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Rationality Quotes November 2009
A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
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Comments (275)
--Aubrey de Grey
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.
My intuition marked this comment's intent as more humorous than serious- is my calibration off?
I read ironic sincerity.
Yup.
"Ironic sincerity"?
Edited to amplify: I have never seen the term previous to this thread. Google doesn't turn up much beyond the quoted quip. Is ironic sincerity when you pretend to pretend not to believe what you're saying and then everyone pretends to pretend you didn't believe it so that no-one need be put to the trouble of thinking about it and deciding whether it actually made sense or not? Or not?
I don't see how this reveals his motive at all. He could easily be a person motivated to make the best contributions to science as he can, for entirely altruistic reasons. His reasoning was that he could make better contributions elsewhere, and it's entirely plausible for him to have left the field for ultimately altruistic, purely non-selfish reasons.
And what is it about selfishness exactly that is so bad?
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?
"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.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1hh/rationality_quotes_november_2009/1ai9
"the quality of being selfish, the condition of habitually putting one's own interests before those of others" - wiktionary
I can imagine a super giant mega list of situations where that would be bad, even if selfishness is often a good thing. There's a reason 'selfishness' has negative connotations.
I can imagine a super giant mega list of situations where love is a bad thing, too. Like when people kill themselves or others. That doesn't mean its default connotations should be negative.
The reason "selfishness" has negative connotations are at least partly due to Western culture (with Christian antecedents in "man is fundamentally evil" and "seek not pleasure in this life"). They're not objectively valid.
Point taken, I just think that it's normally not good. I also think that maybe, for instance, libertarians and liberals have different conceptions of selfishness that lead the former to go 'yay, selfishness!' and the latter to go 'boo, selfishness!'. Are they talking about the same thing? Are we talking about the same thing? In my personal experience, selfishness has always been demanding half of the pie when fairness is one-third, leading to conflict and bad experiences that could have been avoided. We might just have different conceptions of selfishness.
He may have, for his own reasons, not been happy with the ease with which he achieved something great. His selfishness at this point is not for the fact that he may still be able to contribute to the field and yet he chooses not to but for the fact that he will be happier if he had to work harder on something before achieving greatness. That is his value system. I think his choice is justifiable.
Sure, but it's also reasonable for him to think that contributing something that was much harder would be that much more of a contribution to his goal (whatever those selfish or non-selfish goals are), after all, something hard for him would be much harder or impossible for someone less capable.
No, just appalling.
Maybe was just a one-hit wonder who ran out of ideas. :P
This is interesting. Which mathematician? Which paper? Could you at least say what field or what advance?
"I sent the club a wire stating, PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER."
Groucho Marx
I don't think his measure of difference is comprehensive:
Where is this from, http://vimeo.com/7396024 ?
I don't remember exactly, but I think it was from a conference where he was speaking with Eliezer on a panel or Q&A, so that might be it.
--George Bernard Shaw, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)
-- 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)
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?
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 read it twice, and I'd summarize it as: for a longtime OB/LW reader, the only interesting parts are the treatment of Quantum Mechanics and the Newcomb's Dilemma chapters*. Those, incidentally, are past page 100.
* I assume that the person taking the advice is like me and has not understood very much of the 'timeless decision theory' stuff that's been flying around for months, which Drescher takes seriously (he's a user here after all), and which seem to be similar to or better to what he advocates.
Fair comment. The books is not perfect - I think it gets a bit tedious in the examples. Maybe my recommendation was a bit too strong.
Nevertheless, I do think it's special in the way it promotes the naturalistic worldview, and how it applies this all across the board - from consciousness to the sense of time to quantum physics to ethics. There's indeed quite some overlap with topics discussed here, but it's nice to read it in a book with all the themes connected. Those are the 'good bits' for me.
Talking about books, it'd be great if there were some LW Books Top-10 for 2009.
Judson Jerome, The Poet's Handbook, Chap. 1 ("From Sighs and Groans to Art")
The lesson I draw from this is that doing stuff is a better means of figuring out if I've got what it takes. Because surely, ultimately you want to focus your efforts on what you in fact can do?
-- Luke Muehlhauser
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."
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.
