, the Tripitaka.
I've heard it might be
You've heard? That it might be? :-)
It is readily available online in English translation. It attributes these words directly to the Buddha:
Come Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias toward a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another's seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, "The monk is our teacher." Kalamas, when you yourselves know: "These things are bad; these things are blamable; these things are censured by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to harm and ill," abandon them.
and in another translation:
Now, Kalamas, don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, 'This contemplative is our teacher.' When you know for yourselves that, 'These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted carried out, lead to welfare to happiness' — then you should enter remain in them.
If I had the time, I'd be tempted to annotate the passage with LessWrong links.
ETA: For the second translation, the corresponding paragraph is actually the one preceding the one I quoted. The sutta in fact contains three paragraphs listing these ten faulty sources of knowledge. Buddhist scriptures are full of repetitions and lists, probably to assist memorisation.
ETA2: Rationalist version: Do not rest on weak Bayesian evidence, but go forth and collect strong.
Since a gene is just a molecule, it can't choose to maximize its fitness, but evolution makes it seem as though it had.... Why, for example, do songbirds sing in the early spring? The proximate cause is long and difficult. This molecule knocked against that molecule. This chemical reaction is catalyzed by that enzyme. But the ultimate cause is that birds are signalling territorial claims to each other in order to avoid unnecessary conflict. They just do what they do. But the net effect of an immensely complicated evolutionary process is that songbirds behave as though they had rationally chosen to maximize their fitness.
Laboratory experiments on pigeons show that they sometimes honor various consistency requirements of rational choice theory better than humans (Kagel, Battalio, and Green 1995). We don't know the proximate explanation. Who knows what goes on inside the mind of a pigeon? Who knows what goes on in the minds of stockbrokers for that matter? -- Ken Binmore, Rational Decisions
This is not to say that M. Legrandin was anything but sincere when he inveighed against snobs. He could not (from his own knowledge, at least) be aware that he himself was one, since it is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them. Upon ourselves they react only indirectly, through our imagination, which substitutes for our primary motives other, auxiliary motives, less stark and therefore more seemly. Never had Legrandin's snobbishness prompted him to make a habit of visiting a duchess as such. Instead, it would encourage his imagination to make the duchess appear, in his eyes, endowed with all the graces. He would gain acquaintance with the duchess, assuring himself that he was yielding to the attractions of mind and heart which the vile race of snobs could never understand. Only his fellow-snobs knew that he was of their number, for, owing to their inability to appreciate the intervening efforts of his imagination, they saw in close juxtaposition the social activity of Legrandin and its primary cause.
-- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
It is luck in a sense - every way that your opinion differs from someone else, you believe that factors outside of your control (your intelligence, your education, et cetera) have blessed you in such a way that your mind has done better than that poor person's.
It's just that it's not a problem. Lottery winners got richer than everyone else by luck, but that doesn't mean they're deluded in believing that they're rich. But someone who had only weak evidence ze won the lottery should be very skeptical. The real point of this quote is that being much less wrong than average is an improbable state, and you need correspondingly strong evidence to support the possibility. I think many of the people on this site probably do have some of that evidence (things like higher than average IQ scores would be decent signs of higher than normal probability of being right) but it's still something worth worrying about.
The mere fact that an assertion has been made is, in fact, evidence.
Well the evidence here isn't really "the fact that it has been asserted" but "the fact that it has been asserted in a context where truthfulness and authority are usually assumed". The assertion itself doesn't carry the weight. If we're playing poker and in the middle of a big hand I tell you "I have the best hand possible, you should fold." that isn't evidence of anything since it has been asserted in a context where assumptions about truthfulness have been flung out the window.
""Not evil, but longing for that which is better, more often directs the steps of the erring"
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
Counterexample: Space shuttle.
Suppose a hyperintelligent alien race did build a space shuttle equivalent as their first space-capable craft, and then went on to build interplanetary and interstellar craft.
Alien 1: The [interstellar craft, driven by multiple methods of propulsion and myriad components] disproves Gall's Law.
Alien 2: Not at all. [Craft] is a simple extension of well-developed principles like the space shuttle and the light sail.
You can simply define a "working simple system" as whatever you can make work, making that a pure tautology.
I wind up empathizing with both characters.
You're supposed to, or at least I did. Both are right.
What is the converse of a dialogue?
The converse of a logical statement is another statement with the antecedent and consequent swapped. I was using it metaphorically for "another similar take on the same subject". Both these quotes emphasize that there is no morality inherent in the universe. If we want a moral universe, we have to build it ourselves.
The Cassini Division quote actually to me seems rather cheerful. Even from cynicism that deep we can build a good life full of all the things we cherish.
I think part of what bothers me about your Cassini quote is that the claims in the first paragraph are overstated, especially coming from a character who is (presumably) a metaethical nihilist/egoist.
I think that's because they're not coming from a unitary viewpoint. They're bridging between something approximating normal morality, and utter amorality.
life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life.
Why, is it so wrong to eat things?
The point is not "it's wrong to eat things". The point is that life is what's survived, and it does anything it can to survive. People much the same, though they're better at it.
If I firmly estimate that other minds exist, does the existence of those minds depend upon my estimation?
Of course not.
If other minds exist, why should what matters to them be irrelevant?
First ask why should what matters to them be relevant?
Well, because:
1. You want to live under conditions such that they are.
2. They're useful to you, and you to them, and cooperation can make you both better off than a bitter fight to the death.
But neither of these is fundamental.
What does it even mean to say that "might makes right" except that I plan to ignore the concept of "right"?
It means that the concept of right is not fundamental, is not baked into the fabric of the universe. Right only means something relative to the minds that hold it. And they can only enforce that with might. Try reading it as "might effects right".
When, in the course of human events, has the power to ignore morality left people truly free?
Well, the simplest answer is when people have the power to ignore morality forced upon them by others that they don't agree with. If a gay man is free to ignore the moral judgements of an Imam in a Sharia country, he is freer to have sex with whom he pleases, how he pleases. A slave that has the power to escape is freer. A person is freer when they can do something that pleases them rather than the high-paying stressful job that their parents tell them is what they should do.
if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests.
Really? All the time?
All the time.
can spend some of the resulting surplus on frivolous pursuits;
The "frivolous pursuits" are both the thriving and what is in your interests. You interests include both accumulating the surplus and spending it on what matters to you.
The times where it is survival on the line, rather than thriving, can be much rarer.
At this point I reveal myself in my true colours as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years. And in consequence, we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.
Sir Kenneth Clarke, "Civilisation" (Excerpt on YouTube.)
I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago!
Rising in revolt tends to mean civil war. Perhaps if she thought that through a little more she would find at least one answer. One reason to stop other crazy people destroying things you value is to kill them.
What is -William Easterly attempting to establish with -William Easterly's claim?
He is attempting to establish that William Easterly and other mainstream academic economists do not suck at their jobs and that modern macroeconomics has not been thoroughly discredited by the recent (ongoing) financial crisis. He attempts to do this by claiming that their failure to predict anything correctly is not an indictment of their intellectually bankrupt field but rather a ringing endorsement. In so doing he conveniently ignores those economists and investors who correctly predicted the crisis and explained in detail what was going to happen and why it was going to happen in the years before the crisis.
Was there anyone who predicted the crisis based on reliable methods that we could use to predict another crisis?
The Greatest Trade Ever describes how John Paulson's hedge fund identified the coming sub-prime collapse and made $15 billion betting on it. It also covers several other investors who identified the same issues and made money, though most were not as lucky/smart with their timing as Paulson.
The crisis also looks a lot like a classic example of a credit crunch as described by Austrian business cycle theory. Peter Schiff is one of the best known commentators who predicted the broad outlines of the crisis before it really hit.
Now, I'm not saying that Austrian economists have all the answers or that there isn't some element of 'even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day' with the predictions of disaster panning out but there were people out there telling a coherent story about why the economy faced major problems and how the crisis would play out. Some of them were quite accurate on the timing as well. You wouldn't know it from the pronouncements of most economists, bankers and politicians because they look much better if they can proclaim that 'nobody' saw or could have seen the problems coming. I'm a lot more impressed with the likes of Andrew Lahde bowing out with a 'f*ck you' and millions of dollars in profits from betting on disaster and being right than by William Easterly smugly proclaiming vindication of mainstream economics when his profession largely failed at making predictions or even understanding what was going on in the real economy.
But the sense of understanding no more means that you have knowledge of the world than caressing your own shoulder means that someone loves you.
-- Michael Bishop(50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough: Lessons for Philosophy of Science).
"Simply" doesn't necessarily mean "concisely" (outside of mathematical formalizations of Occam's Razor). Conciseness is preferable when possible, but being too terse can start impacting comprehensibility. (Think of three programs that all do the same thing: a 1000-line C program, a 100-line Python program, and a 20-line Perl program. The length decreases with each one, but readability probably peaks with the Python program.)
The quote says "If you can't explain it simply", not "If you don't explain it simply". In this case, even if we do switch to "concisely" I think it checks out. Indeed, most of the major points Eliezer makes in the sequences could be stated much more briefly, but I get the sense that his goal in writing them is more than just transmitting his conclusions and his reasoning. No, it seems he's writing with the goal of making his points not just intellectually comprehensible but obvious, intuitive, and second-nature. (Of course any intuition-pumpery, analogies, and anecdotes are used to complement good reasoning, not to replace it.) But I have little doubt that, if he really wanted to, he could he boil them down to their essential points, at the potential cost of much of the richness of his style of explanation.
(In any case, I'm not convinced that this quote is specific enough to serve as a usable norm. How simple? How much is "well enough"? Everyone will automatically assign their own preferred values to those variables, but then you're just putting words in Einstein's mouth, or rather, putting meanings in his words; you're taking whatever rule you already follow and projecting it onto him. Fittingly, this is a case where a longer explanation would have been simpler (i.e. more understandable).)
Edit: I think I remember Eliezer once writing something like "Generally, half of all the words I write are superfluous. Unfortunately, each reader finds that it's a different half." That seems relevant as well. (Anyone remember the source of that?)
It means that you had a deep understanding for a few seconds, and then lost it. Or that you got trapped in the same confusion as the author, absorbed what made it seem appealing, and then "corrected away" the confusion.
To determine which one happened, try the following:
- reading it again
- rephrasing it in your own words as many different ways as you can
- seeing how the thesis connects to other topics, and if that connection can be independently verified
Eventually, you should be able to either gain the understanding, or recognize where the error is.
One thing is for sure, Coca-Cola corp is definitely losing the overall fermion market to more streamlined business models.
Scientists spend an extraordinary amount of time worrying about being wrong and take great pains to prove others so. In fact, science is the one area of discourse in which a person can win considerable prestige by proving himself wrong.
-- Sam Harris (emphasis in original)
You can’t prescribe decently for something you hate. It will always come out wrong. You can’t prescribe decently for something you despair in. If you despair of humankind, you’re not going to have good policies for nurturing human beings. I think people ought to give prescriptions who have ideas for improving things, ought to concentrate on the things that they love and that they want to nurture.
He drew a deep breath, closed his eyes, drew old lessons to his mind. “What is, is. No loss is made better by dwelling on it; no pain is cured by the mind’s eye regarding it. Accept the casualties. Assess your capabilities. Continue the mission.” The recitation made him feel a little better; a cold clarity came to him.
And Rumours of War, time-travel story on the Ynglinga Saga blog.
[...] but we have no guarantee at all that our formal system contains the full empirical or quasi-empirical stuff in which we are really interested and with which we dealt in the informal theory. There is no formal criterion as to the correctness of formalization.
-- Imre Lakatos, What Does a Mathematical Proof Prove?
ETA: When I first read this remark, I couldn't decide whether it was terrifying, or just a very abstract specification of a deep technical problem. I currently think it's both of those things.
Maybe I should have posted it like this:
As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?
I don't know, to me he's just stating that the brain is the seat of sensation and reasoning.
Aristotle thought it was the heart. Both had arguments for their respective positions. Aristotle studied animals a lot and over-interpreted the evidence he had accumulated: to the naked eye the brain appears bloodless and unconnected to the organs; it is also insensitive, and can sustain some non-fatal damage; the heart, by contrast, reacts to emotions, is obviously connected to the entire body (through the circulatory system), and any damage to it leads to immediate death.
Also, in embryos the brain is typically formed much later than the heart. This is important if, like Aristotle, you spent too much time thinking about "the soul" (that mysterious folk concept which was at the same time the source of life and of sensation) and thus believed that the source of "life" was also necessarily the source of sensation, since both were functions of "the soul".
Hippocrates studied people more than animals, did not theorize too much about "the soul", and got it right. But it would be a bit harsh to cast that as a triumph of rationality against superstition.
We live in an age of uncertainty, complexity, and paranoia. Uncertainty because, for the past few centuries, there has simply been far too much knowledge out there for any one human being to get their brains around; we are all ignorant, if you dig far enough. Complexity multiplies because our areas of ignorance and our blind spots intersect in unpredictable ways - the most benign projects have unforseen side effects. And paranoia is the emergent spawn of those side effects; the world is not as it seems, and indeed we may never be able to comprehend the world-as-it-is, without the comforting filter lenses of our preconceptions and our mass media.
