(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- Do not quote yourself (or your sockpuppets).
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB - if we do this, there should be a separate thread for it.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.
"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)