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Rationality quotes: April 2010
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.
- 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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 (307)
"Hypocrisy and dissimulation are what keeps social systems strong; it is intellectual honesty that destroys them."
Theodore Dalrymple- The New Vichy Syndrome p. 26.
G. K. Chesterton
That quote had already been posted by Eliezer Yudkowsky on 2/2/2010.
Economists did something even better than predict the crisis. We correctly predicted that we would not be able to predict it.
-William Easterly
How is that better? That doesn't make sense. Predicting that you won't be able to predict something is equivalent to a maximum entropy probability distribution over the outcome. That's a state of zero knowledge. What is -William Easterly attempting to establish with -William Easterly's claim?
Also, what crisis?
I had never previously considered the possibility of James Callaghan uploading into an internet-connected paperclip maximizer, but I guess there's a first time for everything.
He is attempting to establish that William Easterly and other mainstream academic economists do not suck at their jobs and that modern macroeconomics has not been thoroughly discredited by the recent (ongoing) financial crisis. He attempts to do this by claiming that their failure to predict anything correctly is not an indictment of their intellectually bankrupt field but rather a ringing endorsement. In so doing he conveniently ignores those economists and investors who correctly predicted the crisis and explained in detail what was going to happen and why it was going to happen in the years before the crisis.
There's always someone predicting a financial crisis, and when it inevitably happens (and one will eventually come), someone probably predicted it. Was there anyone who predicted the crisis based on reliable methods that we could use to predict another crisis?
Easterly does have a point though - there are two ways to predict a crisis. Infer the implicit market prediction, or predict it yourself. The latter is extremely hard because as soon as you find some reliable method of predicting financial crises and tell the world about it, market prices will change to reflect this knowledge. On the other hand, as soon as the market knows about the crisis, the crisis is beginning (if people know the price of X is going to fall soon, then the price of X will fall now as they all sell it). So in some sense, a crisis has to come out of the blue.
It sounds like Easterly was being sarcastic - taking a jab and macroeconomists who DO try to predict crises.
The Greatest Trade Ever describes how John Paulson's hedge fund identified the coming sub-prime collapse and made $15 billion betting on it. It also covers several other investors who identified the same issues and made money, though most were not as lucky/smart with their timing as Paulson.
The crisis also looks a lot like a classic example of a credit crunch as described by Austrian business cycle theory. Peter Schiff is one of the best known commentators who predicted the broad outlines of the crisis before it really hit.
Now, I'm not saying that Austrian economists have all the answers or that there isn't some element of 'even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day' with the predictions of disaster panning out but there were people out there telling a coherent story about why the economy faced major problems and how the crisis would play out. Some of them were quite accurate on the timing as well. You wouldn't know it from the pronouncements of most economists, bankers and politicians because they look much better if they can proclaim that 'nobody' saw or could have seen the problems coming. I'm a lot more impressed with the likes of Andrew Lahde bowing out with a 'f*ck you' and millions of dollars in profits from betting on disaster and being right than by William Easterly smugly proclaiming vindication of mainstream economics when his profession largely failed at making predictions or even understanding what was going on in the real economy.
"If A=B and B=C and C=D, then do not get a job proofreading." - Quid's Theorem
Nasim Taleb
-Gilgamesh Wulfenbach
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 conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for theirselves. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything.
All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil.
This is the true knowledge.
We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anesthetics and piety with immortality. The universal acid of the true knowledge had burned away a world of words, and exposed a universe of things.
Things we could use.
--Ken MacLeod, The Cassini Division
Currently, humans don't work that way. I mean, sure, we want to survive, and will do a lot of nasty things for it, but if you actually internalize nihilism, crass self-interest, and convention as your moral foundation, then the result will NOT be goodness or truth or beauty. To win, you have to be aware of the mundane roots of things without celebrating them.
See, e.g., Gall's Law and/or Goodhart's Law.
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"
I enjoyed the Pratchett dialogue, but I am not sure I learned from it -- I wind up empathizing with both characters. Are you agreeing with me? Disagreeing with me? What is the converse of a dialogue? I'm confused.
I think part of what bothers me about your Cassini quote is that the claims in the first paragraph are overstated, especially coming from a character who is (presumably) a metaethical nihilist/egoist.
Why, is it so wrong to eat things? Eating seems normal and natural to me; an activity to be celebrated. "Scum" is a kind of life that prevents our usual foods from being healthy for us -- it is thus an odd insult for a carnivore.
Why? If I firmly estimate that other minds exist, does the existence of those minds depend upon my estimation? If other minds exist, why should what matters to them be irrelevant? What does it even mean to say that "might makes right" except that I plan to ignore the concept of "right"? When, in the course of human events, has the power to ignore morality left people truly free?
Really? All the time? Is the world so grim that I must spend all my time eating or face extinction? Surely species and individuals with a significant advantage can spend some of the resulting surplus on frivolous pursuits; what evidence is there that the fate of the world hangs by a razor-thin thread?