-- Charles Stross (Afterword: Inside the Fear Factory)
"You pride yourself on freedom of choice. Let me tell you that this very freedom is one of the factors that most confuse and undermine you. It gives you full play for your neuroses, your surface reactions and your aberrations. What you should aim for is freedom from choice! Faced with two possibilities, you spend time and effort to decide which to accept. You review the whole spectrum of political, emotional, social, physical, psychological and physiological conditioning before coming up with the answer which, more often than not, does not even satisfy you then. Do you know, can you comprehend, what freedom it gives you if you have no choice? Do you know what it means to be able to choose so swiftly and surely that to all intents and purposes you have no choice? The choice that you make, your decision, is based on such positive knowledge that the second alternative may as well not exist."
-- Rafael Lefort, "The Teachers of Gurdjieff", ch. XIV
A more cheering version: "The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder." Ralph W. Sockman
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-- Dylan Thomas
I would prefer to say that conforming your thoughts to reality is science, and conforming reality to your thoughts is engineering...
I downvoted you because you're either completely missing the point of the quote, or you're unsuccessfully trying to be funny.
In case it's not the latter: Yes, since you already know the answer, it's easy to "infer" the result from the givens. But the question is, what additional information are you using that constrains your answer to that? That's what you need to say to solve it, not just repeat back from the answer key.
Furthermore, it's not at all clear that children get the result you claim.
If I'm not allowed to use real-life common sense, it's not clear how I would even understand the question, let alone solve it. Okay, what additional information do you think one should need? Why?
Are you serious? The problem is to specify which "common sense" reasoning leads you to which conclusion! Yes, now that you've explained one reason why one outcome holds (even though it doesn't account for children who grow up recenting their mothers and so isn't even right on its own terms), you've given the kind of information the question is asking for.
Stating which outcome your common sense tells you would result -- which is what you did -- is non-responsive. And even now, you haven't told what conditions determine the 27 possible outcomes - just one reason why one outcome would result.
Black-box "common sense" reasoning is exactly how you stray from rationality. You should open the box, and see what's inside.
I can't understand it. I can't even understand the people who can understand it.
-- Queen Juliana
I love Piet Hein :)
For many system shoppers it's
a good-for-nothing system
that classifies as opposites
stupidity and wisdom.
Because by logic-choppers it's
accepted with avidity:
stupidity's true opposite's
the opposite stupidity.
or
Wisdom is
the booby prize
given when you've been
unwise.
How could you distinguish a repeating process consisting of the entire universe, from that process happening only once?
New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled, the humiliating question arises, "Why then are you not taking part in them?"
-- H. G. Wells
I've always enjoyed three-fourths of this quote, but the first line still bothers me. If one knows not that they know not, should we not guide them so they at least know that they know not? Then we can teach them, possibly awake them, and finally have more wise people for others to follow.
'The Master said, “I do not open the way for students who are not driven with eagerness; I do not supply a vocabulary for students who are not trying desperately to find the language for their ideas. If on showing students one corner they do not come back to me with the other three, I will not repeat myself.”'
--Analects 7.8
If you were in China and were confronted with the top 0.1% of 1 billion, would it be worthwhile to try to teach the ignorant who are ignorant even of being ignorant?
On the other hand...
Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.
Seems to me that Schiller's been better vindicated so far.
Johnny Smith: If you could go back in time to Germany, before Hitler came to power, knowing what you know now, would you kill him?
[...]
Dr. Sam Weizak: I don't like this, John. What are you getting at?
Johnny Smith: What would you do? Would you kill him?
Dr. Sam Weizak: All right. All right. I'll give you an answer. I'm a man of medicine. I'm expected to save lives and ease suffering. I love people. Therefore, I would have no choice but to kill the son of a bitch.
-- The Dead Zone, 1983
An interesting related fact: the British considered assassinating Hitler in Operation Foxley in '44. It was kaiboshed, mostly because he was seen as a really terrible strategist.
David: But you're a doctor--you help people!
Dr. Mordin Solus: Lots of ways to help people. Sometimes heal patients; sometimes execute dangerous people. Either way helps.
-- Mass Effect 2
I don't see much point in passing judgment on them.
"It's not that I judge them, I just, just..."
"Don't see any reason for them to exist?"
"Exactly."
"There are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."
You use a metaphor to describe some concept. The metaphor isn’t the thing you describe - it’s just a tool that you use. But someone takes the metaphor, and runs with it, making arguments that are built entirely on metaphor, but which bear no relation to the real underlying concept. And they believe that whatever conclusions they draw from the metaphor must, therefore, apply to the original concept.
— Mark Chu-Carroll, Metaphorical Crankery: a bad metaphor is like a steaming pile of …
I really like the quote about cod but I'm not particularly inspired by the moral given for the story. I'd prefer "I eliminated a non-terminal ethical principal when I realised my thinking was pretentious bullshit, moving towards a more coherent ethical framework. Yay me!"
I conjecture that we're supposed to read it under the classical definition of "philosophy", which used to include pretty much every type of intellectual discussion, including such practical issues as how to properly raise children, how to organise a political society, etc.
Yes, but in context this doesn't quite mean what it sounds like. In Girl Genius, "Science" is almost a password for any weird things built by sparks, rather than what a rationalist would call science.
Pretty much the opposite of the foundation of modern education and social organization.
Lewis was a convert to Christianity. The usual self-analytical deficiencies of religious believers are often gigantified in converts, possibly because they adopted their beliefs out of need rather than simple habit and thus will hug them much tighter.
It's specifically the "I have something unpleasant to do, and I'm not doing it!" that's exciting. I'll play even a bad game when I have work to avoid.
Sometimes, I feel the fear of uncertainty stinging clear
And I can't help but ask myself how much I let the fear
Take the wheel and steer
It's driven me before
And it seems to have a vague, haunting mass appeal
But lately I'm beginning to find that I
Should be the one behind the wheel
- Incubus, Drive
Getting from "other people's minds are probably similar to mine" to "I care about other people's minds" still requires some implicit premises or some psychological features beyond egoism (e.g. empathy).
WrongBot has been around enough that one can safely assume that his ignorance is Socratic.
The hypothetical situation I mean is one where your current retina is reprogrammed to switch red and green stimuli, and your memories are edited so that you don't figure it out from inconsistencies, but everything else is left the same.
The fact that there's subconscious cognitive content to red vs. green can be deduced from things like instinctive reactions† to the sight of blood: the brain doesn't check the color against the memory of other blood, it reacts faster than that to to perception. The emotional valence of colors would seem off somehow after a switch, because those don't appear to operate fully through memory, either. Snap judgments of peoples' attractiveness would backfire as your subconscious applied the rule "green tint means sickly" to someone with a healthy complexion.
I don't think you'd be able to consciously articulate what exactly seemed "red" about that green grass, but parts of your mind would be telling you that something's gone wrong, because they're hooked up not just to labels "red" and "green" but to full systems of processing that would be running on suddenly different stimuli.
†Similarly, chimps raised by humans in captivity will still freak out when exposed to a fake snake, because certain patterns have been encoded deep within. There's no reason for such patterns to be raised to the level of conscious knowledge.
Ahhh, so you'd only be reprogramming part of my brain. Well, of course I'd run into problems then. All that means is that there are more parts of my brain than those I have conscious access to, which seems pretty obvious to me even before I start to think about what I know of neurology.
I think we agree with each other.
Distrust any historical anecdote good enough to have survived on its literary merit.
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Marcus Aurelius
This describes the outcome of pretty much every argument I've ever had. Well, except the ones whose outcome was "each party agrees that their opponent is an idiot".
I might just be suffering from availability bias since I was reading about the French Revolution right before I read the quote, but I was thinking that so much of what we do that is non-rational (not based on explicit reasoning or weighing of evidence) could be adapted to our social environment through memetic evolution. If this was the case, dropping norms of behavior or social institutions simply because we don't have sufficient rational justification for them might prove disastrous.
Does this sound crazy or am I making sense?
That was a beautiful reply :-D
To push a little more (and much more gently this time) I suspect that you are homing in on a familiar critique of politics rather than ideas themselves (which can sometimes be profitably separated from politics).
I personally have a very hard time remembering situations where ideas themselves seemed to lead to emotional reactions, rather than having ideas expressed in front of an audience, with competitive processes layered in as an inherent part of what's going on. Like, I love having conversations on road trips, because its private and safe and there is room for 90 minutes of undistracted cooperative communication. In my experience, those kind of conversations don't cause people to freak out very much at all, even when the ideas are themselves very "fraught".
According to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.
I suspect that beyond a certain point, sanity can only be raised by groups of people who are aware of (and have the skills to manage?) issues like glossophobia. There is a big difference between contexts where people try to induce crazy emotions in someone they are debating (which I was sort of doing by example, in the grandparent and for which I apologize) versus contexts where people are explicitly trying to bring an epistemically "nurturing" environment into being :-)
I think I'll repurpose a recent quote here: Personally, this is not the first time I've heard about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by the death of the solar system, and my attitude has always been that I'm willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.
I find worries about the heat death of the universe almost as comically premature. Ping me about heat death in a million years - if it still looks like a problem at that point, then I'm willing to consider it an issue. "But you probably won't be alive in a million years!" Well, then there's even less reason for me to worry about this.
Edit: I don't disagree that Russell knew how to turn a phrase - I find the sentence Kazuo quoted especially appealing, the words "a universe in ruins" are evocative. (And thanks for digging up the link, KT.)
Arguably, that's still understanding. 'Now I know that natural language parsing is in this family of parametric functions which my ML algorithm can handle, with the coefficients given by minimizing the divergence from a bazillion word corpus...etc.'
Yes, I agree. The real test of AI is not the automation of "formal specification - working code" -- if the client could formalize it to that level, they could write the code themselves. Rather, the real test is whether an AI could talk to an extroverted MBA, figure out what they want, and then produce the working code. But so far, only humans programmers can do that.
But not being accepted by many provides some evidence against a thing being true.
There is no point in saying that one should not doubt or one should believe. Just to say 'I believe' does not mean that you understand and see. When a student works on a mathematical problem, he comes to a stage beyond which he does not know how to proceed, and where he is in doubt and perplexity. As long as he has this doubt, he cannot proceed. If he wants to proceed, he must resolve this doubt. And there are ways of resolving that doubt. Just to say 'I believe', or 'I do not doubt' will certainly not solve the problem. To force oneself to believe and to accept a thing without understanding is political, and not spiritual or intellectual.
In that case, I'd say you're using a much too binary definition of "true". I'm sure this has been posted a dozen times before, but it seems relevant:
"When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
-Isaac Asimov
The line between genius and insanity is measured only by success
-- unknown
Okay, but that wouldn't be a free ride if the emergency payment were high enough -- the guy wasn't saying, "okay, fine, I'll pay this year's subscription fee -- now will you put out the fire?" He was offering the higher amount (which isn't credible, because the court wouldn't enforce it because if your house is burning, you'll lie, knowing you won't pay, because the court won't enforce ...).
(Long ago, I had this image in my mind of a rude, doesn't-get-it guy who didn't buy car insurance, didn't understand car insurance, and then when his car was wrecked, visits an insurance company, expecting a payout. When they don't pay out, he sighs and says, "Fine, how much is a month of coverage? There -- there you go. NOW will you pay for my car?"
That's not what's going on here.)
For some strange reason a lot of US policy in particular seems to fall into the "worst of both worlds" camp ( I would consider their health insurance system as an example). As I'm not an American I don't know why this is the case.
"Too big to fail" banks: they profit when their gambles pay off, we bail them out when they don't. Also arguably telecommunications carriers that have quasi-natural quasi-monopolies.
As I'm not an American I don't know why this is the case.
Neither do Americans.
Could you expand on the specific details of what went wrong?
It looks like this is actually a quote from Carolyn Merchants The Death of Nature; only the parts in quotation marks are Bacon's words, taken from "The Great Instauration", "The Masculine Birth of Time", and "De Dignitate".
Of note is that Lojban doesn't fall into that chair trap in particular. I can easily talk about "le stizu" the same way I use "the chair" in English.
More literally, "le stizu" means "the particular chair(s) which in context I'm obviously referring to". Lojban is all about using context to reduce unneccessary verbiage, same as a natural language. The big difference is that the ambiguity in Lojban is easier to locate, and easier to reduce when it becomes necessary.
(Also, if I really did need chair^1 and chair^2 for some reason, I can just talk about "le stizu goi ko'a" and "le stizu goi fo'a", then later use just "ko'a" and "fo'a" for shorthand).
I wish my mother had used this strategy, instead of the completely arbitrary-sounding "this is just the way you are to do things" which just caused a counter-reaction.
I'd be concerned that this phrasing would raise more sociopaths... because that's how they think about morality.
The quote doesn't talk about morality. I take it to be about social rules such as what is considered proper dress, table manners, rudeness and politeness, playing nicely, and so on. At a certain age (as WTP alludes to) children become capable of understanding above that level, and they will need a proper upbringing in what is good and real at that level as well. There's another quote of WTP I could give in this connection, but I've used up my quote quota for this month.
Ok then:
If you happen to believe that people ought to live all bunched up together, be nice and refrain from violence, keep their promises and commitments to each other, take care of the helpless, do their share by helping with the unpleasant or boring jobs, teach the young, love truth, and be respectful of the environment, that's fine. What you should do is go around talking to people, trying to persuade them that they will be better off if they act like this, explaining to them the advantages of this kind of behavior toward others and the disadvantages of other ways of behaving, and so forth. The more of them you can persuade, the more people there will be in the world who want the same things you want, and who will help get them in situations where one person alone would be ineffective. Nothing the matter with that.
