Rationality Quotes - July 2009

SilasBarta

(Last month's started a little late, I thought I'd bring it back to its original schedule.)

A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.

Please post all quotes separately (so that they can be voted up (or down) separately) unless they are strongly related/ordered.
Do not quote yourself (or your sockpuppets).
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB - if we do this, there should be a separate thread for it.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

(Last month's started a little late, I thought I'd bring it back to its original schedule.)

A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.

Please post all quotes separately (so that they can be voted up (or down) separately) unless they are strongly related/ordered.
Do not quote yourself (or your sockpuppets).
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB - if we do this, there should be a separate thread for it.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

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.

I do not agree with all interpretations of the quote but primed by:

That's not right. It's not even wrong. -- Wolfgang Pauli

I interpreted it charitably with "critical" loosely implying "worth thinking about" in contrast to vague ideas that are not even wrong. Furthermore, from thefreedictionary.com definition of critical, "1. Inclined to judge severely and find fault.", vague statements may be considered useless and so judged severely but much of the time they are also slippery in that they must be broken down into precis... (read more)

5gjm17y

On the other hand, precise statements that are somewhere in the vicinity of the truth can be dangerous, because people tend to mistake precision for accuracy, and because modes of reasoning (e.g., formal logic) adapted to precise statements tend to be brittle -- one can deduce very wrong conclusions from slightly wrong premises. A charitable reading of Smullyan would be that when a precise statement is made, he likes to examine it as closely as its precision allows, to avoid such dangers; and that a vague statement, so far as it's vague, is not worth the trouble of criticizing. (For the avoidance of doubt: I think such a reading would probably be too charitable, and I upvoted Eliezer's comment.)