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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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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)
-- 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 :-)
-- Luke Muehlhauser
And this is a great follow up:
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
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 certainly hope he was being sarcastic. Even the fact that we suspect he may not be is rather telling.
Yes, "about these pressing moral issues!" screams sarcasm, but I don't see how the original quote assumes that people in the USA somehow believe they have a unique claim to being less wrong, which would make the most sense as a target of the sarcasm. The quote isn't saying that unlike our smartest ancestors, we do have all the answers, only that we're less wrong (and should suspect that there's probably much that we're still over-confidently wrong about), and isn't saying that we is any particular nationality (nor is any strongly implied).
Pretty sure he was sarcastically attacking something other than the original comment.
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.
When I read the original quote, I noted the conspicuous absence of any kind of positive assertion that the speaker is immune from those problems, and I read it as cautioning us against thinking that we are not similarly wrong about some of those very problems and other important problems that we are blind to.
Did you read it in the context of the atheist blog post Eliezer linked to? I agree that the quote was possibly meant to be cautionary, but I think it was primarily meant to show that believing in things 200 years old is generally not a good idea. Maybe I misunderstood the point of the post, though; the cautionary value is a more useful interpretation for us aspiring rationalists, and 'don't put faith in ancient wisdom' is rather simple advice by comparison. Because of that, context be damned (even if I did interpret it as was meant), I'm going to switch to your interpretation. :)
I hadn't clicked through to read the original, but having just done so, I note that the very next paragraph after the given quote is:
Which doesn't exactly smack of over-confidence and American arrogance to my ear.
ETA: also, from things he said elsewhere in the essay, it seems likely to me that he had in mind more than "a few centuries" in the essay, despite the words in the quote, since he distinguishes again and again between pre-scientific and scientific ways of investigating and understanding the world.
Oh jeeze, how did I miss that? Thanks for taking the time to enlighten me. About the ETA, I noticed that too, which may be relevant to another discussion I saw nested under the original quotation...
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.
Just keep a lid on the nationalism. Sterling moral leadership isn't always something associated with the USA. We don't want to get into a discussion on the topic but I wouldn't leave such implications unchallenged. I might have to make comparisons to Canada and things would go downhill from there! :)
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?
Amusingly, your holy indignance at hearing such stereotypes isn't a human universal either - it's part of the same particular moral system I was talking about.
PS: I didn't downvote you.
I was trying to point out why part of your post was nonsense, despite making some valid points, and sending your troll back back at you. Words -- with a few exceptions like 'objectivism' -- are not as strongly associated with a single moral system as you suggest. There is no single moral system that originates in the USA, and no single moral system that everybody who uses the terms "racism" and "sexism" in a sentence holds. And unless you think that Russia has adopted the moral system "whose place of origin is the USA", 2.19.2 in the Russian constitution poses a problem for you, unless you assert that using the tokens "racism" and "sexism" is sufficient for your thesis to hold but spelling out that racism and sexism are bad without using those tokens somehow makes your hypothesis not apply.
P.S. Maybe your idea of stereotypical Americans causes you to mistake my response for "holy indignance". For what it's worth, I'm not indignant or angry, just amused. Perhaps I should have added some smileys? And for your information, since I know you're Russian, I wasn't born or raised in America, though I live there now and am a naturalized citizen.
Kind of. The current Russian constitution was written at the extreme high point of Russian popular affection for the American way of life, and the people who wrote it were big fans of the US constitution. Such attitudes have gone way down since then.
Now I'm curious: why does this particular assertion look absurd to you? From where I stand, using marker words like "racism" and "sexism" looks like a pretty clear case of signaling. That's like the difference between saying cheating on your spouse is bad, and saying cheating is "a sin".
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.
Not by me. But the readability is abysmal enough that I at least had second thoughts before voting it up to 0..
Many crazy moral systems see themselves as (complete and) universal. It's a trivial enough failure, so one should be able to do better.
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.
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.)
You're right; forgive my imprecision. But I doubt that people from the past could be said to be using the exactly the same function as us, nor even that I'm using the exact same function as you. It would just be too much coincidence.
I think I see the difficulty - my language is phrased in terms of an absolute morality to which all historical systems are approximations of varying accuracy. Do I correctly infer that you reject that concept? If so, I believe it reasonable to assume that the remaining confusion is a matter of phrasing.
Yes.
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.
A fair point, to be sure.
