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Rationality Quotes January 2010
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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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 (140)
---A Charlie Brown Christmas
(edited to include more context)
I don't understand why this is a rationality quote. Am I missing some context? (I've never read any Charlie Brown books).
I thought it exemplifies a virtue which is nameless.
In what way does it exemplify that virtue?
Hmm, I still don't get it but thanks for the explanation.
Right, so Charlie Brown is frustrated with commercialism and asks if anyone knows what Christmas is all about, and Linus replies by quoting the Bible, reminding Charlie Brown about the religious significance of the day and thereby guarding against loss of purpose. (In our state of knowledge, we don't regard religious observance as a legitimate purpose, but conditioning on the premise that Christianity is true, it would be important to make sure your holidays remain being about Christ, rather than wandering off and becoming about gifts or something.)
I like the indirectness of Linus's reminder (the scene would have been much less effective if Linus had just said, "Well, it's about Jesus"), which is why I referred to the Eliezer's "twelfth virtue" in my (apparently still too opaque) attempt at explanation above. Mere words can only be pointers; they don't in themselves contain the complexity of a thought. The thoughts that you can only invoke indirectly are important. ("You may try to name the highest principle with names such as 'the reason for the season,' 'the true spirit of Chirstmas,' or 'God's word,' but what if &c.)
I like the seeming incongruity of using a religious quote in a Rationality Quotes thread, which on a meta level illustrates that specific ideas can be accepted or rejected on their own merits. Of course Christianity is false, but if a religious quote also demonstrates something true or useful, the irrationality of the source doesn't matter.
Maybe too subtle (judging by the downvotes), but I'm not so sure.
If you haven't grown up in a Christian household or something, this completely fails. It doesn't sound like a reminder of purpose. Just a fail.
It did occur to me after the first attempted explanation that perhaps my unreligious upbringing was why this quote doesn't work for me. My immediate reaction to Linus' quote is simply 'no, that's not what Christmas is about at all' - Christmas has almost nothing to do with religion for me so the quote doesn't work.
Loss of purpose indeed.
This context is absent in the quote, which makes it impenetrably confusing (and as such, a bad quote).
Edited to include character names and previous line of dialogue
I believe this is from a tv special; I'm having trouble determining the relevance as well.
One possibility: the extended description of the story, rather than a simple statement of fact or belief, constitutes a warning about the power of contextual imagery in activating availability heuristics.
"One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Supose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."
Puddleglum the Marshwiggle, in C.S. Lewis "The Silver Chair".
Order of the Stick
Funny quote; what's the connection to rationality? The character in question not being in touch with reality? The recent melatonin thread? Something else?
-- Octavio Paz, The labyrinth of Solitude
Italicized emphases mine. I really liked that phrase.
The italicized premise seems bogus to me.
I can't give an opinion on the surrounding context of that phrase. However, I really liked the phrase because it is eloquent.
I am having a hard time seeing how the premise of that phrase is bogus; the phrase, on its own, is a description of the process of society reproducing itself through generations. The phrase, on its own, has nothing to say about the device, or "protection," that does this.
It's fascinating that nations can stay around with the same name and substance even though the original founders have long died. Now, isn't "a mere protection for society with no other object but the reproducing of that same society" a good phrase for boxing up that fascination and making it wonderfully palpable?
Of course, the phrase would have to be modified to exist on its own. But for now, I am happy that I have it under my belt.
*E: Reading the phrase again, I can see that there may be cause for objection saying that the "protection" has only a single use. Is this what you find bogus?
Yes, the 'no other object' part I find most bogus. I would still disagree if the claim was 'the main object' or even 'a significant object' although such relative judgements require more reasoning and background to evaluate than the banal absolute.
I find it abhorrent. It has enough 'wonderfully palpability' that many people will hesitate to actually parse the meaning and realise that, trying to describe it without an expletive, what little content it contains lacks factual merit.
Marriage is not merely, primarily or even credibly understood to be a protection for society with the object of reproducing of that same society.
I would much prefer Octavio put his ability to turn phrase into something harmless like, say, and 'Ode to Blue'. If he wants to keep up the airs of intellectual sophistication he can perhaps work some qualia into the mix. That would tie in nicely with the whole poignant solitude, sublime experience of the human condition vibe. Then if he wants to raise the intellectual bar another notch he can include "da ba dee dah be daa" as a refrain.
