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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality Quotes: October 2009 - Less Wrong
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...I had no idea the art of rationality got that advanced that early!
Hey, Darwin predicted and explained punctuated equilibrium all the way back in The Origin of the Species. It's remarkable how often the old masters hit a target generations ahead of their time. Or rather, it would be if I didn't already know that human beings don't as a rule draw the full benefit from the evidence at hand - which implies a small variation in the accuracy of the extrapolation leads to startling insight.
(Not having read the Latin - chiefly thanks to not being fluent in the Latin - I can't swear it's a perfect translation, but I saw it in the book and had to quote it.)
Theres a sampling issue there, no-one talks about all the things Darwin thought of that were wrong.
Indeed. You'll note that I did not quote Galileo's 1623 article declaring that comets were a sublunary (within the sphere of the Moon's orbit around the Earth) phenomenon, for example.
Still, I would be willing to wager that if you had modern biologists compare, say, Darwin's writings from the voyage of the Beagle to his death even to those of contemporaries such as Alfred Russell Wallace - an independent inventor of the theory of natural selection - he would fare extremely well.
Do you attribute that to his greater experience and access to data, or some innately better understanding of biology?
I think he was actually less biased. I was actually just reading John McPhee's Looking For a Ship, and McPhee quotes Darwin discussing the geology of the Valparaíso region, and notes that Darwin divines the processes that created the formations of that terrain essentially correctly ... before plate tectonics was even a theory with a name in the scientific literature. It is of course impossible to separate out to what extent his results are improved by his hesitance in publishing data without overwhelming evidence, but I would guess that his rationality was significantly above par for his era.
There is a quote, though I cannot find it now, to the effect that 'It is an old parlor game among American philosophers to show that Peirce thought of something first.'
But he did!
It's funny because it's partly true - he did an impressive amount, and stuff which has yet to be dug out of his scores of volumes - but some Peirce fans take it too far (I had one professor who the quote applied well to).