Edit: To be precise, to a major extent, the causality is probably in the opposite direction - because treating people the way slaves were treated is wrong, those with a stake in the matter had it widely argued that the chattel slaves were not people in the proper sense of the word.
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.
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.
The British and the French fought multiple times in the 1800s, and also in the early 1900s. One would expect further fights...
What stopped de Gaulle from thinking about being a second Napoleon, if not US hegemony?
Said revenues are controlled by political processes, which are staffed by people that can be influenced or outright bought for trivial sums - a few thousands or millions. The returns to investing in lobbying are well known and can be astronomical.
"The British and the French fought multiple times in the 1800s, and also in the early 1900s. One would expect further fights..."
Citation? Britain and France haven't fought since Napoleon's defeat in 1815.
"What stopped de Gaulle from thinking about being a second Napoleon, if not US hegemony?"
The fact that the French population would never stomach it, given that they had just gotten out from under four years of brutal German occupation with American and British support?
"Said revenues are controlled by political processes, which are staffed by people that can be influenced or outright bought for trivial sums - a few thousands or millions."
Ross Perot lost, and Bloomberg never even tried.
"The returns to investing in lobbying are well known and can be astronomical."
Citation?
The Napoleonic wars were at least 4 wars; then there was the Merina Conquest of Madagascar and the Hundred Days. 6 wars in 15 years is pretty impressive. And it's not like France was peaceful after that, there was all sorts of wars all over the place, yes, even in Europe. And then Germany and Russia have kept the 2 busy all through the 1900s. We don't know that their enmity and warring are truly over, any more than we know whether great power conflicts are truly over.
And no country occupied has ever wished for revenge? Italy and Germany were right there, and American and Britain wouldn't've seriously objected to France invading (in this hypothetical nuke-less Communist-less world) - they weren't in any position to stomach stopping France. The American & British support didn't mean a whole lot to de Gaulle and his force de frappe.
Waggish answer: What, the past couple years of American politics haven't made it painfully obvious how valuable lobbying can be?
Serious answer: if the returns weren't high, then why do some companies invest so much in lobbying instead of putting the money into Treasuries?
More serious answer: The Mickey Mouse Protection Act
Most serious answer: http://www.google.com/search?q=return+on+lobbying+investment and specifically http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/11/AR2009041102035.html :
"The Napoleonic wars were at least 4 wars; then there was the Merina Conquest of Madagascar and the Hundred Days. 6 wars in 15 years is pretty impressive. And it's not like France was peaceful after that, there was all sorts of wars all over the place, yes, even in Europe. And then Germany and Russia have kept the 2 busy all through the 1900s."
This is a blatant dodge of my original claim, which was specifically about Britain and France. No one who had ever cracked a history book would ever claim that there were no wars in Europe during the 20th century.
"And no country occupied has ever wished for revenge?"
Germany was destroyed, the government was completely dissolved (and largely imprisoned), all the cities were bombed into rubble, and more than ten percent of the population was killed (including, I believe, a majority of the men of military age). You couldn't get a more thorough revenge if you obliterated Berlin with a 50 megaton H-bomb.
"The American & British support didn't mean a whole lot to de Gaulle and his third way."
Historically, after the war, we know that the French didn't want another war against Germany. Why would it be different this time?
"Serious answer: if the returns weren't high, then why do some companies invest so much in lobbying instead of putting the money into Treasuries?"
Because there are points on the real line between "3%" and "22,000%".
"In a remarkable illustration of the power of lobbying in Washington, a study released last week found that a single tax break in 2004 earned companies $220 for every dollar they spent on the issue -- a 22,000 percent rate of return on their investment. "
OK, that's a legitimate citation, but it ignores the non-monetary costs of lobbying, which far exceed the monetary ones. A company may hire a lobbyist and pay him $100,000, but if both the company and the lobbyist don't have connections with people high up in Washington, they won't get anywhere. And it's much more difficult to acquire those connections than to acquire $100K.
In such a scenario I don't think they'd have fought much because US hegemony would be even stronger than in real history. The US would push the USSR much harder in proxy wars if it thought they could lead up to an economic/military collapse of the USSR or its satellites, and all the European countries would participate more in these proxy wars. Also, decolonization of Asia and Africa might have proceeded more slowly in such a scenario, or not at all in places.
Sorry, I realize now my phrasing was misleading here. I meant that European countries have fought outside Europe against non-European ones.