But if you tell them they should do all these things because there are social forces that make them necessary or right, then you're lying. The truth is that these are things you want to happen. You may have lots of good reasons for wanting them to happen, and there's certainly nothing wrong with telling people what convinced you and seeing whether the same things will convince others. But trying to convince people that there are forces other than you that demand the behavior you want in some objective way is just an empty threat; anyone who disagrees with you can nullify your argument by claiming knowledge of other forces that demand a different kind of behavior. Since you're both making up these external forces in your imaginations, nobody wins.
-- William T. Powers
Hm, how about...
Beliefs are justified by their Solomonoff-nature. That is the core of Bayesianism. Science is bookkeeping.
If it's a stupid idea and it works, then it isn't stupid.
-- French Ninja, Freefall
Puts me in mind of "Rationalists should win".
“But for that matter, how do you explain the fact that the statues of Easter Island are megaliths exactly like the Celtic ones? Or that a Polynesian god called Ya is clearly the Yod of the Jews, as is the ancient Hungarian Io-v’, the great and good god? Or that an ancient Mexican manuscript shows the Earth as a square surrounded by sea, and in its center is a pyramid that has on its base the inscription Aztlan, which is close to Atlas and Atlantis? Why are pyramids found on both sides of the Atlantic?”
“Because it’s easier to build pyramids than spheres. Because the wind produces dunes in the shape of pyramids and not in the shape of the Parthenon.”
“I hate the spirit of the Enlightenment.”
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at
solomon short (david gerrold's fictional character)
The course of human progress staggers like a drunk; its steps are quick and heavy but its mind is slow and blunt
-Jesse Michaels of Operation Ivy
Posted because it's a useful and evocative metaphor: the drunk feels himself leaning or falling in one direction, and puts his foot down in that direction to steady himself. If he doesn't step far enough, he is still leaning in the same direction, and he steps again. In this way we can make fantastic progress in directions we don't like while getting further away from the ways we did want to go.
If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen to look like oxen, and each would make the gods’ bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.
Xenophanes
More likely they would write a treatise on how God wants them to keep pulling carts around.
Surely he would be circular?
I got burned during a debate because I trusted the history from my physics textbook. After having read several books on the history of science (rather than summaries inside larger works) I am convinced that the Dark Arts on on full display even in natural science coursework.
So should every every metaphor be voted down? Or just personifying metaphors? Or just metaphors mentioning deities?
I downvoted it because it perpetuated the myth that Galileo was tortured. Plus, God knows, the poetry was pretty awful.
From her website:
This song was inspired when a friend of mine complained to me about a run-in with some Creationists, and asked "what can you say to such people?" The first words that popped out of my mouth were "humans wrote the bible. God wrote the rocks."
From her bio:
Cat Faber is the offspring of a sasquatch and a space alien, which gave her a unique perspective on things like sports and religion (if those can be said to be separate subjects). Her taste in music is likewise unusual, combining a love for the folksong style with an interest in subjects like science and magic. This made her such a natural for filk that it is astonishing she didn't discover it until she was nearly full grown. She sang from babyhood, though her sasquatch parent maintains she was tone-deaf until about the sixth grade. In 1996 she hooked up with Arlene Hills to form the filk duo Echo's Children.
A book is a machine to think with.
I. A. Richards, "Principles of Literary Criticism"
'Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
Pope, Essay on Criticism
I hate that quote; it's completely backwards and depends entirely on selection effect.
Many ideas accepted as self-evident, both true and false, are first violently opposed. Many ideas violently opposed are first ridiculed. However, most ridiculed ideas stay ridiculed, and most violently opposed ideas stay violently opposed.
Similarly: If you win, before that they probably fought you. If they fight you, before that they probably laughed at you. And if they laugh at you, before that they probably ignored you.
But be careful of writing your conclusion first!
Clearly causality is secondary to grammar; had it been 'ELANK' you would have been right.
I don't know if this quote has already shown up, but it's one of my favorites.
"Consider this: You are the architect of your own imprisonment."
-- Macros the Black (from Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga)
The quotes idea is pretty much wrong. And sadly sometimes used as an argument against life extension.
| "Why did I do that?" I asked.
-- The Poet Who Is Odd, Knapsack Poems by Elanor Arnason
Some of Galileo's critics argued that at least some of his observations were artifacts of the instrument he was using (the telescope) and even cited experimental evidence in their critiques (such as looking at objects that could be seen with the naked eye as well as through the telescope and observing anomalies like duplication or "halos" through the latter). This is simply standard scientific criticism, not religious nay saying. So, even if the quote is accurate it wasn't necessarily representative of his critics.
The Jesuits of the Collegio Romano that were sent to meet with Galileo verified his observations by using his telescope, but disagreed with his interpretation of them. Therefore, it seems very unlikely that the quote is accurate.
Probably, the quote is a kind of bullshit.
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.
"I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth."
God (presumably), Revelation 3:16
I suspect that's giving mid-19th century members of Parliament way too much credit.
Before we study Zen, the mountains are mountains and the rivers are rivers. While we are studying Zen, however, the mountains are no longer mountains and the rivers are no longer rivers. But then, when our study of Zen is completed, the mountains are once again mountains and the rivers once again rivers.
-- Buddhist saying
In context:
FOUR LAWS OF ADVICE
Learning to give good advice is so important to technologists that special laws of advice have been developed. The first of these is often stated as follows: "The correct advice is the desired advice." However, this form of the law leaves ambiguous whether the recipient wants correct advice or whether the desired advice is by definition the correct advice. A much clearer and completely unambiguous statement is provided by the following version of the First Law of Advice:
The correct advice to give is the advice that is desired.
A classic example of good advice was given to the mayor of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the fall of 1920. A major city highway, built on the side of a hill, began sliding, a piece at a time, onto railroad tracks below. With every heavy rain, more mud and parts of the road washed down, causing many of the railroad tracks to be unusable. Efforts to remove the mud to keep all tracks operable had been too slow following some of the more massive mud slides.
Several solutions were offered by local engineering and construction firms and by concerned citizens. One was to pave the entire side of the hill to prevent erosion. Another was to build a metal structure to support the road and protect the tracks. All the suggestions would have been quite expensive, causing thoughtful people to wonder how or if the city could pay for the necessary work. Furthermore, no one knew if any of the proposed ideas would solve the problem.
AN EXPERT IS CALLED
The mayor knew he needed good advice. Ultimately, he hired G. W. Goethals as a consultant. Goethals had served as chief engineer for the Panama Canal and had considerable experience with landslides. His expertise was evident not only in his experience, but also in his consulting fee of $1,000 per day - an extraordinary sum at that time.
After only one day of study, Goethals was prepared with his advice and with his bill. His advice to the city was simple: "Let it slide."
The opposition party and one of the newspapers made sport of the city administration for paying so much for this advice. The mayor rightly argued that it was a small price to pay to learn that none of the more expensive proposals would work. The mayor chose to follow this most economical advice and permitted the hill to slide.
Whether technically right or wrong, the consultant's advice was the desired advice. It did not involve construction expenses. Furthermore, any other solution would have been under constant attack from engineering and construction firms whose "solutions" had been rejected in favor of the winning contractor. The desired advice was clearly the correct advice.
This classic example also stands up well in terms of the Second Law of Advice:
The desired advice is revealed by the structure of the organization, not by the structure of the technology.
And it also agrees with the Third Law of Advice:
Simple advice is the best advice.
Another classic example of advice that obeys all three laws was the advice given to the vice president of a petroleum company during the 1920s. The company had discovered a major oil deposit of high quality that could be refined economically into gasoline and other products. There was only one problem. The resultant gasoline had a greenish tint. Because all gasoline at that time was clear, like water, the marketing group believed there would be considerable customer resistance to an impure-looking gasoline.
The production manager submitted his proposal for solving the problem. It called for modernization of the refinery. The company's chief chemist objected on the grounds that there was no proof that refinery modifications would result in a better product. Removing the greenish tint was a difficult chemical problem that had defied every attempt at a solution. The chief chemist, therefore, recommended an expanded research program.
FOR ADVICE, GO OUTSIDE
Rather than adopting either solution, the vice president wisely turned to an outside consultant for advice. The consultant was a chemical engineer of good reputation in academic circles, who had consulted before in the petroleum industry.
He listened to the proposal of the chief chemist and then to that of the production manager. He talked to engineers and managers at the refinery and to chemists in the laboratory. Then he returned to the university for further study. If he were to recommend more experimental work, the chief chemist would be pleased. On the other hand, a recommendation to modernize the refinery was the desired advice of the production manager.
The important thing for the consultant, however, was to determine what advice was desired by the vice president. The vice president did not want to be responsible for choosing either of the proposals already presented. He wanted to avoid responsibility for any decision that would appear to favor either of his subordinates. If such a decision had to be made, it would be best to attribute the decision to an outsider. This, the consultant discerned, was the real reason why he was hired. Even better for the vice president would be a totally different solution that played no favorites.
After several weeks of additional work, the consultant was ready with a uniquely neutral recommendation - one that required neither research work nor modernization of the refinery. His advice to the vice president was simple: "Advertise the color."
The marketing success of the greenish gasoline and the fact that most gasoline is now artificially colored demonstrate once again that the advice found by studying the structure of the organization - not the structure of technology - is the desired advice. It also substantiates the Third Law. Indeed, simple advice is the best advice.
(The rest of the chapter is not relevant.)
The citation is taken from "Brinkmanship in Business"[pdf]. The cited assertion is actually a mistake, as it presupposes that the right thing to do in the Ultimatum game is to accept any amount offered to you, and never punish the unfair dealer. The whole document is a lesson in Dark Arts.
Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.
-Patrick Henry
"First Law of Communication: The purpose of communication is to advance the communicator." - Putt's Law and the Successful Technocrat
Nothing greater can happen to men than the perfection of their mental functions.
Leibniz (quoted in Maat, "Philosophical languages in the Seventeenth Century: Dalgarno, Wilkins, Leibniz")
"If you understand something in only one way, then you do not really understand it at all." -- Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
My interpretation: "As a woman, you are stuck with not being allowed to speak what you think, but there is a workaround for this."
From comp.lang.c++.moderated:
This is just a simple example to illustrate the mechanics of the problem. The actual system is far more complex. For the sake of argument suppose that f passes the Handle to a different thread context that destroys the Handle during one of three distinct timeframes depending on the runtime environment. Either (1) before the constructor returns; (2) after the constructor returns and before the assigned handle is destroyed; or (3) after the assigned handle is destroyed. The problem occurs in case 1. -Andrew.
That doesn't make it any less flawed; it just demonstrates that it's flawed in a complex manner.
Kevin P. Barry
Doing it efficiently turns you into a dangerous paperclip monster, while doing it inefficiently makes you a mere harmless rock.
I guess it implies the extra cost of optimizing the useless task. Mostly agreed, though.
This is actually an anti-rationality quote. Enigmas of the world are not harmless. Just try fighting "harmless enigmas" like diseases before germ theory. The mysteries of the world are not made terrible by our attempts to interpret them as though it had an underlying truth.
I interpret this quote to suggest that mysteries are harmless, and that trying to understand the world is what is harmful. The vast majority of the time, this view is backwards; it is falsified by the history of science. I really hope this isn't what the quote means in context, because otherwise, it is mystery mongering, and I can't even begin to fathom what is wrong with the thought process that led to it.
What we don't know can hurt us. Attempting to understand the world based on an underlying structure is at least instrumentally rational, and it might even be true, also.
I'm curious about the context of the quote, and what NihilCredo thinks it has to do with rationality.
Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.
-G. K. Chesterton
Loyalty mods don't whisper propaganda in your skull. They don't bombard you with images of the object of devotion while stimulating the pleasure centres of your brain, or cripple you with pain and nausea if you stray from correct thought. They don't cloud your mind with blissful euphoria, or feverish zealotry; nor do they trick you into accepting some flawed but elegant piece of casuistry. No brainwashing, no conditioning, no persuasion. A loyalty mod isn't an agent of change; it's the end product, a fait accompli. Not a cause for belief, but belief itself, belief made flesh - or rather, flesh made into belief.
--Greg Egan, "Quarantine".
"Student: How can one realize his Self-nature? I know so little about the subject.
Yasutani: First of all, you must be convinced you can do so. The conviction creates determination, and the determination zeal.
But if you lack conviction, if you think 'maybe I can get it, maybe I can't', or even worse, 'This is beyond me!' - you won't awaken no matter how much you do zazen."
pg 126, The Three Pillars of Zen, ISBN 8070-5979-7
When I came across this quote, I was struck by its relevance to one of Eliezer's beisutsukai posts about finding the successor to quantum mechanics (The Failures of Eld Science; on a side note, are there any 'internal'/wikilinks to LW articles for us to use, instead of hardwiring lesswrong.com URLs?).
I meant to write a post on how interesting it is that we intellectually know that many of our current theories must be wrong, and even have pretty good ideas as to which ones, but we still cannot psychologically tackle them with the same energy as if we had some anomaly or paradox to explain, or have the benefit of hindsight. The students in Eliezer's story know that quantum mechanics is wrong; someone with a well-verified observation contradicting quantum mechanics knows that it is wrong (replace 'quantum' with 'classical' as you wish). They will achieve better results than a battalion of conventional QMists.
But nothing quite gelled.
"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them" - Mr Gradgrind, Hard Times (Dickens)
An anti-rationalist quote. Dickens believes there is more to life than rationality. Does his satire upon us here have any basis in reality?
Is it really true that playing the lottery makes you feel rich? Can someone who has played the lottery corroborate on this?
Maybe they also think they understand you. You can't get intelligence from simple asymmetry.
