epistememe comments on Rationality Quotes: October 2009 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 October 2009 04:06PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Tags: quotes

Comments (276)

Sort By: Best

Show:

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: epistememe 23 October 2009 06:03:28AM 6 points [-]

There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth…not going all the way, and not starting.

Buddha

Comment author: wedrifid 23 October 2009 05:55:18PM 6 points [-]

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.