I concede that the quote was inappropriate.
This pertains to the part of the quote that I don't care too much about and don't have much of an opinion on.
The thing that I found most valuable in the phrase was this: "reproducing itself through generations," in the discussion of a nation. It's something that I've tried to say before, but it came out very clumsy. So, seeing something similar to what I've been trying to say, written, was great. I'm sure you've had the experience before.
Anyway, now I feel really silly putting that quote up. Please understand that I'm likely much younger than you and am just now getting my feet wet with rationality. Thank you for the discourse and I'll see you around.
Don't feel silly for putting the quote up. It is a quote that has the form of wisdom and brushes past potential insight. In fact, the reason I object is not because it silly to identify with these quotes from Octavio but the reverse. It is the sort of thing that appeals to our intuition and we are naturally pulled into agreeing with when we may otherwise see flaws. It's a trap and, speaking here particularly of the poignant angsty existential quote, one that I carefully train myself to avoid.
-The Book of Bantorra, Episode 12
-- G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Jonah Lehrer's How we decide
(In the section which discusses psychopaths and notes that the "rational" part of their brains appears to be undamaged: the human brain relies on the circuitry of emotion to form moral decisions, or at any rate that's what's broken in psychopaths.)
-- Octavio Paz, The labyrinth of Solitude
Or maybe that is just what a lonely man might think so he can feel deep. Like a high status emo.
Or maybe it's what a genius would say after emerging from the "existential labyrinth," the main theme of The Labyrinth of Solitude.
Here is Jostein Gaarder's response to your response:
The condition of solitude is not imaginary; though, Octavio Paz, being a poet, sensationalizes it well. It's a condition that has, at the very least, lightly touched every human. And it is a condition that has spun many great people into the deepest kind of angst.
Communication is a major human bottleneck, and Octavio Paz laments this. Our input/output capabilities are severely restricting, considering everything that goes on in our minds. Our methods of communication aren't very effective.
I find Octavio Paz's quote interesting in light of transhumanism.
"Lonely" -> "senstationalise the experience so I sound deep" -> "gain status as a poet and author" -> "get laid". That ranks well above "cutting" as far as plans go.
I do not respect wallowing in existential angst and definitely don't consider it rational. More importantly I do not allow my brain to reward itself with a sense of smug superiority when it generates such trains of thought for me.
--- Walt Whitman, "Song of Joys"
-- Anon
In the UK to dribble a football means to keep it close to your feet as you move along the pitch - is that the meaning you refer to here? If so I can't make sense of the quote, because it's perfectly possible.
Heh. Make that, "tell them to basketball-dribble an American football."
People in the rest of the world dribble footballs all the time.
Funny, when I was a kid I sometimes used to try to basketball-dribble a US football for fun. Never got it down very well.
American football, basketball dribble.
Edit: Aww, I lose alphabetically and chronologically.
You found better references, though. :)
He almost certainly meant an American football, and dribbling as in basketball, which is done by bouncing it off the ground repeatedly.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. —Nietzsche
-- PeteWarden
-- William S Burroughs, Words of Advice for Young People
I have a brother-in-law who used to manage a Christian rock band. He told me that Christian organizations were the worst about paying for performances, because they assumed that the musicians were in it for service to God, not for the money.
But it could also be that the Christian organizations just had less money.
-- E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory
Do you remember where exactly in the book this quote is?
Page 136 (in Chapter 5 - "Queer Uses for Probability Theory"), in the first full paragraph.
Wow, that was fast, I can see that you definitively did your homework. :)
Google Books is your friend.
LOL. :(
Sam Harris's reply to Karen Armstrong
Armstrong's reply is nothing but chiding Harris for being rude, and waffle. Returning to the "niceness" discussion, it strikes me that if Harris had made the same points with a straight face and without sarcasm, Armstrong would have been left with nothing but waffle.
Yeah, but waffle is all Armstrong ever writes when she puts her theologian hat on, and it doesn't seem to bother her fans in the slightest. Using sarcasm allowed Harris to point out the ridiculousness in her article without giving the impression that it was sane enough to deserve a respectful reply.
To "point out" means to induce others to see what you see. Do you think that Harris's approach reliably induces people who don't already agree with him to see the ridiculousness that he sees? I suspect that he accomplishes little more than signaling his tribal loyalties, while exacerbating antipathy towards his tribe by non-tribe-members.