I quoted this in another comment, but I think it deserves to be in here as well. It used to be in the rec.backcountry FAQ.
"You have before you the disassembled parts of a high-powered hunting rifle, and the instructions written in Swahili. In five minutes an angry Bengal tiger will walk into the room."
-- Eugene Miya
"Train yourself to get suspicious every time you see simplicity. Any claim that the root of a problem is simple should be treated the same as a claim that the root of a problem is Bigfoot. Simplicity and Bigfoot are found in the real world with about the same frequency." -- David Wong
Two very similar quotes:
"It would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings." - Paul Graham
"Mathematics is the study of precisely defined objects." - Norman Gottlieb
I'll bet that a survey of lottery players would reveal that more than 50% know they lose money on average by playing the lottery. If not, a survey of people at slot machines would be even more likely to produce this result.
Gambling is about thrill.
If you still get thrill out of slot machines, it just means that you don't get it at a deeper level.
Almost everyone understands that they will get old and die (and that dying is bad), but relatively few see aging as the most important disease to fight.
For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. Mathematically, progress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information, which means that it is optimal for someone, when in doubt, to systematically reject the new idea, information, or method. Clearly and shockingly, always. -Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness p.52
"No matter how the next forty-seven thousand years turn out, whether they are ages of liberty or tyranny, happiness or misery, by the time two hundred thousand million years are passed, the civilization that rules the sevagram will occupy basically the same area of the local galactic supercluster, and achieve roughly the same height of enlightenment and technical advancement. You are wasting my time with trifles."
-- John C. Wright, Null-A Continuum
Monroe Fieldbinder sees psychologist to bounce ideas off him. One of Fieldbinder's ideas is that the phenomenon of modern party-dance is incompatible with self-consciousness, makes for staggeringly unpleasant situations (obvious resource: Amherst/Mt. Holyoke mixer '68) for the all self-conscious person. Modern party-dance is simply writhing to suggestive music. It is ridiculous, silly to watch and excruciatingly embarrassing to perform. It is ridiculous, and yet absolutely everyone does it, so that it is the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing who feels out of place and uncomfortable and self-conscious . . . in a word, ridiculous.
David Foster Wallace (The Broom Of The System, pg. 158)
it seems Taleb might be saying that the road is not simply reversible and that one direction is not just the same as the other.
Right, as he says later:
Yet the strange thing is that it is very hard to realize that knowledge cannot travel equally in both directions.
In context, the quote is more about verbal overshadowing and related biases, wherein having a map can blind one to the territory, and the excesses of academic tail-chasing and status-bound disdain for the merely practical.
In other words, it's rather a lot of things lumped together, each one of which has been an OB or LW post topic at one time or another. (Which is why I thought it appropriate to link to the whole thing, rather than just giving one out-of-context quote.)
Because, I mean, really, what do you call a nuclear weapon if not a practical application of theoretical knowledge?
Wasn't the effort involved in generating the practical knowledge of how to build a nuclear weapon at least a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the effort involved in coming up with the idea, even if you count all of the physicists in a direct line from Newton to Szilard?
Part of Taleb's point is that even if you have a promising theory, you are really only just getting started -- and then only if you don't have a model that blinds you to the real thing. And for a great many things (especially those where fast feedback is possible), you will get better results sooner by building your map from the territory than trying to come up with a theoretical model from scratch.
One reason why knowledge doesn't flow equally in both directions is that theory is a more compact, "lossier" form of information that is necessarily included in practice. Another reason is that human brains are better at building intuitive models from experience than from principles. (i.e., better at extracting principles from experience than generating experience from principles.)
Many of the arguments on LW remind me of this quote:
"for the obscurity of the distinctions and of the principles that they use is the reason why they talk about everything as confidently as if they knew about it, and defend everything they say about it against the most subtle and knowledgeable, without leaving any room to convince them of their mistake. In doing this they seem to me to resemble a blind person who, in order to fight without any disadvantage against a sighted person, would bring them into the depths of a very dark celar."
-Rene Descartes from the Discourse on Method
Given the story of his encounter with the psychologist (also in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!), I'd say he thought so, and ditto with the other fields he mentioned. I believe he was criticizing acceptable social conversation (at the Nobel Prize banquet, I believe!) as being restricted to topics on which nobody sufficiently facile with words could be conclusively shown to be wrong.
Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs.
-- Edsger Dijkstra
Voted up for striking very home for me - I just finished watching His and Her Circumstances, which had far too much adolescent wangst about 'real me's.
Philosophers who reject God, Cartesian dualism, souls, noumenal selves, and even objective morality cannot bring themselves to do the same for the concepts of free will and moral responsibility. The question is: Why?
Tamnor Sommers — Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context, “The Illusion of Freedom Evolves”, p. 62, MIT Press, 2007
Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
William James
In other words, let's replace an attempt to understand human history as a result of the moral axioms of its actors with an extremely vague and lazy tautology.
I hear this kind of nonsense all the time when discussing the negative effects of religion. "Oh, it's not because of their religious beliefs that Muslims are more likely to be terrorists than any other religious group, it's because they're people." It's a refusal to try and figure out why people act as they do.
There is no concept of "evil" or "crazy" in objective reality, but there is a concept of "people". The quote reminds us that understanding human behaviour begins by accepting that people do what they do exactly because they are people -- that is, instances of a very specific mental architecture forged by blind evolution in very specific circumstances on this specific planet.
Go is a game of big moves and little moves. One problem we will examine here is what may look big now can, in the final analysis, be small, and vice versa. The ability to see what is and what is not territory and potential territory is to see the truth on the board.
– Peter Shotwell, Go: More than a game
That quote touches a sore spot on me due to the recent death of Erik Naggum. He was a controversial figure, and I find myself struggling to refrain from discussing whether he was right or wrong; discussions that are certain to turn into time consuming quarrels. It seems like an important struggle because his premature death emphasises that life is too short for quarrelling on the internet.
I read the quote from Lazarus Long in the original post as an olive branch to his opponents and a rebuke to his friends and allies. There is a concern underlying it that loqi's rebuke completely misses.
First Lazarus Long offers a test of humanity that is open to all. The deaf, the homosexual, the Jew, etc, all may pass Long's test. Read between the lines to find the implicit advice: Learn to cope with mathematics. It is good advice, good enough that it is a dangerous gift to give to ones enemies.
There is a saying in military circles that amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. An enemy that holds mathematics in contempt will blow off the logistical calculations behind his military campaigns. How many bullets do we need? How long will the march take? How much food do we need? Who cares, let us run at the enemy screaming!
An enemy that cannot cope with mathematics is seldom much of a threat; a friend or ally who cannot cope with mathematics is more dangerous. Simply moving the selector from single shot to fully automatic will let the innumerate comrade shoot off the expeditions ammunition in a matter of minutes, dooming the entire party.
Since the quote is from Lazarus Long we should think space opera. The ship has broken down and rescue is months away. Calculate the rations that let the crew survive. No doubt they are uncomfortably meagre. If too many cannot cope with mathmatics, refuse the unwelcome results of the calculation and insist on too large a ration, all will perish. This dilemma is a modern setting for a dilemma that was common in history. When the crops fail, meagre stocks must be nursed through a hungry winter. The sums are the same. Bryan Caplan captures the modern form of the problem.
Lazarus Long does not fear defeat by subhuman opponents. Why should he? He is sincerely believes that they are inferior. No. He fears being dragged down by his own side, most of who are no better.
Touché.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.
-Mark Twain
"It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master."
~ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
[ I'm actually not too fond of objectivism, but this quote is spot-on ]
Studies of patients with split brains have allowed us to begin to understand the functions and relative roles of different parts of our thinking organ. The left hemisphere, usually referred to as the "rational" side, is actually the rationalizing one, what neurobiologists call "the left interpreter." It is in charge of holding onto one person's current paradigm and worldview, no matter what the evidence. The left brain will distort facts if they conflict with the current held viewpoint. We like to think of ourselves as rational animals, but perhaps it would be more accurate to describe ourselves as rationalizing animals. However reasonable a view may be, it’s possible that we have acquired it for wholly irrational reasons and are now simply rationalizing it in order to maintain our self-image as consistent, rational, and moral. It’s not just a question of rationalization, either — we appear capable of making up complete falsehoods as part of this.
Massimo Pigliucci continues in the Summer 2003 issue of Free Inquiry:
In fact, the left brain can literally make up stories if the evidence is scarce or contradictory. A typical experiment was with a patient characterized by a complete severance of the corpus callosum (which connects the two hemispheres in normal individuals). He was shown a chicken leg to the right half of the visual field (which is controlled by the left brain) and was asked to pick a corresponding object. Logically enough, he picked a chicken head. The subject was then shown a house with snow to the left field (controlled by the right brain) and, also logically, chose a shovel.
The individual was then asked to explain why he picked a chicken head and a shovel. Notice that there was no communication between the two hemispheres, and that the only hemisphere that can respond verbally is the left one. Astonishingly, the left hemisphere made up a story to explain the facts while being ignorant of half of them: the shovel was necessary to clean the chicken excrement! I never cease to be amazed at the sorts of things that these experiments on cognition and brain function reveal. I’m sure that the average person would not have thought the above situation to be likely, but it clearly happened: a person made a choice for entirely sensible reasons, but because their brain was unable to understand or articulate them, it made up entirely new reasons and created a story around them.
Simply amazing — and all the more so because the belief being rationalized here was so obviously reasonable and appropriate in the first place. It’s bad enough that a person might rationalize bad beliefs, but apparently we rationalize good beliefs as well. How often do you suppose this happens? How many of our beliefs, especially the very good ones, are rationaliized rather than rational?
Should be perhaps change our beliefs about qualifies as “rational”? If we did, wouldn’t that be a rationalization as well?
FWIW, the exact quote (from pp.13-14 of this article) is:
Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than the exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. [Emphasis in original]
Your paraphrase is snappier though (as well as being less ambiguous; it's hard to tell in the original whether Tukey intends the adjectives "vague" and "precise" to apply to the questions or the answers).
I would roughly divide philosophies into two categories, "crazy" and "sensible". Of the two, I definitely prefer the former. Sensible philosophies are noted for their sobriety, propriety, rationality, analytic skill and other things. One definite advantage they have is that they are usually quite sensible. Crazy philosophies are characterized by their madness, spontaneity, sense of humor, total freedom from the most basic conventions of thought, amorality, beauty, divinity, naturalness, poesy, absolute honesty, freedom from inhibitions, contrariness, paradoxicalness, lack of discipline and general yum-yummyness. ... SNIP ... In general I would say that psychologist, psychiatrist, economists, sociologists and political scientists tend towards the "sensible", whereas artists, poets, musicians and (to my great delight!) chemists, theoretical physicists, mathematicians - especially mathematical logicians - tend towards what I call "crazy".
Raymond M. Smullyan, The Tao Is Silent
Alternatively, "Put down the RSS feed and go learn something."
The right answer is seldom as important as the right question.
Kip Thorne
How can that be the case? You apparently have 'exceptions' forming most of the population!
More generally, being able to talk to the author after reading the thesis is hugely valuable, because whatever was unclear in the thesis can be cleared up. But talking to the author without reading his work is fairly worthless; you won't know what questions to ask, unless of course you're already knowledgeable in the field.
"People are not base animals, but people, about 90% animal and 10% something new and different. Religion can be looked on as an act of rebellion by the 90% animal against the 10% new and different (most often within the same person)."
[This is not a quote, but a meta discussion.]
I find it curious that the quotes posted here have higher votes on average than the usual discussion comments, and it makes me think that I have a below-average appreciation for quotations. Why do people value them, I wonder?
beceause...
“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.” ~Oscar Wilde
I suspect it is because the main post refers to quotes being "voted up/down separately," i.e. it puts it in people's minds that they are supposed to vote on the quotes. I do find it funny that I got 12 karma points for cutting/pasting a quote; C.S. Lewis deserves the karma points, not me (as evidenced by the fact that I have gotten a grand total of 1 point from my own original posts). If one wanted to game the karma system, posting pithy quotes is the way to go.
"A proverb is much matter distilled into few words."
—R. Buckminster Fuller
Short is good.
Incidentally, the Spanish inquisition did not believe in witches either, dismissing the whole thing as "female humours"
Upvoted because it echoes my attitude towards your and Eliezer's ideas on decision theory, except I don't keep quiet.
In fact, one can go further, because Aristotle's conclusion was presumably arrived at in the first place through observation of everyday experience (indeed, it almost seems wrong to attribute it specifically to Aristotle since it is simply the "common sense" view of most of humanity, before and since). So here we arguably have an example of a thought experiment successfully refuting an empirically-derived hypothesis.
"I can't see it, so you must be wrong."
my four-year-old
I've run across that argument a couple times, and my reply has been that all economies are planned. Some are planned by a small number of dumb humans with inadequate data, and others are planned by a very large number of dumb humans with more data, and the latter are called market economies.
It's more so a terrible quote because it is unwise to have a significant emotional attitude towards finding out you're wrong, because this will tend to reinforce irrational defense mechanisms ("Let's agree to disagree!"). The purpose of argument is, I hope, to improve your understanding of the world, so even if you shouldn't be thrilled to find yourself wrong, you shouldn't be afraid of doing so.
It's more so a terrible quote because it is unwise to have a significant emotional attitude towards finding out you're wrong, because this will tend to reinforce irrational defense mechanisms
Yes, it is unwise to have such emotional attitudes, but you don't get rid of them by saying that they are bad. Honestly acknowledging their existence, as in the original quote, is probably a better route to their elimination than an emotionless assertion that losing arguments is good. The quote, on its own, probably doesn't do much good, and perhaps does some harm, but I think it is probably a better step to accomplishing loqi's goal than his phrasing.