"The other half was mostly being used as an American front against the Soviets and didn't dare to have internal wars."
Really? Suppose the German invasion of 1941 was more successful, the Soviet Union was heavily weakened, and the demarcation line between the two was on the Vistula instead of the Elbe. Which European countries would have fought each other?
"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."
Between two Western European powers? Which ones?
"Today, European politics are such that multinational business & industry organizations, and private international alliances, are vastly more powerful than any hypothetical nationalistic power."
Evidence? Spain, Italy, France, the UK, and Germany have gross revenues of more than $1T each, more than three times those of the largest corporations.
"A few" means at least 3. You would never say "a few" when you meant "two". So the quote refers to the 17th century at the latest.
I routinely use "a couple" and "a few" to indicate vague quantities. A few is bigger than a couple, but they overlap. I know that not everyone does this (my S.O., in particular, thinks I'm wrong) but I also know that I'm not nearly alone in this habit.
Yes, certainly, there are circumstances in which "a couple" means exactly two. If I'm talking about some friends, and refer to them as "a couple" rather than "a couple of people", you'd be justified to think I meant exactly two people with some relationship. But if I say "I'm going to read a couple more pages", I think you'd be making a mistake to be upset as long as it was between 1.5 and 4 pages. When I say "a few" it might range from 1.7 to 5 or 6 depending on whether we're talking about potatoes or french fries.
So, to my ears, it could be the 16th century or the mid-18th century, and giving the benefit of the doubt, it's a reasonable statement.
Upvoted because I do the same thing (tell your SO!). You're not alone.
I liked this comment, but as anonym points out far below, the original blog post is really talking about "pre-scientific and scientific ways of investigating and understanding the world." - anonym. So 'just a few centuries ago' might not be very accurate in the context of the post. The author's fault, not yours; but just sayin'.
Well... I find it quite a stretch to call the pre-Shapley–Curtis-debate views of cosmology “essentially ours”. (But http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_cosmology did surprise me. Olber's paradox was first solved by Edgar Allan Poe? I knew he was quite a smart guy, but...)
Linnaeus had a tree of taxonomy, but this claims that the tree of descent was one of the key innovations of Darwin (and of Wallace, who thought it was innovative before he thought of natural selection).
A complete tree of descent (all life from a common ancestor) was Charles Darwin's thinking, but the idea of a tree of descent was not. See, eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Louis_Leclerc,_Comte_de_Buffon for 18th-century thinking on the subject.
Maybe I shouldn't have called it an innovation: the main point was to dispute that the tree of life was "widely known and accepted."
That's an interesting thing to claim - and one I'm pretty sure they wouldn't agree about back then.
But ... "they thought they were right" isn't an argument. Compare how they derived their bottom lines to how we have. Compare their evidence and reasoning to ours, and compare both to the kinds of evidence and reasoning that works (literally does good work) elsewhere, and the answer will probably be straightaway obvious which is the more reliable.
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 it's 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.
One: See above.
Two: The very fact that you can say:
...and expect me to draw your implied conclusion refutes the very claim itself. What do you think makes me appalled that children are dying of diarrhea, aesthetics? That we haven't yet fixed a problem doesn't prove that it meets our approval - after all, people still die everywhere.
In questions of morality, there's nothing but the (really complicated) bottom line.
That's not even empirically true. At best, morality is the (really complicated) function relating "is" and "ought" - which means errors in the "is" can make vast differences to the consequent "ought".
(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.
And even today, many smart people outside the USA are still wrong about these pressing moral issues!
As are many smart people within the USA, obviously, or were you being sarcastic and trying to suggest that the original quote somehow implies a belief that the USA is immune from those problems?
I think he was being sarcastic and trying to suggest that the original quote failed to take note that everyone thinks they are immune from those problems, including the person who decided the past was 'wrong' about them. I'm also pretty sure cousin_it is Russian, if that's relevant. The USA thing was just a tasteful addition, the way I see it. I laughed. (His use of an exclamation point and a look at the top contributors list on the right also indicate sarcasm.)
Edit: I agree with Nick below. It was just a joke. Which I enjoyed.