Since the people he has to convince are religious believers, I think his approach is about as reliable as the 'nice' approach, which is to say it's almost completely worthless. However, it has other benefits that the nice approach doesn't have.
Unless I'm reading you wrong, those "other benefits" amount to no more than signaling tribal loyalties, at least in practical terms.
ETA: . . . and if that kind of behavior helps a tribe to grow, it does so for non-truth-tracking reasons, producing a tribe full of people who are there just because they like the company.
The benefit is to help other non-believers (and perhaps a few believers) realize that Armstrong's article (and defense of religion in general) doesn't fit into the category of "Respectable beliefs I disagree with", it fits into the category of "Intellectually dishonest nonsense that should be scorned and ridiculed".
It's a benefit closely related to breaking the taboo that protects religious beliefs and raising the sanity waterline.
If the benefit of scorn and ridicule is just to inform others about what to scorn and ridicule, then I don't see the point. Scorn and ridicule aren't terminal values.
That would be true if the ability to deride were a reliable signal of sanity. But derision is cheap; it's a tool that is equally available to the insane.
One of the things that keep religion alive in western society in the 21st century is the dogma, widespread even among atheists, that even if religious beliefs are false they're sane enough to deserve respect. In other words, most non-believers treat mainstream religious beliefs as if they were like the belief that the Washington Redskins are going to win the 2010 Superbowl rather than like the belief that Tom Cruise is the son of Xenu, Lord of the Galactic Confederacy.
The first step towards a society in which ridiculous beliefs are acknowledged to be ridiculous, is to stop acting as if these beliefs aren't ridiculous. The point of ridicule is first to make those who hold ridiculous beliefs feel ashamed or at least uncomfortable, and second to help make rationalists feel the appropriate emotion when dealing with such extremes of irrationality. The end goal is a society in which people have the same attitude towards religious beliefs than they do towards belief in alien abductions.
Perhaps it seems tautologous that ridicule is the best way to deal with the ridiculous. So I'm tabooing the word "ridiculous". What do you mean by it?
Does it just mean "crazy" in the sense in which Eliezer uses it? Then, for what reason do you believe that ridicule (e.g., sarcasm and contemptuous scorn) is the best way to achieve your end goal?
If I read "crazy" where you wrote "ridiculous", then your claim is that the first step towards a society in which crazy beliefs are acknowledged to be crazy is to heap scorn and contempt on them. But this is far from obvious. How do you make this argument without relying on the verbal similarity between the words "ridiculous" and "ridicule"?
Humans are social animals. Inducing shame and discomfort might be useful if the believer is isolated away from other believers and cannot rely on them for emotional support. If not, he or she will likely relieve their shame by seeking the company of fellow believers, reinforcing the affiliation with the believing group.
I'm dubious of militant atheism, as it seems counter-productive. Promoting atheism is closely related to promoting science. Aggressively promoting science and proclaiming it to be in direct conflict with religion will polarize society as religious groups will in turn attack science. On the other hand, if you just quietly taught science to everyone and not mention anything about a conflict, religious people would just compartmentalize their beliefs so that they didn't interfere with the things science teaches. You'd basically get people who were technically religious, but close to none of the negative sides.
This has pretty much already happened in my country (Finland). The majority still belongs to a religious domination, but religion is considered a private thing and actually arguing in favor of something "because of the Bible" will get you strange looks and likely branded as a fanatic. Yes, there is still a Christian political party in parliament, but they're a minor player, fielding 7 representatives out of 200. There has traditionally been practically no public debate about any sort of conflict between science and religion, though that's possibly changing as parts of the populace have began to express a fear of Islam. Judging from past evidence, that is probably just going to make any clash of cultures worse. That article is also a good example of the results you'll get when the debate gets polarized, as it shows people who might otherwise have been moderates become extremists.
And yes, we should regardless still continue to provide some critique of religion and the fallacies involved, to shift the social consensus even further into the "religion is just a private way you look at the world, not something you can base real-world decisions on" camp. But one can do that without being overly aggressive.
I'm not sure Armstrong's reply is so bad as all that-- it's legitimate to point out that there's a difference between doing science and using the reputation of science as an excuse to commit atrocities, as in Communism and Nazism.