That is, indeed, the idiomatic form. But it should properly be "Not all that glitters is gold", because gold does, in fact, glitter, and therefore some things which glitter are indeed gold. And, of course, some are diamond.
"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
I've played some Settlers of Catan myself, and it took me a while to realize what you were talking about. (If I understand correctly, you chose not to build a settlement next to a tile that produces resources when a 6 is rolled, and by chance, the settlement wouldn't have produced any resources this turn because a 6 wasn't rolled. Therefore, waiting a turn to build the settlement didn't actually hurt you, but it could have.) I see similar situations all the time when playing Magic.
Similarly, even if you do win the lottery, buying a negative expected value ticket was still a mistake.
Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another. —George Bernard Shaw
(OK, it's sexist. I admit it.)
You say "the sexist implication" like that's the only one there.
Anyway, drawing attention to a sexist implication doesn't increase the extent to which it's present - only the extent to which it's consciously noticed. The quote would carry on being exactly as sexist as it is without the lampshade. With more conscious noticing, there is both more offense taken and less chance for the statement to have insidious subconscious influence (on which level most -isms operate). Without the lampshade, it could feasibly pass without notice, and join a host of similar statements in the back of the brain that combine to form dispositions that yield more sexist statement. With the lampshade, conscious effort can go into de-sexismifying the statement, or rejecting it whole-cloth, and reduce its long-term effect, even if it makes it more unpleasant to hear in the short term.
I love this last analysis.
After all, this whole discussion on how the lampshading would be perceived turned out to be much more amusing and instructive than the quote itself, which makes me glad that I risked adding it.
Actually, it was more like an act of superego-driven risk-aversion, so I'm twice as glad. More precisely, the lampshading was fruit of spotlight effect of my part, as I quickly fantasized that a great deal of politically correct readers would be outraged by the sexism. But it was more like when you say "Hello, get in, make yourself at home; please don't notice the mess.".
And, it cannot be repeated often enough, Good and Real is a must-read for LW-minded folks
By the way, what's so special about it? I got it off Amazon a while ago and read it up to around page 100, but none of the content up to that seemed too special. This might be because I'd already internalized many of those points off OB/LW, of course, but still.
Large chunks of the remaining book seem to mostly be about physics and ethics. I'm hesitant to spend time reading any popular physics, as I don't know the actual math behind it and am likely to just get a distorted image. Formal ethical systems are mainly just rationalizations for existing intuitions, so that doesn't seem too interesting, either. Where are the good bits?
Wrong about racism, sexism, nationalism, governance, and many other moral issues.
That's an interesting thing to claim - and one I'm pretty sure they wouldn't agree about back then.
(For example, in the Americas a couple centuries ago, it was widely believed that black people were not capable of being successful and happy without supervision of white people, and it was consequently meet to own such people in the same way as livestock is owned.)
As much as I keep citing this as an example myself, I don't think we're literally talking about sole prior cause and posterior effect here.
What's interesting from a rationalist point of view is the surprising extent to which this is not actually the case.
"Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth."
--Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes (1939)
Never? Always? Hogwash.
Aside from that, yes.
We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.
--Harold Bloom
"Admiration is the state furthest from understanding." - Sosuke Aizen, Bleach
It really isn't. Hatred and infatuation are both further away from understanding than admiration is. So, I expect, is indifference. Then there's the state of 'incomprehension'...
Apart from being technically absurd the quote also gives a message that I don't particularly like. I'll cynical it up with the best of them but I reserve the right to admire things that I understand. In fact, I've discovered that my taste in music largely consists of admiring songs that convey insight that I understand and empathise with. This holds even when confessing to liking Hillary Duff and Pink sends all the wrong signals of affiliation.
This particular idea seems straightforward, at least in non-technical sense: "infinity" should only appear from "traces" of finite dynamical processes, as a way of talking about their dynamics. Infinite objects are artifacts of objectifying time, and any infinite object can as well be regarded as a statement about a finite dynamical system. I liked this remark as a self-contained way of thinking about infinity (on informal level, apart from the specific axiomatizations).
(For example: think of the process of normalization as the dynamic on a term not in a normal form; whether it'll terminate is undecidable, and a priori the normal form can't be considered as another term (finitely encoded), yet we may reason about this output as another term, considering how it'll reduce in interactions with other terms, etc.)
Many quotes are widely attributed to Einstein. Please provide chapter and verse on when and where he said this.
Who stops you from inventing waterproof gunpowder?
-- Kozma Prutkov
There's no difference between a pessimist who says, "Oh it's hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything." and an optimist who says, "Don't bother doing anything, it's going to turn out fine anyways. Either way, nothing happens.
--Yvon Chouinard
A theory, however elegant and economical, must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.
-- John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
The absence of alternatives clarifies your mind marvelously. —Kissinger
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. —Nietzsche
"I'd rather do what I want to do than what would give me the most happiness, even if I knew for a fact exactly what actions would lead to the latter."
Keith Lynch, rec.arts.sf.fandom, hhbk90$hu5$3@reader1.panix.com
"Psychologists tell us everyone automatically gravitates toward that which is pleasurable and pulls away from that which is painful. For many people, thinking is painful." - Leil Lowndes, How to Talk to Anyone
(Given the context, perhaps a bit of a Dark Arts view.)
Armstrong's reply is nothing but chiding Harris for being rude, and waffle. Returning to the "niceness" discussion, it strikes me that if Harris had made the same points with a straight face and without sarcasm, Armstrong would have been left with nothing but waffle.
He absolutely gave her something to use against him by being sarcastic in a public forum, but I think he made a rational decision that an interesting dialogue in which he could be called snide would catch much more attention than the dull one in which he makes a polite, logically airtight case and receives a shorter reply full of nothing much.
Edit: Oh, I was going to add: and I now know a lot more about Armstrong than I would otherwise, namely, that her argumentative approach is deceitful and based on manipulating her audience's moral feelings.
I'm dubious of militant atheism, as it seems counter-productive. Promoting atheism is closely related to promoting science. Aggressively promoting science and proclaiming it to be in direct conflict with religion will polarize society as religious groups will in turn attack science. On the other hand, if you just quietly taught science to everyone and not mention anything about a conflict, religious people would just compartmentalize their beliefs so that they didn't interfere with the things science teaches. You'd basically get people who were technically religious, but close to none of the negative sides.
This has pretty much already happened in my country (Finland). The majority still belongs to a religious domination, but religion is considered a private thing and actually arguing in favor of something "because of the Bible" will get you strange looks and likely branded as a fanatic. Yes, there is still a Christian political party in parliament, but they're a minor player, fielding 7 representatives out of 200. There has traditionally been practically no public debate about any sort of conflict between science and religion, though that's possibly changing as parts of the populace have began to express a fear of Islam. Judging from past evidence, that is probably just going to make any clash of cultures worse. That article is also a good example of the results you'll get when the debate gets polarized, as it shows people who might otherwise have been moderates become extremists.
And yes, we should regardless still continue to provide some critique of religion and the fallacies involved, to shift the social consensus even further into the "religion is just a private way you look at the world, not something you can base real-world decisions on" camp. But one can do that without being overly aggressive.
Linus replies by quoting the Bible, reminding Charlie Brown about the religious significance of the day and thereby guarding against loss of purpose.
Loss of purpose indeed.
Charlie Brown: Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?
Linus: Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about. Lights, please?
Hear ye the word which the LORD speaketh unto you, O house of Israel:
Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.
They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.
-- Jeremiah 10:1-4
Linus: It's a pagan holiday, Charlie Brown.
If you haven't grown up in a Christian household or something, this completely fails. It doesn't sound like a reminder of purpose. Just a fail.
If you think of losing as “not winning,” then when you try to work out why you’ve lost, or (God forbid) why you’re a loser, you’ll tend to focus on the things you didn’t do and the qualities you don’t have. So it goes with any “negative” concept, one that is defined by what it isn’t (think of how “background” = “everything but the foreground” or how valleys are made by the mountains around them).
I think it’s worthwhile to occasionally invert the picture, to see “being a winner” as “not being a loser.” That way you attend to those habits of mind that are hurting you, instead of the ones that might be helping.
-- Jsomers.net, How to be a loser (Relevance)
"Love God?" you're in an abusive relationship.
DLC, commenter at Pharyngula.
"I waste many hours each day being efficient."
As the mind learns to understand more complicated combinations of ideas, simpler formulae soon reduce their complexity; so truths that were discovered only by great effort, that could at first only be understood by men capable of profound thought, are soon developed and proved by methods that are not beyond the reach of common intelligence.
Marquis de Condorcet, 1794
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance: let us ask, "Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?" No. "Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?" No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. --- David Hume
(quoted in Beyond AI by JoSH Hall)
"Who are you?"
"Who am I? I'm not quite sure."
"I admire an open mind. My own is closed upon the conviction that I am Shardovan, the librarian of Castrovalva."
-- Doctor Who
"Most people are more complicated than they seem, but less complicated than they think"
- BS
"Cayley Landsburg Fair Play" is enough, though.
We should test this! Anyone got a cat? I've got 9 pennies I don't want.
Average Number of Deaths per Year in the U.S
Bee/Wasp 53
Dogs 31
Spider 6.5
Rattlesnake 5.5
Mountain lion 1
Shark 1
Alligator 0.3
Bear 0.5
Scorpion 0.5
Centipede 0.5
Elephant 0.25
Wolf 0.1
Horse 20
Bull 3
Not entirely sure of the accuracy of these, but still. I think 31x as many killed by dogs as by sharks is a much more important figure than deaths from pigs.
Who am I to judge myself?
-- Karp
http://home.netcom.com/~rogermw2/force_skeptics.html
This page persuaded me, by the way - I am now a Force Skeptic with respect to the Star Wars universe.
Expected utility. It's more powerful than the Force.
That doesn't sound like an activist. That sounds like "sucker doing other people's work for free", which doesn't sound like an effective plan for bringing about positive change -- those people tend to "weed themselves out" over the long run.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do things to make the world a better place, like: not litter, drive courteously, etc. (Although you should be careful about which things actually accomplish a net good.) "Be the change you want in the world" (attr. Ghandi) is a good motto to keep. I'm just saying that you shouldn't expect major problems to get solved by Someone Else at no cost to you, nor complain about someone pointing out the dirty river instead of immediately cleaning it up.
So for example, it would make sense for me to try and personally swoop in and free Chinese political prisoners, but if I'm not prepared to do that, I shouldn't protest their incarceration.
I don't think this rule leads to the right kind of behavour.
You're quoting yourself!
This is horribly, horribly wrong, and I talked about it on an Open Thread here.
I continued my critique on my blog, which drew Landsburg out of the workwork and had a back-and-forth with him, which continued onto his blog. He did follow-up posts here and here, but I haven't replied much further on those, because I was really starting to get caught up in "someone is wrong on the internet" syndrome.
Anyway, here's what's wrong (if you don't want to read the links): there is no consistent definition of terms that makes Landsburg right. After a lot of critique, the error turns out to hinge on the meaning of "exist". Put simply, math doesn't exist -- not in the same sense that e.g. biological organisms exist, which meaning Dawkins is using there.
Basically, Landsburg is positing the existence of a Platonic realm of math that is always "out-there", existing. This is a major map-territory confusion, and should be a warning to rationalists. It's a confusion of human use of math, with the things that can be described in the language of math. The only way he supports this position is by rhetorical bullying: "come on, you don't really think the numbers didn't exist before humans, do you?" And leads him into deeper confusions, like believing that we "directly perceive" mathematical truths and that they can tell us -- by themselves -- useful things about the world. (The latter is false because you always require the additional knowledge "and this phenomenon behaves in way isomorphic to these mathematical expressions", which requires interacting with the phenomenon, not just Platonic symbol manipulation.)
(Note that everything he claims is true and special about math, theists claim about God, but this post is already too long to elaborate.)
The only sense Landsburg is right is this: it has always been the case that if-counterfactually someone set up a physical system with an isomorphism to the laws of math, performed operations, and then re-interpreted according that same isomorphism, it would match up with that that follows from the rules and axioms of math.
But Dawkins's claim doesn't deny that at all; he's claiming that populations of organisms evolved, not that "the counterfactual mathematical expression of evolution's working" evolved, the latter of which would indeed be in contradition of the previous paragraph.
His thoughts on that are confused too. He claims that math is fundamental to physics, but also that it's infinitely complex. That doesn't work:
1) Math is simple in the sense that you need very little space to specify the entities needed to use it.
2) But Landsburg says it's complex because you haven't really specified it until you know every mathematical truth.
3) But then physics isn't using math by that definition! It's using a tiny, computable, non-complex subset of that.
(This is discussed at length in the links I gave.)
Thought-provoking is good, but don't fall for the trap of worshipping someone for saying stuff that doesn't make sense.
You can make the calculation return any result you want, for example by including cost of millennia of nuclear waste storage in price of nuclear power; another thing - nuclear power gets massive federal insurance subsidies (but then coal gets free license to kill people by pollution etc., so it's not exclusively nuclear problem).
If you know what result you want, you will be able to come up with it.
According to V. S. Ramachandran, schizophrenics lack the ability to understand or create metaphors.
I didn't want to link to the massive time vacuum that is TV tropes, but I figured people would understand the metaphor even if they hadn't run in to it before.