Whoops, instant controversy =) I didn't mean to accuse the original quote of American nationalism; that would be like accusing early Christians of Jewish or Roman nationalism. Every new moral system sees itself as universal. But also every moral system has some geographical origin from where it spreads, by force if necessary. For the moral system that uses the terms "racism" and "sexism", the place of origin is the USA.
So anybody who uses the terms "racism" and "sexism" (and presumably the related words "race" and "sex" when used in the same sense) -- for instance, in arguing against distinguishing on the basis of race or sex or for guaranteeing the equality of rights and liberties regardless of sex, race, nationality ... -- necessarily has one particular moral system, a moral system that originates in the USA, and despite women's suffrage originating in countries other than the USA, somebody who uses the word 'sexism' in the same sentence as 'racism' is almost certainly either from the USA and subject to stereotypical US nationalism or subscribes to the One Unique True Moral System of the USA?
Not sure why this was downvoted. The word 'racism' was coined in pre-WWII Europe, the word 'sexism' was coined in the US during the 1960s. The movements/ moral systems against such things have been widespread, and I'm not sure it makes sense to say they started anywhere besides "Western civilization". Moral systems don't have founding moments anyway, they evolve out of other moral systems and historical conditions. I would say that the term racism probably plays a bigger role in American discourse than elsewhere, if only because the US is more racially diverse than most of the rest of the world.
The extent to which the usage of these terms is indicative of a particular moral system is just a question of high def versus low def. If you look closely you see differences, if you don't, it all looks the same. If your views are in the general vicinity of where cousin-it was aiming you probably see issues involving racism and sexism. If you are far from cousin-it's target you may well not see the differences between moral systems that use the terms racism and sexism. Though don't "reverse racism" and "reverse sexism" count as uses of these terms? The moral system that uses those terms pretty obviously distinct from the moral system that I think cousin_it is referring to.
But even those supposed 'conservatives' and 'traditionals' still hold views different from their ancestors - or are there heaps of divine rights of kings theorists floating around South America I am not familiar with?
And this is a great follow up:
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
There are likely things about physics we're still wrong about, things about disease we're still wrong about, things about physics we're still wrong about, and so on, and so forth.
!
?
In November 2009, Luke wasn't affiliated with SIAI. (I don't know if he was even reading LW then; later on, he started re-blogging the Sequences, and started posting on LW in late 2010 or early 2011.)
Which is why it's remarkable that Eliezer had noticed him as a source of rationality.
--George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." --Woody Allen
This quote always reminds me of another choice one: "I want to live forever, or die trying".
^ Yossarian, a character in the novel Catch 22, by Joseph Heller.
-- Tom Peters, HT Ben Casnocha
"We are what we repeatedly do."
-- Russ Roberts, quoting some sports guy on the radio
--Randall Jarrell, "A Girl in a Library," line 92; The Seven-League Crutches (1951)
I think you meant this link: http://ben.casnocha.com/2008/01/your-calendar-n.html
— Marvin Minsky
-- Scott Bakker, Neuropath
--Adapted from something in The Economist (sorry, they don't have bylines)
-H. L. Mencken
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.
All of the strips can be found online at http://www.dilbert.com/strips/
And, tracing back from the filename, the strip in question.
What's interesting from a rationalist point of view is the surprising extent to which this is not actually the case.
Egypt "peganthyrus" Urnash, comment thread, "a quick drawing lesson", July 17, 2008
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
This is something I actively remind myself whenever my intuition starts feeling vindication over lucky reprieves or mourning low probability misfortunes. "It's ok, a six wasn't rolled anyway. I made a mistake. It would have been better to trade the wood and build a settlement. I want to become stronger." (The hyperlink is included instead of the phrase. The inner dialog doesn't like wordiness!)
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.
This also happens all the time in poker, especially when you see the flop and instinctively feel good (or bad) that you folded.
--Andrew S. Grove
-- Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
A quote that means something completely different coming from you than from Nietzsche!
— Henri Poincaré
(necroreply:) In many ways this is true of mathematics in general, except where those mathematics are adopted for their beauty or elegance.
– Michael Vassar
source
"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)
Never? Always? Hogwash.
