I listen to all these complaints about rudeness and intemperateness, and the opinion that I come to is that there is no polite way of asking somebody: have you considered the possibility that your entire life has been devoted to a delusion? But that’s a good question to ask. Of course we should ask that question and of course it’s going to offend people. Tough.
Daniel Dennett, interview for TPM: The Philosopher's Magazine
I recall, for example, suggesting to a regular loser at a weekly poker game that he keep a record of his winnings and losses. His response was that he used to do so but had given up because it proved to be unlucky. - Ken Binmore, Rational Decisions
A side note: All three of the quotes I've posted are from Binmore's Rational Decisions, which I'm about a third of the way through and have found very interesting. It makes a great companion to Less Wrong -- and it's also quite quotable in spots.
My dad used to have an expression: "Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value."
Joe Biden, remarks delivered in Saint Clair Shores, MI, Monday, September 15, 2008
Of course, to really see what someone values you'd have to see their budget profile across a wide range of wealth levels.
"Everyone thinks they've won the Magical Belief Lottery. Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow lucked into the one true belief system."
-- R Scott Bakker, Neuropath
It is luck in a sense - every way that your opinion differs from someone else, you believe that factors outside of your control (your intelligence, your education, et cetera) have blessed you in such a way that your mind has done better than that poor person's.
It's just that it's not a problem. Lottery winners got richer than everyone else by luck, but that doesn't mean they're deluded in believing that they're rich. But someone who had only weak evidence ze won the lottery should be very skeptical. The real point of this quote is that being much less wrong than average is an improbable state, and you need correspondingly strong evidence to support the possibility. I think many of the people on this site probably do have some of that evidence (things like higher than average IQ scores would be decent signs of higher than normal probability of being right) but it's still something worth worrying about.
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
Bertrand Russell
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
-- George Eliot
Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind is obsessed with it.
-- Bruce Lee
When I look around and think that everything's completely and utterly fucked up and hopeless, my first thought is "Am I wearing completely and utterly fucked up and hopeless-colored glasses?"
This is more important than it looks. Most people's beliefs are just recorded memes that bubbled up from their subconscious when someone pressed them for their beliefs. They wonder what they believe, their mind regurgitates some chatter they heard somewhere, and they go, "Aha, that must be what I believe." Unless they take special countermeasures, humans are extremely suggestible.
Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: 'My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.' The stranger is a theologian.
"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
-- Clay Shirky
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
-- Christopher Hitchens
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
-- Christopher Hitchens
Accuracy was sacrificed for a pleasant parallel construction. Anything can be so asserted.
And, without supporting evidence, such assertions demonstrate nothing.
The mere fact that an assertion has been made is, in fact, evidence. For example, I will now flip a coin five times, and assert that the outcome was THHTT. I will not provide any evidence other than that assertion, but that is sufficient to conclude that your estimate of the probability that it's true should be higher than 1/2^5. Most assertions don't come with evidence provided unless you go looking for it. If nothing else, most assertions have to be unsupported because they're evidence for other things and the process has to bottom out somewhere.
Now, as a matter of policy we should encourage people to provide more evidence for their assertions wherever possible, but that is entirely separate from the questions of what is evidence, what evidence is needed, and what is demonstrated by an assertion having been made.
If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
-- Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts
"All things end badly - or else they wouldn't end"
Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The word agnostic is actually used with the two distinct meanings of personal ignorance and intrinsic unknowability in the same context. They are distinguished when necessary with a qualifier.
WEAK agnosticism: I have no fucking idea who fucked this shit up.
STRONG agnosticism: Nobody has any fucking idea who fucked this shit up.There is a certain confusion with weak atheism which could (and frequently does) arise, but that is properly reserved for the category of theological noncognitivists,
WEAK atheism: What the fuck do you mean with this God shit?
STRONG atheism: Didn't take any God to fuck this shit up.which is different again from weak theism.
WEAK theism: Somebody fucked this shit up.
STRONG theism: God fucked this shit up.An interesting cross-categorical theological belief not easily represented above is
DEISM: God set this shit up and it fucked itself.
-- Snocone, in a Slashdot post
An atheist walked into a bar, but seeing no bartender he revised his initial assumption and decided he only walked into a room.
http://friendlyatheist.com/2008/02/29/complete-the-atheist-joke-1/
Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.