People yes. Paperclip maximizers/office assistants no.
I understand metaphors. I just don't understand why there would be a need for scale for science fiction writing. It's much more important to be able to look up material properties.
What about a scale that tells us how much a work of fiction deals with paperclip manufacturing and resource harvesting? Surely you need some way of communicating the traditions and norms of paperclip creating to your youth.
Edit: and come to think of it wouldn't you be interested in in fictional explorations of possible future ways of manufacturing paperclips? And wouldn't you want to know which of those explorations was the least fantasy and most based on reasonable extrapolations from current knowledge?
If they raped you, starved you/fed you paint chips, beat you to the point of brain injury, tortured you? How about being born in a place where the pollution is so bad that you're likely to get sick/die from with a very high probability? Places that are completely ravaged with drought or famine? Places where genocide is fairly regular? Where your parents are so destitute that they are forced to feed you the absolute worst food (or even non-"food") so that your brain/body never develops properly?
Of course, for people/places where rape/forced childbirth is prevalent or the knowledge of how pregnancy occurs is still non-existent, it's understandable. For places where the former isn't and the latter is, there really should be no statute of limitations on blame.
The quote is good, but should be understood to apply only in certain contexts (i.e., to people who weren't born into horrific conditions and who live(d) in a place with something resemble equality of opportunity.) Not understanding this perpetuates the idea that "everything that happens to you is your own fault" that appears in some popular strains of political thought today, when it clearly cannot be universally applied.
The quote is good, but should be understood to apply only in certain contexts
All advice is relative to a certain context.
"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." -- Isaac Asimov
Three ways to increase your intelligence
Continually expand the scope, source, intensity of the information you receive. Constantly revise your reality maps, and seek new metaphors about the future to understand what's happening now. Develop external networks for increasing intelligence. In particular, spend all your time with people as smart or smarter than you.
I'll give an upvote to whoever knows the source of that.
It's not presented in terms of information warfare, and it doesn't explicitly cover "insist[ing] it's the victim's obligation to repair the damage", but the original article on Dark Side Epistemology (now known as "anti-epistemology", I hear) sounds similar to what you're getting at. Specifically, the point that to deny one scientific fact, you need to deny a massive network of principles and implications, to the point that your entire epistemology ends up either contradictory or useless.
It doesn't. My though process was too silly to even bother explaining.
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
–xkcd
by "have a norm of" you mean "mention explicitly in the monthly threads that this is a norm", right? As, as far as I can see, this norm pretty much seems to exist already.
Due to not being an appropriately-credentialed expert, I expect. The article does mention that he got a very negative reaction from a doctor.
Well, if it turns out to be so hard to extend the list of "ways people make a living" beyond the two items {entrepreneur, worker under management hierarchy} that would constitute support for the "brainwashing" hypothesis (overstated as the term may seem).
When I was younger I wanted to become a novelist and make a living that way. That seems different enough from entrepreneurship; it's one of the passive income categories. (My parents discouraged that - "you need a real job".) Another classic one is to be a landlord. Silas mentioned investment income earlier, that could be considered a separate category. You could also consider as a different category someone whose intellectual or artistic output doesn't generate royalties but who is supported by patronage.
To maintain that "the educational system hasn't kept up" we would have to believe in the first place that it was at one point designed to turn out a then-optimal balance of people trained in one or another way of supporting themselves. I'm not sure we have good reason to think that.
That list makes a decent starting point. My recommendation would be more along the lines of "deconstruct the notion of a job into its component options, list several alternatives to each of these options, figure out what you want, then build up from the list of preferred alternatives the kind of life you'd like to live". One of the most important distinctions is active vs passive income. Another is taking orders, vs giving orders, vs neither. And so on.
Something in the way you're asking suggests you might not really want answers. I'd be delighted to find out I'm wrong...
What do you envision as the alternative to having a job? Running your own business? ... Living off of a trust fund?
That list makes a decent starting point.
"Let them eat cake", thy name is Morendil!
Again, the issue not whether the functions accomplished by a job can be broken down into their consitutent components. Of course they can. But Godin's claim goes further, into saying that people are fundamentally ignorant of alternate ways to accomplish these functions.
Does he really not think that people are aware that if you have enough money, you don't need to work to earn an income?
Also, this is another tenuous division of conceptspace:
Another is taking orders, vs giving orders, vs neither. And so on.
Why is one taking orders, while another isn't? One way or another, you usually have to do something other people want to get their money. Grocery stores are taking my orders to bring them food. Employers are only giving me orders in the sense that, "if you want this money, you will perform this act. If you don't like that tradeoff, we can go our separate ways."
The identification of employment as "taking orders" is hardly a natural category for it, and certainly not one people are ignorant for not making.
Evolving a threat response over a half-million years on the African savannah hasn't really left me with any good mechanisms for dealing with a threatening number.
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
-- Wayne Gretzky (but I've seen it attributed to Michael Jordan and Joe Ledbetter, HS coach)
I could be wrong, but I'd like to see some evidence.
--- Mark Liberman
Thanks RobinZ, The full quote is "Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think."
But the partial quote is much more crisp.
The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines.
Freeman Dyson
I think Mises's point is rather that concepts like "good," "bad," "evil," "right," "wrong," "ought to" and "rights" all reduce back down to variations on "I desire it"/"It brings me pleasure" and the opposite. In other words, all ethical systems are dressed up (subjective) consequentialism and they only appear otherwise due to semantic confusion.
Not if the forest is sufficiently dark that your night vision doesn't have enough light to work with.
Social scientists are experts at having an explanation for the results, no matter how they come out, so long as they are statistically significant. It is easy to turn the statistical crank. With sufficiently powerful statistical tools, you can find a significant statistical relationship between just about anything and anything else.
Psychologists see no real problem with the current dogma. They are used to getting messy results that can be dealt with only by statistics. In fact, I have now detected a positive suspicion of quality results amongst psychologists. In my experiments I get relationships between variables that are predictable to within 1 percent accuracy. The response to this level of perfection has been that the results must be trivial! It was even suggested to me that I use procedures that would reduce the quality of the results, the implication being that noisier data would mean more.
After some recovery period I realized that this attitude is to be expected from anyone trying to see the failure of the input-output model as a success. Social scientists are used to accounting for perhaps 80% (at most) of the variance in their data. They then look for other variables that will account for more variance. This is what gives them future research studies. The premise is that behavior is caused by many variables. If I account for all the variance with just one variable, it’s no fun and seems trivial.
If psychologists had been around at the time that physics was getting started, we’d still be Aristotelian, or worse. There would be many studies looking for relationships between one physical variable and another—e.g., between ball color and rate of fall, or between type of surface and the amount of snow in the driveway. Some of these relationships would prove statistically significant. Then when some guy comes along and shows that there is a nearly perfect linear relationship between distance traveled and acceleration, there would be a big heave of “trivial” or “too limited”—what does this have to do with the problems we have keeping snow out of the driveway?
Few psychologists recognize that, whatever their theory, it is based on the open-loop input-output model. There is no realization that the very methods by which data are collected imply that you are dealing with an open-loop system. To most psychologists, the methods of doing research are simply the scientific method—the only alternative is superstition. There is certainly no realization that the input-output model is testable and could be shown to be false. In fact, the methods are borrowed, in caricature, from the natural sciences, where the open-loop model works very well, thank you. Progress in the natural sciences began dramatically when it was realized that the inanimate world is not purposive.
Psychologists have mistakenly applied this model of the inanimate world to the animate world, where it simply does not apply.
This was a forgivable mistake in the days before control theory, because before 1948 there was no understanding of how purposive behavior could work. Now we know, but the social sciences have their feet sunk in conceptual concrete. They simply won’t give up what, to them, simply means science.
- Richard Marken in a May 15, 1985 lecture titled "Teaching Dogma in Psychology"
The author was transformed by reading "Behavior: The Control of Perception"(1973) and began a research program whose early years(?) seem to have been summarized in "Mind Readings: Experimental Studies of Purpose"(1992)
This has been discussed here before.
The problem is that Marken's models don't actually have predictive power; he just fits a function to the data using as many free parameters as he has data points, and marvels at the perfect fit thus derived. One doesn't need to think highly of the current state of psychology to realize that Marken is a crank, and that any recognition Marken has in the PCT community is a sign that they are bereft of actual experimental support if not basic scientific reasoning skills.
Such sad statistical situations suggest that the marriage of science and math may be desperately in need of counseling. Perhaps it could be provided by the Rev. Thomas Bayes.
Tom Siegfried, Odds Are, Its Wrong, on the many failings of traditional statistics in modern science.
If the point is to get them to answer or reason about the topic, then I think we should reject the statement that "there is no polite way of asking." We should find a way of asking politely, such as teaching them to process our questions instead of answering with cached thoughts. Being offensive doesn't win.
I also think it's a poorly phrased question, since it's easily brushed off with "yes/no", avoiding any of the deeper implications in an apparent effort to make it catchy and instantly polarizing.
If the point is to upset people, to feel righteous, or to signal tribal affiliation, then go right ahead.
It shoehorns the use of giggle-inducing curse words into an explanation of religious views. Someone who has only ever been exposed to Beavis and Butthead cartons, and has never heard about "agnosticism," might be able to learn from this type of explanation.
My point is that we have words because they call out a useful, albeit fuzzy, blob of conceptspace. We may try to claim that two words mean the same thing, but if there are different words, there's probably a reason -- because we want to reference different concepts ("connotations") in someone's mind.
It's important to distinguish between the concepts we are trying to reference, vs. some objective equivalence we think exists in the territory. The territory actually includes minds that think different thoughts on hearing "unmarried" vs. "bachelor".
ETA: My point regarding Kant was this: He should have seen statements like "All bachelors are unmarried" as evidence regarding how humans decide to use words, not as evidence for the existence of certain categories in reality's most fundamental ontology.
I would say that Gall's Law is about the design capacities of human beings (like Dunbar's Number), or is something like "there's a threshold to how much new complexity you can design and expect to work", with the amount of complexity being different for humans, superintelligent aliens, chimps, or Mother Nature.
(the limit is particularly low fo Mother Nature - she makes smaller steps, but got to make much more of them)
A final goal of any scientific theory must be the derivation of numbers. Theories stand or fall, ultimately, upon numbers.
You've been wrong about every single thing you've ever done, including this thing. You're not smart. You're not a scientist. You're not a doctor. You're not even a full-time employee. Where did your life go so wrong?
---Portal (emph. mine)
Relevance: rationalists should win, importance of saying Oops
The new CEO of Coca-Cola in the 1980s had a problem with his senior vice-presidents who thought the company was doing well because they had 45 percent of the soft drink market. He asked them, "What proportion of the liquid market - not just the soft drink market - do we have?" That turned out to be only two percent. The resulting change in the world view of the company led Coca-Cola to increase sales revenue by thirty-five times in just over ten years.
--Review of The Art of Choosing, by Sheena Iyengar
I would love to agree with the sentiment in that quote, but offhand, I can't think of any examples.
Certainly the day-to-day job of the scientist is to prove himself or herself wrong in as many ways as possible, so as not to leave that job to others. But what eventually yields prestige is being right.
One possible counter-example I can think of is the Michelson-Morley experiment, the "most celebrated null experiment in the history of science" to quote one short-breathed biographer. But by several accounts I have read it only became "the most celebrated" thirty-odd years later, once the significance of Einstein's work had sunk in. Before that it seems to have been possible at least to regard it as an anomaly to explain away, for instance via "ether drag" theories.
So even this attempt to prove myself wrong doesn't reach as far as I should hope.
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field.
Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962)
'102. One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.'
--Alan Perlis, Epigrams in Programming
I would question that this is a rationality quote. It's a quote about how atheism is better for aesthetic reasons.
CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
That what you were thinking of?
Being skeptical about skepticism about skepticism?
Most "doomsday predictions" do not actually predict the total annihilation of the human race.
It might be postulated that we don't have records of most correct doomsday predictions because the predictor and anyone listening met with doom.
He is assuming that there will be a doomsday - also known as begging the question
No, I don't think so. He is making a claim about what implications follow from a certain fact. That fact is the definition of "a doomsday prediction". All that follows from that definition is that all but one will be false. Of course, even that last one (so to speak) might be false, but, even if this is so, it doesn't follow from the definition.
This is not a case of begging the question. It is just being clear about what implies what.
Rambo
Hell yeah.
I've had 2 Japanese cars. They're reliable; but when something does break, it's often hidden deep inside the engine so you need to have a mechanic pull the engine out and charge you $700 to replace a $10 part.
Unfortunately the classic essay "Understanding Neurotypicality" is gone, the owner's web pages removed.
I agree, of course. But don't be too harsh on Immanuel Kant, who had no knowledge of modern chemistry but was able to understand, that Aristotle was essentially wrong in his views about "natural places of light things up on the sky and heavy things down here on Earth".
I got nothing from my tracking system until I used it as a source of critical perspective, not on my performance but on my assumptions about what was important to track.
-- Gary Wolf
There's a sample bias - People are likely to try appeasement when they are powerless, which makes appeasement unlikely to work.
It's also the kind of thing that gets forgotten when it works but remembered forever when it fails. See Appeasement in international politics.
This seems impossible. If you respect those who "can be of no possible value" to you, and this causes others to hold you in higher regard, and if the esteem of others confers any value to you, then those you respected were valuable to you in that way.
Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.
Stephen Jay Gould
"I don't believe important statements just because someone makes them. Even if I make them."