Aside from that, yes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, Oct.-Nov. 1867
"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
-- Dorothy L. Sayers
--W. Somerset Maughan, "The Creative Impulse" (1926)
— Brendan O’Regan
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair
"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
Substituting "has perpetuated" for "has settled" in that quote results in a statement of essentially the same veracity.
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.
--Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes (1939)
-Ambrose Bierce
It's a good quote. But I say combining the latter two gives the first.
-- G. K. Chesterton
The quote is good; but I have a knee-jerk reaction against all rationality quotes by Chesterton, who cleverly confused social conservatism with rationality in the minds of so many people.
— Alain Robbe-Grillet
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
"If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup" Turkish Proverb
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
--Ringworld, Larry Niven
— Leonardo da Vinci
Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference. —Stephen Jay Gould
-- Homer Simpson
-- Alan Kay
That's great when you can pull it off, but one can only invent a small part of the future.
-- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun also Rises
-- The Wizard's Oath (from So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane)
How does that work? Life grows almost exclusively at the expense of other life.
Sounds like I'd better change that.
Well said :-)
As I recall, Duane had to do some retconning because utter opposition to entropy doesn't work if you also want life.
-- Aubrey de Grey
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
The history of the world is the history of the triumph of the heartless over the mindless.
From the Yes, Minister TV show.
Winston Churchill, 29 October 1941
I'd like to add to that:
I don't tend to yield to force or overwhelming might of what counts as my enemy. I do not consider this trait to be 'good sense'. Damn propaganda.
...yeah, it's not a brilliant rationality quote, but there's a bit of a good point in it nonetheless: this is a case in which precommitment is necessary, because despite the fact that you would prefer not to be subject to the assault of an enemy, you don't want to establish that every threat will be profitable, however imaginary. Naive calculations neglect the effect of your decision method on the actions of others. (It's like in cryptography - your strategy has to work even if other people know the function.)
Jonathan Carroll
"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another. —George Bernard Shaw
(OK, it's sexist. I admit it.)
Lampshading it doesn't make it go away. But the quote would work just exactly as well in the other direction, and so it's not so bad IMO.
Seems to make it worse .
It eliminates plausible deniability for ignorance. It doesn't actually make it more sexist, and it's arguable whether "saying something sexist on purpose for what one can presume is a halfway decent reason like sharing a neat quote" is worse than "saying something sexist accidentally through carelessness or ignorance or both".
I do not agree. Without the lampshading the sexist implication (that is, "women are more worthy recipients of love than men are") is negligible. Claiming that the quote is sexist while saying it increases the extent that this implication is present and so gives men more cause to feel slighted.
I don't take offence at the possible slight but do find the lamp-shading distasteful.
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.".
The implication you've mentioned isn't present, with or without the "lampshading".
I'm not sure enough to state it categorically, as you have, but his choice of sexist implication to withdraw seemed strange to me as well. The obvious problem to my eyes is that it assumes that the entire possible audience is attracted solely to women.
That one, and not the indication that women are all pretty much alike if you aren't deluded by an emotional illusion, is the one that jumps out at you?
I read the remark as a cynical retort against the idea of the One True Love, which would make the implication you point out hyperbole, not misogyny.
Barring that interpretation, though, I'll grant that's the worse one.
One can reject the "One True Love" idea without thinking that the members of the relevant sex(es) are pretty much all alike. cf. the excellent Tim Minchin.
--Harold Bloom
I recommend the "Prologue: Why Read?" from Bloom's book How to Read and Why. http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Why-Harold-Bloom/dp/product-description/0684859076
"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.
I like Pink...
... perfect existence, huh?
Perfection does not exist in this world. It may seem like a cliche, but it's true. Obviously, mediocre fools will forever lust for perfection and seek it out.
However, what meaning is there in "perfection"? None. Not a bit. "Perfection" disgusts me. After "perfection" there exists nothing higher. Not even room for "creation", which means there is no room for wisdom or talent either.
Understand? To scientists like ourselves, "perfection" is "despair".
Even if something is created that is more magnificient than anything before it, it still however, will be far from perfect.
Scientists are constantly struggling with that antinomy. And furthermore, must become beings capable of drawing pleasure from such.
In short, the instant that absurd word, "perfection", came from your lips, you had already been defeated by me.