WIlliam Thomson, Lord Kelvin
The white line down the center of the road is a mediator, and very likely it can err substantially towards one side the other before the disadvantaged side finds advantage in denying its authority.
Source:
-- Schelling, Strategy of conflict, p144
[The book was mentioned a couple of times here on LW, and is a nice introduction to the use of game theory in geopolitics]
It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
Charles Darwin, "The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals", ch.3.
"Torture the data long enough and they will confess to anything."
--via The Economist, "a saying of statisticians".
Are the winners the only ones actually writing the history? We need to disabuse ourselves of this habit of saying things because they sound good. ----- Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates runs a popular culture, black issues, and history blog with a very strong rationalist approach.
[Discarding game] theory in favor of some notion of collective rationality makes no sense. One might as well propose abandoning arithmetic because two loaves and seven fish won't feed a multitude. -- Ken Binmore, Rational Decisions
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
-- Gautama Buddha
"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." ~William Kingdon Clifford
This is the quote that got me thinking about rationality as something other than "a word you use to describe things you believe so that you can deride those who disagree with you."
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.
John Gall, "Systemantics"
Evolved from both simpler winged aircraft and simpler rockets.
All the base components that went into the space shuttle still existed on a line of technogical progress from the basic to the advanced. Actually, the space shuttle followed Gall's Law precisely.
The lift mechanism was still vertically stacked chemical rockets of the sort that had already flown for decades. The shuttle unit was built from components perfected by the Gemini and Apollo programs, and packed into an aerodynamic form based on decades of aircraft design.
Reducing technologically, the shuttle still depends on simple systems like airfoils, rockets and nozzles, gears, and other known quantities.
I've written some of those. And every time, I test everything I write as I go, so that at every stage from the word go I have a working program. The big bang method, of writing everything first, then running it, never works.
"Face the facts. Then act on them. It's the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it's harder than you'd think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don't pray, don't wish, don't buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don't give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of... whatever. FACE THE FACTS. THEN act."
--- Quellcrist Falconer, speech before the assault on Millsport. (Richard Morgan, Broken Angels)
"In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined."
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
"A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it."
-David Stevens
We originally want or desire an object not because it is agreeable or good, but we call it agreeable or good because we want or desire it.
-- Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics
...As you can easily imagine we often ask ourselves here despairingly: "What, oh, what is the use of the war? Why can't people live peacefully together? Why all this destruction?"
The question is very understandable, but no one has found a satisfactory answer to it so far. Yes, why do they make still more gigantic planes, still heavier bombs and, at the same time, prefabricated houses for reconstruction? Why should millions be spent daily on the war and yet there's not a penny available for medical services, artists, or for poor people?
Why do some p
Evolving a threat response over a half-million years on the African savannah hasn't really left me with any good mechanisms for dealing with a threatening number.
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Alfred North Whitehead
If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can't be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
Rephrase that and it sounds nonsensical: "If you can't outperform the stock market, then how can you be sure of anything?" I think Carnegie was just looking for a glib rationalization for his advice to avoid contradicting people whom you want to like you.
A final goal of any scientific theory must be the derivation of numbers. Theories stand or fall, ultimately, upon numbers.
True Knowledge:
Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests co...
No, currently we don't. If we want our values to survive, then we must win. If we want to win, we have nothing else to place our values on besides this "apparently barren soil".
Think of it as the converse of the following Terry Pratchett dialog between Susan and Death in Hogfather:
"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
"REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE"
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little- "
"YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES"
"So we can believe the big ones?"
"YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING"
"They're not the same at all!"
"YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET-- " Death waved a hand. "AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME... SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED"
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point---"
"MY POINT EXACTLY"
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
-- Wayne Gretzky (but I've seen it attributed to Michael Jordan and Joe Ledbetter, HS coach)
Except that actually isn't right. You miss exactly 0% of the shots you don't take. And I'm not just being pedantic. In basketball this attitude can cost teams games. Any game of possessions (of which basketball is one) is won with efficiency. Shooting the ball means there is some chance of scoring but also some chance of missing and the ball being rebounded by the other team. When the latter happens you've lost your opportunity to score and you will never get it back. So the key to winning is to take high efficiency shots-- this means shots that are likely to go in and shots that are worth a lot of points. Now not shooting does increase the likelihood of a turnover and one can't go on not shooting forever. Moreover, quick shots before the defense is ready can often be very efficient shots. But the key is that the game is not about scoring a lot of points-- it's about scoring a lot of points efficiently. And to get good at that means cultivating a skill of waiting for the best shot, creating a better shot or deferring to more efficient teammates.