-- William T. Powers
Rational belief is constrained not only by the chains of deduction but also by the rubber bands of probabilistic inference. --Nick Bostrom, Anthropic Bias
A household is a business given over to caring for small, temporarily insane people.
-- Clark Glymour, What Went Wrong: Reflections on Science by Observation
Longer version:
A household is a business given over to caring for small, temporarily insane people, a business subject to cash-flow problems, endless legal harassments, run by people who expect to have sex with each other, who occupy the same space, and who go nuts when either party has sex with anyone else. Once in marriage, a lot of people try to get out as fast as religious tradition, poverty, or devotion to children permits.
(I really like the short one for "small, temporarily insane people", but the one above will tickle many a LW reader's funny bone.)
Via CRS.
Do not ask whether a statement is true until you know what it means.
When it comes to proving such obvious things, one will invariably fail to convince.
Montesquieu, "The Spirit of the Laws", book XXV, chapter XIII. (Link to the book, Original French)
But there's one one thing about Star Trek for which I'll never forgive Gene Roddenberry or Star Trek: "Logic". As in, Mr. Spock saying "But that would not be logical.".
The reason that this bugs me so much is because it's taught a huge number of people that "logical" means the same thing as "reasonable". Almost every time I hear anyone say that something is logical, they don't mean that it's logical - in fact, they mean something almost exactly opposite - that it seems correct based on intuition and common sense.
If you're being strict about the definition, then saying that something is logical by itself is an almost meaningless statement. Because what it means for some statement to be logical is really that that statement is inferable from a set of axioms in some formal reasoning system. If you don't know what formal system, and you don't know what axioms, then the statement that something is logical is absolutely meaningless. And even if you do know what system and what axioms you're talking about, the things that people often call "logical" are not things that are actually inferable from the axioms.
I think it's that the website is dedicated to identifying common structures that make stories entertaining, with an emphasis that they are fictional structures. It's the very use of the word "tropes" in the title. Thus the user base is a bunch of people who enjoy a lot of bad (and usually absurdly bad) t.v., yet also have fun analyzing what psychological manipulation they were supposed to have been subjected to.
Also, I know a few TVTropes addicts who are regular LW readers (from a forum on which Dresden Codak left a large impact), and wouldn't be surprised if they have contributed.
Rational Tropers. QED.
Also, Democritus observed Brownian motion, and realised from that the atomic nature of gas.
Smart guy.
I try not to downvote people when they are right.
8 possible outcomes, not 27
27 if you allow for "no effect", which you should.
If all such questions are effective in making you open your eyes, question your assumptions and upvote away, well, then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the nature of "rationality".
It's true that you can construct similar questions in other domains.
But the questions you posed are different from that in the quote because it refers to a:
-more common situation with a
-more common inference that is
-more often poorly grounded and hinges on complex aspects of human sociality, which are
-more relevant to our everyday lives because of the
-more frequent occurrence of similar situations.
See also Richard's further remarks.
The rationality issue involved in the quote is one of how you come to a conclusion, and I think it's fair to say you might have missed some of the factors that come into play regarding manipulation of children, which Richard explains. There's a difference between
a) "What does your gut tell you would happen?", and
b) "What information should you use to justifiably reach a conclusion about what would happen?"
You were answering a), while the question was asking b).
Sure thing. For me, it was the sudden realization that I had made assumptions from the very start of reading it, and that I had ranked certain outcomes far lower than the problem -- taken in isolation -- would justify.
When I read it, I immediately thought, "Okay, rewarding a kid for eating spinach, same ol' same ol' ..."; then when I got to the end, I -- very quickly -- absorbed the insight that, in order for the process not to result in the child hating the mother, certain conditions have to hold, which are probably worthy of probing in depth.
I know all of this may sound obvious, but I really had an aha!/gotcha! moment on that one.
The method-oriented man is shackled: the problem-oriented man is at least reaching freely toward what is most important. --John R. Platt
There is no evidence that is so strong that it will justify a statement no matter how improbable you initially considered it. Thus, as Oscar points out, this quote is off.
In Bayes/Pearl terminology, knowledge of an effect destroys the causes' independence (d-connects them), and ruling out a cause shifts probability onto the remaining causes.
Your original quote asserts a definite fate, not a fate which would occur if some particular technology were to remain uninvented.
That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die
-- H. P. Lovecraft
Yes and no. You are right about a lot of biases originating from the unconscious. But the other way is also possible, the smart human who does something stupid because he has a good theory of how it should be done. Or choosing a picture because of some salient verbalizable reason instead of just taking the one you like the most without necessarily being able to explain why, etc...
There is more on this topic in "The rational unconscious: Conscious versus unconscious thought in complex consumer choice" by Ap Dijksterhuis and in Jonah Lehrer "How we decide".
The reason Royal Navy [nuclear missles] can be launched without a code is that when it was suggested failsafes should be introduced the British Admiralty took insult at the implication that Officers of the Royal Navy would ever consider launching nuclear missiles without orders or unless it was the correct thing to do.
-- TV Tropes, A Nuclear Error
One day four boys approached Hodja and gave him a bag of walnuts.
"Hodja, we can't divide these walnuts among us evenly. So would you help us, please?"
Hodja asked, "Do you want God's way of distribution or mortal's way?"
"God's way," the children answered.
Hodja opened the bag and gave two handfuls of walnuts to one child, one handful to the other, only two walnuts to the third child and none to the fourth.
"What kind of distribution is this?" the children asked, baffled.
"Well, this is God's way," he answered. "He gives some people a lot, some people a little and nothing to others. If you had asked for mortal's way I would have given the same amount to everybody."
Is there anyone who actually believes in moral darwinism under that self-description, or is it just a straw man position that people like to claim as the underpinning of the ideology of people they don't like?
I think that the quote is best read as a critique of any appeal to nature. Maybe you don't see such brazen appeals to nature in careful arguments, but they seem common enough in informal arguments.
Many people really do seem to think that you've made a substantive point about what we ought to do when you point out that something happens "in nature". For example, I knew someone once who was uncomfortable with tolerating homosexuality, but who felt obliged to seriously reconsider his position when he learned that animals sometimes exhibit homosexual behavior. I was in the strange position of trying to explain why he ought not to be persuaded by that argument, even though it led him to what I thought was the right conclusion.
So, Wiker thinks that the eventually-dominant (?) Epicurean movement staged a deliberate 2-millennium (?) campaign to get a 60s-style social revolution (?) going, and thereby steal credit (?) for scientific advancement from the Church, which was doing so well at it (?) for the first 1500 years.
Before reading it: what are the odds Wiker has marshaled enough evidence to even get that hypothesis on the radar?
Oh, and check this out from the description:
Infanticide. ...
Ideas and actions once unthinkable have become commonplace.
Yeah, we sure don't have any evidence of a Greek culture practicing infanticide, do we?
Edit: Also, the review you refer to is by a "Phillip Johnson", who looks to be this Phillip Johnson, founder of the Intelligent Design movement.
Okay, I'll choose my own way.
What else does Auditore say I should do?
If you don't get this elementary, but mildly unnatural, mathematics of elementary probability into your repertoire, then you go through a long life like a one legged man in an ass kicking contest. You're giving a huge advantage to everybody else.
It ought to mean acquiring a method — a method that can be used on any problem that one meets — and not simply piling up a lot of facts.
-- George Orwell
I think it would be more clear if it included the previous sentence:
Clearly, scientific education ought to mean the implanting of a rational, sceptical, experimental habit of mind.
Or perhaps just substituting "[Scientific education]" for "It".
The Salvation War Web Original trilogy is based on this premise. And boy does it makes good use of it.
The plot of End of Time revolves around a professor combining symbological powers with those of genetics.
So it's the same as the plot of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality? .
Personally, I don't mind pain being a strong enough warning that it's hard to ignore. I can see the need for that.
I think the problem with pain is that it's like those stupid car alarms. You know the ones that should be programmed to turn off after five minutes because any good they might do will have been done by then if it's to be done at all, but they actually keep going all night?
That's what pain should have: a way of saying, after some appropriate enforced time delay, fine, I've got the message, I'm doing everything I can about the problem, you can stop now.
I appear to be a mutant: I always read pop-up boxes.
By all means, please adapt my analogy to something that you would actually pay attention to.
What question was the Avatar movie an answer to?
How about the last flash game you played?
This conversation?
No, only for the ones who can't reply to your comment.
I had just recently seen the two Christopher Nolan Batman movies (Batman Begins and The Dark Knight). Here are my favorite quotes; please add any that you like. (Character attribution left off to prevent pre-judgment.) Wikiquote lists.
"It's not who you are on the inside; it’s what you do that defines you." (Compare: Functionalism, substrate independence, timeless identity – I know, that’s probably not what was intended, but note how it’s used in other contexts.)
"Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society's understanding." (Compare to counterfactual reasoning: if we would sympathize with every defection, and felt that “the past is the past”, those wishing to defect would have no reason not to.)
“And what about escalation? […] We start carrying semi-automatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor-piercing rounds. […] And you’re wearing a mask, and jumping off rooftops!”
(Also, I watched the earlier Batman movies after seeing this, and frankly, by comparison, they look like campy garbage.)
It could also be a selection effect -- if you're doing something even though you're not supposed to, it must be something you really like.
Similarly, unhealthy food tastes good because substances that are neither healthy nor tasty aren't classified as food.
Completely out of curiosity, why do you cite him by his birth name rather than his pen name of Anton Szander LaVey?
(This one is also interesting. I didn't spot much else worth sharing in the rest of the "comic", however.)
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
-H.P. Lovecraft
We've got Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality; maybe you should write Cthulhu Mythos and Rationality ?
Then again, it might be unwise to disseminate it openly.
Perhaps you simply do not have qualia or subjective experience. Some people do not have visual mental imagery, strange though that may seem to those of us who do. Similarly, maybe some people do not have anything they are moved to describe as subjective experience. Such people, if they exist, are the opposite of the logically absurd p-zombies. P-zombies falsely claim that they do have these things; people without them truthfully claim that they do not.
You might just be Socratically role-playing, but even so, there may be other people who actually do not have these things. That is, they would express puzzlement at talk about "the redness of red", "awareness of one's own self", and so forth (and without having been tutored into such puzzlement by philosophers arguing that they cannot be experiencing what in fact they do experience).
Is there anyone here who does experience that puzzlement, even before knowing anything of the philosophical controversy around the subject?
I think that line means the opposite of how you interpreted it. I read "I await the dissolution of death" not as "I await the dissolution that is death" but as "I await the point when the threat of death is dissolved".
Edit: What komponisto said.
I firmly believe that the whole materia medica as now used could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.
- Oliver Wendel Holmes (1809 - 1894)
Clearly wrong, according to Cohen the Barbarian.
Von Neumann advised Shannon to use the word “entropy” on the grounds that “Nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.”
I cried when I first saw this. Reading the rest of the storyline ruined it for me.
rot13: Gur punenpgre jvgu gur onfronyy ong vf n pncevpvbhf tbq pncnoyr bs qbvat jungrire fur jnagf gb gur havirefr, hc gb naq vapyhqvat qrfgeblvat znwbe pvgvrf jvgu snagnfgvpny perngherf, fgnegvat jnef jvgu nyvra fcrpvrf, perngvat na nsgreyvsr jvgu rgreany gbegher, naq qverpgyl pnhfvat gur qrngu bs rirel uhzna ba rnegu.
Russell is not just saying that beliefs should be proportional to evidence (if anyone on LW disagrees with THAT, I'll be shocked); he's saying that if that were done, it would eliminate most of the world's problems.
If he had said 'many' instead of 'most,' it would be a great quote. Unfortunately there is a huge class of problems that, although they may eventually be solved by rational methods, are not solved just by being rational. Turning everyone rational overnight doesn't automatically cure death, for example. Nor does it remedy the partiality of human utility functions, or cure psychopaths of their psychopathy... et cetera.
Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do. (St. Thomas Aquinas)
I find this a very efficient three-step guide to living, provided of course that we interpret "ought to" in a way that is very much not the Angelic Doctor's.
(For the record, he followed up with: The first is taught in the [Nicean] Creed... the second in the Lord's prayer; the third in law. Wish it were so simple.)
I think this post starts to get to the heart of why ideas are frightening.
At first glance it seems strange to have evolved any mental system that attributes such weight to something (intellectual discussion) that has no immediate survival consequences.
However studies have shown that status (community judgments of different members value) and legitimacy (whether a person has committed an appropriate or socially taboo action) do carry with them significant effects on survival, and in severe cases can last across generations (making them worse than say, being eaten by an animal). This is because status determines who has influence (and may determine if one gets to eat or not), and legitimacy determines whether one is attacked (in a communities eyes, punished) with people being so willing to enforce these ideas that they are willing to suffer in order to maintain them.
In this sense the quote is entirely correct, thought is the most terrifying thing because thought carries with it changes in status and legitimacy rules. The examples in the quote demonstrate the power of thought, highlighting the kind of traditional social defenses thought can destroy.
An insult, is the very name we give to incidents of this fear, the more directly we concentrate on the person speaking the more obvious the association, but fundamentally when thought is most powerful it alters our status and legitimacy values, and so, regardless of how obliquely we make statements, they are always going to be frightening, and thus experienced as an insult.