He absolutely gave her something to use against him by being sarcastic in a public forum, but I think he made a rational decision that an interesting dialogue in which he could be called snide would catch much more attention than the dull one in which he makes a polite, logically airtight case and receives a shorter reply full of nothing much.
Edit: Oh, I was going to add: and I now know a lot more about Armstrong than I would otherwise, namely, that her argumentative approach is deceitful and based on manipulating her audience's moral feelings.
Armstrong's reply was not up when I first read the article. I am glad you brought that to my attention.
I am stunned at her reply. She completely missed the point that Harris was making (not surprising, I have known some pretty smart people who were caught flat-footed by the philosophical tool of object replacement). That she did not catch the comparison of witchcraft in Africa as a form of religious practice is... well, stunning.
Yes, Karen, what we need to do with Theologists such as William Lane Craig, who whole-heartedly defends the genocidal acts of his God in the old testament, is to have their theology enriched by rationalizing of those atrocities rather than have them understand why they do not stand up to a rational criticism.
Can you elaborate? What is the tool of "object replacement"?
It is essentially what Harris did in the article. He replaced the noun objects of Armstrong's point with other, analogous/isomorphic objects to illustrate that the point being made did not have the merit that Armstrong thought it did.
I'll see about looking up the term as it applies to Propositional Logic. It's a more widely recognized term (at least here).
-- Tetragrammaton
-- Julian Barbour, The End of Time
- Joni Mitchell
Beautiful (in the song) and true, but it doesn't sound very poetic on its own, and the following line is beautiful and false.
In the next line, only the word "back" is false.
-- Daniel Dennett
Interestingly, my memory of the quote was corrupted, until I retrieved it to post here; I thought he'd said "harshest efforts"; perhaps owing to contamination from the quote "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be".
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes (via Pharyngula)
"Wars do not end when they are won, but when those who want to fight to the death find their wish has been granted." - Spengler
"If I were wrong, then one would have been enough."
Einstein's reported response to the pamphlet "One Hundred Authors Against Einstein."
-- Mark Jason Dominus
This sounds like a funny "blooper" story, but could just as well be an entirely normal history of the solution to an important problem. Many important theorems are proved by contradiction, and for all we know, the question of the existence of partially uniform k-quandles could have been a difficult unsolved problem.
There is a similar story -- whether true or not I don't know -- told at Oxford about Cambridge and at Cambridge about Oxford. Someone wrote a thesis on anti-metric spaces, which are like metric spaces, except that the triangle inequality is the other way round. He proved all sorts of interesting facts about them, but at the viva, the external examiner pointed out that there are only two anti-metric spaces: the empty set and the one-point set.
It is recounted that the student passed, but his supervisor was criticised for not having picked up on this earlier.
Likewise there's the story about the Princeton student defending his thesis on the set of real functions that satisfy the Lipschitz condition for every positive constant C, and being asked by an examiner to compute the derivative of such a function...
My point having been, of course, that the k-quandle story is not (necessarily) of this type.
I don't think you need to do anything as sophisticated as computing the derivative to prove that the only such functions are constant functions. Consider any distinct x_1, x_2. d(x_1, x_2) is nonzero by the definition of metric spaces. If d(f(x_1), f(x_2)) were nonzero, there would be a K small enough for the condition to be violated; therefore it must be zero for all x_1, x_2.
The humor of asking the student to compute the derivative is that one imagines the student confidently starting to answer the question, until a dawning horror rises on the student's face as the implications of the answer become evident.
I... don't mathematicians usually have more than one interesting example of a mathematical object before they decide to study it?
Generally yes. But not always. Sometimes there's only a single such object. For example, there's a largest sporadic simple group. It is a very interesting object. But there's only one of it.
To use a slightly less silly example, up to isomorphism there's only one ordered complete archimedean field. We call it R and we care a lot about it.
Also, sometimes you lack enough data to know if there are other examples of what you care about. But yes, you should generally try to figure out if a non-trivial example exists before you start studying it.
Not when the question is whether any examples exist!
OK, but it takes two minutes to prove that an anti-metric space with more than one point can't exist. If x != y, then d(x, y) + d(y, x) > d(x, x).
Unless you allow negative distances, in which case an anti-metric space is just a mirror image of a metric space.