It might be that these aren't concerns in hockey: if all shots are more or less equally efficient or if a lot of points are scored of offe...
...Since a gene is just a molecule, it can't choose to maximize its fitness, but evolution makes it seem as though it had.... Why, for example, do songbirds sing in the early spring? The proximate cause is long and difficult. This molecule knocked against that molecule. This chemical reaction is catalyzed by that enzyme. But the ultimate cause is that birds are signalling territorial claims to each other in order to avoid unnecessary conflict. They just do what they do. But the net effect of an immensely complicated evolutionary process is that songbirds be
...This is not to say that M. Legrandin was anything but sincere when he inveighed against snobs. He could not (from his own knowledge, at least) be aware that he himself was one, since it is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them. Upon ourselves they react only indirectly, through our imagination, which substitutes for our primary motives other, auxiliary motives, less stark and therefore more seemly. Never had Legrandin's snobbishness prompted him to mak
Such sad statistical situations suggest that the marriage of science and math may be desperately in need of counseling. Perhaps it could be provided by the Rev. Thomas Bayes.
Tom Siegfried, Odds Are, It's Wrong, on the many failings of traditional statistics in modern science.
""Not evil, but longing for that which is better, more often directs the steps of the erring"
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, A Scandal in Bohemia
...Social scientists are experts at having an explanation for the results, no matter how they come out, so long as they are statistically significant. It is easy to turn the statistical crank. With sufficiently powerful statistical tools, you can find a significant statistical relationship between just about anything and anything else.
Psychologists see no real problem with the current dogma. They are used to getting messy results that can be dealt with only by statistics. In fact, I have now detected a positive suspicion of quality results amongst psychologi
"Hypocrisy and dissimulation are what keeps social systems strong; it is intellectual honesty that destroys them."
Theodore Dalrymple- The New Vichy Syndrome p. 26.
...At this point I reveal myself in my true colours as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years. And in consequence
True, I did not escape some unpleasant conversations with political figures To them I repeated the same thing: all contemporary conflicts I considered to be temporary phenomena, as the reigns of Alexander the Great and Napoleon were temporary. Every world crisis could be viewed in strategic terms, as long as the consequence of that approach was not our potential destruction as a biological species. But when the fate of the species became one of the members of the equation, the choice had to be automatic, a foregone conclusion, and appeals to the American way, the patriotic spirit, to democracy or anything else lost all meaning.
"O my friend, if we, leaving this war, could escape from age and death, I should not here be fighting in the van; but now, since many are the modes of death impending over us which no man can hope to shun, let us press on and give renown to other men, or win it for ourselves."
--Sarpedon, The Iliad, as quoted in Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation
You can speed up your math reading skill by practicing, but be careful. Like any skill, trying too much too fast can set you back and kill your motivation. Imagine trying to do an hour of high-energy aerobics if you have not worked out in two years. You may make it through the first class, but you are not likely to come back.
Shai Simonson and Fernando Gouvea, "How to Read Mathematics"
The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed.
--Robert A. Heinlein
Sad, but true.
I hold that information is not neutral. Never give a (fallible) human sterile information. He will not ignore it. These models led to an increase of risk in society, period. The providers are responsible.
"Wow! That seems…incredibly hard to believe. I’m not saying that just because it sounds crazy means its not true. Plenty of crazy things are true. But this claim is based on the results of just one study, conducted with the help of a biased author." --Jason Swett (my older brother)
The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close it again on something solid
G. K. Chesterton
If I let everyone I thought was an idiot die, there wouldn't be many people left.
A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire
Edit: All right, then, here's another one:
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
Robert Heinlein
Economists did something even better than predict the crisis. We correctly predicted that we would not be able to predict it.
-William Easterly
"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments." - Nietzsche
“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”
--Sir Edmund Hillary (1919-2008) - New Zealand Mountaineer and First man to Climb Mt. Everest
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.