"The things with which we concern ourselves in science appear in myriad forms, and with a multitude of attributes. For example, if we stand on the shore and look at the sea, we see the water, the waves breaking, the foam, the sloshing motion of the water, the sounds, the air, the winds and the clouds, the sun and the blue sky, and light; there is sand and there are rocks of various hardness and permanence, color and texture. There are animals and seaweed, hunger and disease, and the observer on the beach; there may be even happiness and thought. Any other spot in nature has a similar variety of things and influences. It is always as complicated as that, no matter where it is. Curiosity demands that we ask questions, that we try to put things together and try to understand this multitude of aspects as perhaps resulting from the action of a relatively small number of elemental things and forces acting in an infinite variety of combinations."
Richard Feynman "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", section 2-1
While that's basically true, a significant part of any large program consists of dealing with "accidental complexity" that isn't really part of the "business logic". Of course in many cases that only makes the programming even less mechanical.
Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them... there is nothing. (Jean-Paul Sartre)
And being thought of by someone is evidence of the thing being true. And all these evidences are screened off by correct analysis of the thought itself.
But some thoughts are both so complex and so irrelevant that a correct analysis of the thought would cost more than an infrequent error about thoughts of this class (costs of necessary meta-analysis included).
Marijuana is death on writers. I’ve seen several go that route. Typical behavior for a long time marijuana user is as follows. He gets a story idea. He tells his friends about it, and they think it’s wonderful. He then feels as if he’s written it, published it, cashed the check and collected the awards. So he never bothers to write it down.
Alcohol can have the same effect.
-- Larry Niven
From a hacker news thread on the difficulty of finding or making food that's fast, cheap and healthy.
"Former poet laureate of the US, Charles Simic says, the secret to happiness begins with learning how to cook." -- pfarrell
Reply: "Well, I'm sure there's some economics laureate out there who says that the secret to efficiency begins with comparative advantage." -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Is there a general name for that shape of argument? It or something close to it seems to be a recurring pattern.
People who can manage their lives will, despite MMOs.. (People who lose time playing MMOs are bad at managing life, so they would've lost the time anyway.)
(Edit: removed opening "also".)
above "invented analytic geometry" Descartes or just above meditations descartes?
Found a couple of semi-spoilery reviews for Zendegi. Apparently it has stand-ins for Robin Hanson and SIAI as foils for the authorial message.
It worked for these 10 cases. It didn't work for the 11th case. It was probably never right in the first place.
That one is counterintuitive, but true surprisingly often. Maybe not most of the time, but more often than you might think. And it picks the worst times to be right, let me tell you. Especially if it reveals a mistake in the math underlying everything you've been doing....
The solution, I suppose, is to learn to enjoy rewriting.
No link to chick.com is complete without mentioning these two things:
Dark Dungeons with MST3K-style snarking. This really improves it.
Lisa, which is no longer published or archived on the Chick Publications web site. It has some... interesting ideas about how one should deal with people who rape children. (Everything is okay after five minutes of prayer! No need to report it to the police! Lalala!)
There are some other great Chick tracts, but those are the cream of the crop.
from a European perspective, and simultaneously from the perspective of one who sees most state-sanctioned educational approaches as almost comically counter-productive, the idea that appears common in the US, that home schooled = fundamentalist christian parents is confusing. Many home educators in europe are specifically atheist.
Extremely short version: it's a load of crap
Slightly longer version: He taught that you should never refer to things in general terms or else you'll confuse the map for the territory. For example, the chair I'm sitting in now is chair^1, the identical chair across the table is chair^2, there's chair^1 as I'm eperiencing it now, chair^1 as I experienced it last night, and so forth. Oh and you should try to avoid the use of the copula "to be" because it encourages sloppy thinking (i'm not sure how, just paraphrasing what I remember)
You can control how people think simply by altering which concepts are permitted as base level representations
Really? A claim like this needs some evidence. George Orwell novels don't count.
I recommend Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, which clarifies to what extent language can influence thought.
Really? A claim like this needs some evidence. George Orwell novels don't count.
I never read it. I understand there were pigs involved.
I recommend Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, which clarifies to what extent language can influence thought.
I liked Pinker when I read other stuff of his but I haven't got to that book yet.. Now, back to thinking about good modularity and DRY while writing OISC machine code.
(In case my meaning was not clear, let me be explicit. You made the response "A claim like this needs some evidence" to a comment that actually referred to evidence. Even if you think there is other, stronger, evidence that contradicts what we can infer from observing the influence of language on programmers it is still poor conversational form to reply with "needs non-Orwell evidence".)
Er, how about the wisdom to know whether a thing should be changed in the 1st place?
You know, that actually sums up my concerns regarding saving.
I think that: Within the next 30 years, a singularity and major economic upheaval are each much more likely than any kind of "business as usual" situation for which IRAs were intended. I also think that money (at least USD) will be of much less value to me when I'm 60.
And yet I contribute anyway, and only have about 8% of current USD value of my savings invested in a way appropriate for one of those scenarios.
Now, I've gotten a bit better: I stopped maxing out the 401k (i.e. putting 25% of pre-tax earnings in it), and I'm keeping a car loan I could pay off. But if I were really serious about this, I should empty most of the account, and put it in something else, even though this will incur a big penalty.
Making incompetent sociopaths more rational would create new harms as well. They would be better able to fool people and erode the trustworthiness of "normal-seeming people" a little. But since there are already many competent sociopaths, and because normal people are situationally also selfishly destructive (self-serving bias+hypocrisy), we have institutions that mitigate those harms.
That sounds right to me. I suspect the main difference that improving social education for all children would have on sociopaths is that it would knock some of the rough edges off the less intelligent among them. The kind of behaviours that are maladaptive even for sociopaths and may lead them to do overtly anti-social things and wind up sanctioned.
But since there are already many competent sociopaths, and because normal people are situationally also selfishly destructive (self-serving bias+hypocrisy), we have institutions that mitigate those harms.
The models I have for competent sociopaths and high status individuals are approximately identical for basically this reason.
If I could just recruit another equally capabler soldier for $ 299,000 or less with no ill consequences, then this seems like a shut up and multiply situation that accountants are trained for.
Hell, from a utilitarian perspective, if I saved a single soldier with that money instead of feeding and housing let's say, 300 African children for 10 years, then I made a stupid decision.
I think the accountant got things just about right.
With some constraints, of course.
"Here, have a penny."
"You bastard!"
Overall, however, we've done better by avoiding dragons than by slaying them. -Warren E. Buffett
That doesn't sound right.
To me, it seems like:
(Philosophy - Science) and (Art - Engineering).
Scribbles on maps, particularly in 1815 and 1919, had some largish effects.
People were killed because someone neglected to sharpen their pencil. That's "scribbles on a piece of paper" for you.
I suppose it would be in bad taste to find that rather amusing. Or at least to admit it.
In circumstances like that I find I have to laugh, if only to keep from weeping.
I just came across this and thought it was a pretty funny dialogue: "Reality is that which does not go away upon reprogramming." (Check the first 4 comments here: Chatbot Debates Climate Change Deniers on Twitter so You Don’t Have to)
This is of course a paraphrase borrowed from Philip K. Dick's famous statement:
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Isaac Newton's argument for intelligent design:
Were all the planets as swift as Mercury or as slow as Saturn or his satellites; or were the several velocities otherwise much greater or less than they are (as they might have been had they arose from any other cause than their gravities); or had the distances from the centers about which they move been greater or less than they are (as they might have been had they arose from any other cause than their gravities); or had the quantity of matter in the sun or in Saturn, Jupiter, and the earth (and by consequence their gravitating power) been greater or less than it is; the primary planets could not have revolved about the sun nor the secondary ones about Saturn, Jupiter, and the earth, in concentric circles as they do, but would have moved in hyperbolas or parabolas or in ellipses very eccentric. To make this system, therefore, with all its motions, required a cause which understood and compared together the quantities of matter in the several bodies of the sun and planets and the gravitating powers resulting from thence.... And to compare and adjust all these things together in so great a variety of bodies, argues that cause to be, not blind and fortuitous, but very well skilled in mechanics and geometry.
-- Letter to Richard Bentley
Well, the Egyptians had animal-headed gods.
Hmmm. A mathematician learning a new field thinks for himself, up to a point. Oh, he gets his ideas, theorems, and even proofs from the book, but he is supposed to verify the thinking for himself.
The same kind of thing applies to scientists. They get ideas, formulas, and even empirical data from other scientists, but they are supposed to verify the inferences and even some of the derivations themselves. At least in their own field. A neuroscientist using FMRI doesn't need to know the fine points of the portions of QED dealing with particle spins in a varying magnetic field. Nor the computer science involved in the image processing. But he does appreciate that these tools, whether he understands them in detail himself or not, are not based on tradition or authority, but instead draw their legitimacy from the work of his colleagues in those fields who definitely do think for themselves.
If the balance you seek to strike is the balance that lets you distinguish path-breaking innovation from crackpottery, I would suggest this: It is ok to try doing something that the experts think is impossible if you really understand why they are so pessimistic and you think you might understand why they are wrong.
Binmore is on something of a "Hume is God, Kant is Satan" kick in this book. Another quote I like deals with Binmore's efforts to comprehend the "categorical imperative":
It eventually dawned on me that I was reading the work of an emperor who was clothed in nothing more than the obscurity of his prose.
I share much of Binmore's enthusiasm for Hume. I don't think that rationalists have much reason to dislike Hume's skepticism. Hume was a practical man, and his famous argument against induction is far from a counsel of epistemological despair. As for instructing the young to be skeptical of gods - well it may violate the US Constitution, but then so does gun control. ;)
Nonetheless, I suspect that many people here would not care much for this particular quote in its full context - starting a couple paragraphs before my quote and continuing a paragraph further.
Out-of-sample error equals in-sample error plus a penalty for model complexity
Y.S. Abu-Mostafa, in explaining the VC inequality of PAC learning.
So should every every metaphor be voted down? Or just personifying metaphors? Or just metaphors mentioning deities?
I figure this particular one strikes some as a bit iffy since the metaphor is so close to the salient metaphor the actual creationists are using and treating as a non-metaphor. Metaphors, like "God wrote life", closely associated with unsympathetic real-world groups tend to carry a bit extra baggage. The matter is of course confused further by the original context where this was written as a response to creationists.
There are times I almost think
Nobody sure of what he absolutely know
Everybody find confusion
In conclusion he concluded long ago
And it puzzle me to learn
That tho' a man may be in doubt of what he know,
Very quickly he will fight...
He'll fight to prove that what he does not know is so!
"However insistently the blind may deny the existence of the sun, they cannot annihilate it. " - D. T. Suzuki
Want to bet?
(At stakes of a few thousand galaxies worth of energy and negentropy. It's not going to be cheap to win this bet! I'm not too comfortable with the whole making myself blind thing either but I guess I can rectify that once I finish deploying the antimatter disruptor beam.)
He only has to deny that it exists.
Alternatively, he could lock himself onto a sun-destroying path, and then forcibly do an unBayesian update away from the existence of the sun.
Alternately, he could interpret the sentence literally, note that 'not at all' is a level of insistence, deny the existence of the sun not at all, and then destroy it.
With the caveat that P(Truth|observation of one or more stages) P(observation of one or more stages|Truth)
Duelling quotes!
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
We learn an art or craft by doing the things that we shall have to do when we have learnt it
"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." Henry David Thoreau
"Even though it is a path of 1,000 miles, you walk one step at a time. Consider this well." - Miyamoto Musashi
That you are given three of the four letters for "lake" in correct, consecutive order.
Incidentally, he was one of the main people behind the invention of Monte Carlo methods for approximating things that were too complicated to calculate exactly.
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Max Planck
Really?
It would be bad even if the premise were true. Then the pure idea of 'yeah, we have to let you all die because otherwise all the shiny new ideas would not prosper' is so much out of proportion. Most people do not even work in idea maintaining, but do pretty mundane jobs, or moonlight as grandparents.
Over time I notice the occasional instance of ageism in young people. It is very easy to ignore collected experiences of others, and in some cases bad. It would be awesome to have people still around that lived through history. Instead each generation to some degree forgets what was before.
It hurts me each time someone (my age or younger) claims how he does not care about history at all, because -
Over time I notice the occasional instance of ageism in young people.
And in middle aged people and old people too. :)
I hope there have been some changes in the way scientists work since the 1960s. Also I hope that it depends on the specific field.
As a conclusion of the initial argument one could add time limits to tenure, but please lets not argue for killing off scientists justs for being to old.
Actually, this book, which is where I found the quote, demonstrates how much of a social and political impact Facebook really has. It's definitely an interesting read.
Plausibly. There are worse goals to have than maxing your stats.
I read it as
Arguments with words are inherently empty, and therefore cannot compare with a test which will show practical results.
I don't think so. Many, many common practices would be improved by some properly applied theory.
If you're curious, please read the story; it's short, and interesting! Actually, let me just spoil the premise now because I think it's neat and suspect other people will as well.
Knapsack Poems is about an alien race called the goxhat, in which each "person" consists of around 10 individuals, of varying gender. There's no telepathy or anything cheap like that, it's just a cornerstone cultural meme for the goxhat.
So when The Poet Who Is Odd asks themself "Why did I do that?", it's not rhetorical. Arguing with oneself is not uncommon.
The value of a problem is not so much coming up with the answer as in the ideas and attempted ideas it forces on the would be solver.
— Yitz Herstein
Bright people have more unanswered questions, maybe? You can't be pondering the Gibbs paradox without knowing much more about thermodynamics than I currently do.
"Today I will question my own confusion."
From Today I Will Nourish My Inner Martyr - Affirmations for Cynics by Ann Thornhill Sarah Wells
-- Patrick Nielsen Hayden