Yes, but the combined resources of the biggest (say) 1000 companies are far far greater than those of governments, simply because there are so many more corporations. This is true both inside a country and summed across Europe. And most corporations by far would lobby very strongly against war inside Europe.
"The US would push the USSR much harder in proxy wars if it thought they could lead up to an economic/military collapse of the USSR or its satellites, and all the European countries would participate more in these proxy wars."
Agreed, but there's still peace in Europe in this scenario.
"Yes, but the combined resources of the biggest (say) 1000 companies are far far greater than those of governments, simply because there are so many more corporations."
"Corporations" do not act coherently like a national government does. There is no "United Corporate Alliance" or any such thing.
"This is true both inside a country and summed across Europe. And most corporations by far would lobby very strongly against war inside Europe."
Some would, but some would probably push for it (military contracting can be enormously profitable). There were certainly plenty of companies that pushed for a US war in Iraq.
From Schindler's List:
SCHINDLER: There's no way I could have known this before, but there was always something missing. In every business I tried, I see now it wasn't me that was failing, it was this thing, this missing thing. Even if I'd known what it was, there's nothing I could have done about it, because you can't create this sort of thing. And it makes all the difference in the world between success and failure. [He waits for her to guess what the thing is. His looks says, It's so simple, how can you not know?] EMILIE: Luck? SCHINDLER: War.
Why include the quote from Schindler's List? Are we supposed to take it as evidence for what causes wars?
It's supposed to be an example of how war can be profitable for industry (as indeed it was for many in Germany during WWII).
OK, then, do you consider Schindler's List or any other Hollywood film evidence that the war was profitable for industrialists in Germany?
I always thought that Hollywood films were held to high standards for mass appeal and sometime for aesthetics, but not for historical veracity.
Incidentally, why do you use quotes instead of quote-markup with '>'? It's a bit harder to read.
Yes, because of US hegemony.
There would be if 90% of all corporations had a common cause that was a life or death matter for them! At the very least all the corporations would be pushing in the same direction, and even without a formal alliance the result would be much the same.
Companies benefit from war - if they expect to be on the (economically) winning side, and if war isn't going to occur on their home turf. If US companies really honestly believed there was a 50-50 chance of Iraq winning the war and conquering New York, none of them would have supported a war.
In Europe, too many big companies are multinational. All of them stand a lot to lose from an internal war. Also, in a war they would have to bet on winner(s) right at the start - because if they want a military contract with Germany, then Germany's going to demand they stop selling weapons to France.
In WW1 the big economical winners were US companies because they sold everything but actual weapons to the Alliance countries for many years without being directly involved in the war.
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'.
"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.
-- Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
A quote that means something completely different coming from you than from Nietzsche!
-- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun also Rises
-- Tom Peters, HT Ben Casnocha
--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
-- A. R. Ammons
Egypt "peganthyrus" Urnash, comment thread, "a quick drawing lesson", July 17, 2008
I can't wait for her to finish her tarot deck.
I thought it was complete already - I haven't been paying attention, I suppose.
Some cards are still "coming soon".
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, Oct.-Nov. 1867
Winston Churchill, 29 October 1941
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.)
Another quote that means something far different (better) coming from you than from a politician.
...I do believe this is why I have a section in my quotefile marked "uncontexted". I really couldn't say whether you're right or wrong - all I know is what I've read.
Judson Jerome, The Poet's Handbook, Chap. 1 ("From Sighs and Groans to Art")
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
--Adapted from something in The Economist (sorry, they don't have bylines)
-H. L. Mencken
What's interesting from a rationalist point of view is the surprising extent to which this is not actually the case.
Anymore, at least, relative to the power of the state.
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.
--Andrew S. Grove
--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.
--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.
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?
"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.
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?
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.
"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.
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?
No, just appalling.
Maybe was just a one-hit wonder who ran out of ideas. :P
I don't think his measure of difference is comprehensive:
"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.
— Marvin Minsky
— Alain Robbe-Grillet
— Leonardo da Vinci
"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.
— Brendan O’Regan
— Henri Poincaré
--George Bernard Shaw, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)
--George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)
-- Kozma Prutkov
-- Alan Kay
-- Dorothy L. Sayers
--W. Somerset Maughan, "The Creative Impulse" (1926)
-- 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.
-- Homer Simpson
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
--Ringworld, Larry Niven
The history of the world is the history of the triumph of the heartless over the mindless.
From the Yes, Minister TV show.
A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.
From the Yes, Minister TV show.