-- Kurotsuchi Mayuri
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.
-- Kozma Prutkov
--Yvon Chouinard
Dupe.
I'm sorry.
In fact, it might actually be where I got it from. Yet one more reason why we need to upgrade our brains (or at least, why I need to write down where I find interesting quotes)..
The occasional duplication is probably not worth everyone writing down where they find interesting quotes. Though maybe you have other reasons. If it becomes more common we can request that everyone search for their quote on less wrong before they post it.
-- John Cavil (Battlestar Galactica character)
--- Edward O. Wilson, Consilience
"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"Construing a rock as conscious via a joke interpretation is paradoxical only insofar as it seems to suggest that we should therefore respect and care about rocks. Resolving the paradox requires a theory of what we are obligated to respect or care about, and why." - Gary Drescher
Disagreed; it also affects anthropic reasoning.
How is anthropic reasoning affected by the existence of a conscious stone that nobody and nothing can ever communicate with, even in principle? If it is indeed affected, then this says bad things about anthropic reasoning.
But I don't think it is: Some smart LW poster once noted (I can't find the link now) that for anthropics all is needed is an agent that can do a Bayesian update conditioned on its own existence. An agent that can do this does not necessarily have consciousness under any reasonable definition of consciousness.
I think the point Nick Tarleton was getting at was that you might BE one of those "joke interpretations" of a rock. So, combine that with any sort of decision theory that can handle Newcomblike problems...
"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence." - Robert Frost
-- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
But beware, lest the input becomes master over you.
I think the implication is that, by default, the input is already your master, and this is an undesirable state of affairs.
How about I take control of my output and so master my input? Seems to work better for me.
What distinction are both of you making between "take control of" and "master"?
-- Galileo Galilei, The Assayer
– Robin Hanson
-- George Vincent
--Napoleon Bonaparte; quoted by his secretary in Memoirs of Napoleon (1829-1831)
-- Jean-Yves Girard
I second RobinZ's request for an elaboration. I know a little (a very little) about the technical topics of that paper, but I find Girard's philosophising here and elsewhere (for example) impenetrable.
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.)
Is there a way of describing it that doesn't require a computer science background? What are "traces" in this context? And what is a "finite dynamical process" that introduces infinities, and what is the "objectifying"? I can tell this is grammatical English, but the terminology is opaque.
Trace is something like a list of execution steps of a program, a list of what happens at each step, for all steps. When a program runs indefinitely, it'll be a potentially infinite list (or actually infinite if we know the program won't terminate). Finite dynamical system is something like a program (together with its current state) that is itself finite, and allows to compute data of the same kind (e.g. program + state) for the next step: this transition from the current step to the next step is the dynamic. Infinity appears in this process when we consider all the (future) steps, not just one, even though one step is enough to determine them all. Objectification as I used it is a concept from mathematics, when you are trying to capture some phenomenon as a certain kind of single mathematical object (as opposed to a thing with whistles, processes and hand-waving).
Thanks - that's much clearer.
Elaboration, please?
Science involves confronting our ‘absolute stupidity’. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown.
Martin A. Schwartz
Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity.
-- unknown
Hanlon's Razor
-- Phillip E. Johnson
I feel dirty now.
I just feel confused.
– Rudi Hoffman
-- A. R. Ammons
“I was forced into a measure that no one ever adopts voluntarily: I was impelled to think. God, was it difficult! The moving about of great secret trunks. In the first exhausted halt, I wondered whether I had ever thought.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, found here.
This is my last one for the month, it seems.
"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." - Rene Descartes
"It is one thing to show a man that he is in error,| and another to put him in possession of the truth." (John Locke)
http://www.dorktower.com/2009/12/04/dork-tower-friday-december-4-2009-mayadamus/
Star Trek, Richard Manning & Hans Beimler, Who Watches the Watchers? (reworded)
-- Albert Einstein
"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.
Do you disagree with the first sentence or the second? I actually agree with the first sentence, at least if you interpret it to mean that consciousness is a software tool which serves the parallel-processing unconscious brain hardware.
Many quotes are widely attributed to Einstein. Please provide chapter and verse on when and where he said this.
-- Marcus Hutter