Non-Euclidean geometries? IIRC the questions of "what can you still/now prove with this one postulate removed" were studied for centuries before hyperbolic or elliptic geometries were really understood.
Or maybe I'm misremembering. That always did seem odd to me. I guess hyperbolic geometries can't be isometrically embedded in R^3, which makes them hard to intuitively comprehend. But the educated classes have known the Earth was a sphere for millennia; surely somebody noticed that this was an example of an otherwise well-behaved geometry where straight lines always intersect.
The fact that they didn't notice that Earth is an example of a non-Euclidean geometry is especially ironic when you consider the etymology of "geometry".
What's wrong with identifying with sports teams
A very funny video comparing identifying with a team to assuming you were there in your favorite movies.
-- John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
-- Xunzi, An Exhortation to Learning (勸å¸) 1.6, translated by John Knoblock in "Xunzi: A Translation and study of the Complete Works"
*Knoblock gives "If there is no ardor and enthusiasm in purpose" as an alternative, personally I would translate it as "if there is no one who deeply wills it" and similarly the next passage as "if there is no one who singlemindedly labors for it" (Knoblock doesn't give any alternative there).
"I once spent a whole day in thought, but it was not so valuable as a moment in study. I once stood on my tiptoes to look out into the distance, but it was not so effective as climbing up to a high place for a broader vista. Climbing to a height and waving your arm does not cause the arm's length to increase, but your wave can be seen farther away. Shouting downwind does not increase the tenseness of the sound, but it is heard more distinctly. A man who borrows a horse and carriage does not improve his feet, but he can extend his travels 1,000 li [~500km] A man who borrows a boat and paddles does not gain any new ability in water, but he can cut across rivers and seas. The gentleman by birth is not different from other men; he is just good at "borrowing" the use of external things."
-- Xunzi, An Exhortation to Learning (勸å¸) 4, translated by John Knoblock in "Xunzi: A Translation and study of the Complete Works"
-- The Cure, "Where The Birds Always Sing"
The absence of alternatives clarifies your mind marvelously. —Kissinger
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first. —Mark Twain
"You cannot understand what a person is saying unless you understand who they are arguing with."
-- Don Symons, quoted by Tooby and Cosmides.
"I'd rather do what I want to do than what would give me the most happiness, even if I knew for a fact exactly what actions would lead to the latter."
Keith Lynch, rec.arts.sf.fandom, <hhbk90$hu5$3@reader1.panix.com>
"With my eyes I can see you. With your eyes I can see myself."
K. Bradford Brown
"Do not ask permission to understand. Do not wait for the word of authority. Seize reason in your own hand. With your own teeth savor the fruit."
-"The Way of Analysis", Robert S. Strichartz
~ Bill James
"Most haystacks do not even have a needle."
-- Lorenzo
-- Thomas Carlyle
-- Nazgulnarsil
-- Miss HT Psych
Believe me, breaking the bed is a bit more worrying when you're tied to it.
-- The Onion, Millions and Millions Dead
Related: World Death Rate Holding Steady At 100 Percent
-- Alexander Pope
-- Carl Sagan
-- Herbert Samuel
-- Voltaire
Matter flows from place to place
And momentarily comes together to be you
Some people find that thought disturbing
I find the reality thrilling
—Richard Dawkins quoted in Our Place in the Cosmos
- Alan Sokal (hat tip)
"Psychologists tell us everyone automatically gravitates toward that which is pleasurable and pulls away from that which is painful. For many people, thinking is painful." - Leil Lowndes, How to Talk to Anyone
(Given the context, perhaps a bit of a Dark Arts view.)
--A.E Housman, Juvenal (1905), xi
--A.E. Housman, Last Poems 10
"It is therefore highly illogical to speak of 'verifying' (3.8 [the Bernoulli urn equation]) by performing experiments with the urn; that would be like trying to verify a boy's love for his dog by performing experiments on the dog." - E.T. Jaynes, Probability Theory
--- Mike Caro
"The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted."
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"
-- attributed to George Carlin
He thought he knew that there was no point in heading any further in that direction, and, as Socrates never tired of pointing out, thinking that you know when you don't is the main cause of philosophical paralysis.
-- Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Just out of curiosity, who is being discussed, and what direction did he discount?
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
-- Mark Twain
Clearly Dennett has his sources all mixed up.
----John Holt, Learning All the Time
We're here to devour each other alive.