It's a good quote. But I say combining the latter two gives the first.
--Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes (1939)
-Ambrose Bierce
"You can tell the truth but you better have a fast horse." - Rita Mae Brown
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
"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.
Infatuation would probably be a better word to describe the attitude of the character Aizen's referring to in that quote, although the subtitle says "admiration."
I like Pink...
Leave me the fuck alone.
(eg.)
?
Sharing CronDAS's appreciation of Pink without, well, inviting him to come home. Good song that. Perhaps her best.
"Who Knew?" would have been less of an apparent vulgar non-sequitur.
You're right and I love that song too!
Haven't actually heard that one.
The ones I can remember having heard on the radio are "Who Knew?", "U + Ur Hand", "So What", "Sober", and "Please Don't Leave Me". I liked them all.
To put it In context, the quote should read: "admiration for another person is the state furthest from understanding."
... 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.
--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
-- Jean-Yves Girard
Elaboration, please?
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.
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
Incidentally, it seems to me that this invokes the anthropic principle. To wit, if our actions generally seemed irrational and unsatisfactory to ourselves, we would probably go insane.
That seems to stretch the anthropic principle rather further than I would be included to do.
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
E.K. Hornbeck in Inherit the wind
Are little heroes supposed to be good, or bad?
Good. I thought about just writing "Disillusionment is what heroes are made of", to avoid the possibility of confusion, but decided to go with the original quote. It is said by a cynic as an encouragement to a person disillusioned by the behavior of people in groups. It's a call to embrace it. For even if it might be better that the world lives up to your expectations, it would be worse if you didn't have the judgment to realize something is wrong. And it is only the ones who realize something is wrong who will do something about a problem.
-- 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.
-- George Vincent
--Napoleon Bonaparte; quoted by his secretary in Memoirs of Napoleon (1829-1831)
"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.
– Michael Vassar
source
– Robin Hanson
– Rudi Hoffman
-- Galileo Galilei, The Assayer
-- Phillip E. Johnson
I feel dirty now.
I just feel confused.
-- Aubrey de Grey
Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity.
-- unknown
Hanlon's Razor
-- 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?
Star Trek, Richard Manning & Hans Beimler, Who Watches the Watchers? (reworded)
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
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.
Well spotted!
Yes, By forgetting I had a wood port I could have lost possible resources from a 6 or even more if a 7 came while the cards were still in my hand.
I see them rather less. I've played sufficiently few games that I mostly notice the mistakes when the cards drop and my Feral Hydra gets fried. RIP.
I was mostly thinking about mulligans. If you kept a one land hand and go on to win because you drew three lands in a row, that doesn't mean keeping it was the right decision. Conversely, if you do mulligan your 7 card hand and then end up with completely unplayable 6 card and 5 card hands, that doesn't mean that you should have kept your original hand.
Perfect example.
And now we've managed to completely confuse all the non-gamers here. ;)
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.".
I say it because it is not the first sexist implication that is consciously noticed, even by me. This is despite being the clearest literal meaning in this instance. I say it because although becoming more aware of the discordance between the politically correct application of 'sexist' and 'sexist' itself can be frustrating it leads in some small way to eliminating sexist assumptions.
Not so. I assert that that claiming something is sexist then saying it gives an actual different meaning to the words. Context is important.
For example if the lampshade was replaced with "yeah, this is sexist against da bitches. lolz." then I would say a different interpretation of sexist implication would be most appropriate.
Obviously if you say "yeah, this is sexist against da bitches. lolz" then you have added sexism to your complete utterance. I don't think you've added sexism to whatever you said before "yeah".
I disagree fundamentally. I also would not be able to reconcile ascribing sexist (or any other) implications that are not part of the literal meaning while also asserting that the surrounding context can not change meaning. Either the meaning communicated includes subconscious nuances and dispositions or it doesn't. Those nuances are affected by the context.
Context can affect sexist content. Sure. I just don't think lampshades are a kind of context that tends to increase sexist content, for reasons described above. If one wants to make what one says more sexist, one can accompany it with action (particular or over time), or elaborate on any potentially sexism-free components of one's utterance in such a way that they can now be interpreted as sexist where before they were innocuous. Acknowledging that there already existed a particular sexist interpretation of a statement makes that sexism consciously accessible when it might not have been, but doesn't make it greater in magnitude.
Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference. —Stephen Jay Gould
-- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
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"?
-- Scott Bakker, Neuropath
"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