You're supposed to, or at least I did. Both are right.
The converse of a logical statement is another statement with the antecedent and consequent swapped. I was using it metaphorically for "another similar take on the same subject". Both these quotes emphasize that there is no morality inherent in the universe. If we want a moral universe, we have to build it ourselves.
The Cassini Division quote actually to me seems rather cheerful. Even from cynicism that deep we can build a good life full of all the things we cherish.
I think that's because they're not coming from a unitary viewpoint. They're bridging between something approximating normal morality, and utter amorality.
The point is not "it's wrong to eat things". The point is that life is what's survived, and it does anything it can to survive. People much the same, though they're better at it.
Of course not.
First ask why should what matters to them be relevant?
Well, because:
1. You want to live under conditions such that they are.
2. They're useful to you, and you to them, and cooperation can make you both better off than a bitter fight to the death.
But neither of these is fundamental.
It means that the concept of right is not fundamental, is not baked into the fabric of the universe. Right only means something relative to the minds that hold it. And they can only enforce that with might. Try reading it as "might effects right".
Well, the simplest answer is when people have the power to ignore morality forced upon them by others that they don't agree with. If a gay man is free to ignore the moral judgements of an Imam in a Sharia country, he is freer to have sex with whom he pleases, how he pleases. A slave that has the power to escape is freer. A person is freer when they can do something that pleases them rather than the high-paying stressful job that their parents tell them is what they should do.
All the time.
The "frivolous pursuits" are both the thriving and what is in your interests. You interests include both accumulating the surplus and spending it on what matters to you.
The times where it is survival on the line, rather than thriving, can be much rarer.
All right, all of that is interesting. I would use some of the words you use differently, but none of your definitions are unreasonable, and now that I understand what you're really saying, I agree with most of it.
I still disagree that the interests of others are non-fundamental; there are causes I would die for, which your philosophy seems to forbid. Perhaps I still don't understand your stance on that point.
Also, this may be nitpicky, but at this point in history, life is not "what survived." The ocean, the moon, the molten core of the Earth, the Sun, and, so far as we know, much of the rest of the galaxy are made of nonliving matter that is roughly as enduring as life. Life has not yet succeeded in eating everything else.
:-)
You're free to do so, should you decide that's what you value.
It's not my philosophy, or at most only a minor part. I like seeing what this viewpoint illuminates, and thought others here would as well. Judging by the karma swings on the post, it has proven controversial. Hopefully it's provoked some thought in doing so.
Nitpicks are good. That's an entirely fair point. I wavered between this formulation and a statement that life is the only thing that uses other matter, which I think is closer to expressing a violation of the Kantian categorical imperative (second formulation), and hence a common formulation of evil. (Or as Pratchett expressed it: "And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.")
Me too!
As long as you're accepting nitpicks, I don't think your Kantian formulation holds much water either. Kant teaches that you can't use people as means to an end, but he would probably encourage you to use things as means to an end; certainly he chides people who want to leave well enough alone (thereby saving resources) for not developing their latent talents.
A hookworm might be evil under a modernish Kantian framework because it is life treating other life as a means to an end; ditto fire, which is matter treating other matter as a means to an end. A lichen, though, is well within its rights (as life) to treat the rock it sits on (matter) as means to an end, and people (as the only known Kantian-rational agents) are well within their rights to treat wheat (mere life) as means to an end.
Mastication is only one form of eating. As a Westerner, I consume a large portion of our world's resources in the form of energy, household goods, large appliances, transportation, gadgets, taxes to fund war efforts, etc.
As for imposing our will upon life, just look at factory farms, algae farms, dead zones in the sea, global warming, and war. Might is truly the final arbiter, and unless part of what we care about is the other, then we show a good track record of trampling them for our own uses.
Our present (relative) peace was brought about by people who felt the rights of others mattered, and had the might to back it up and impose it on those who felt differently.
not trying to be glib here, but:
"• Do not quote yourself." -4wnoise
Voltaire
Edit: All right, then, here's another one:
Robert Heinlein
--Aristotle
Repeat.
Richard Bellman, "Eye of the Hurricane"
Counterfactual: the theory of evolution is one of the most successful scientific theories, yet it contains no equations; nor numbers. It is rather a framework of ideas in which observations can be made sense of.
I tend to agree with you that numbers are inessential in a scientific theory, and that Darwin's theory is a good example of this. But your critics also have a point that some nice math has been added to the theory since Darwin's time. (Not enough of a point to justify downvoting you, though, IMHO).
As a smaller scale example of a non-numerical scientific theory, consider the theory that the historical branching order of the Great Ape family tree is "First orangutan, then gorilla, then man, leaving the two species of chimp." That is a meaningful and testable scientific theory as it stands, even though there are no numbers involved. But what spoils my example a little is the observation that this theory is improved by adding numbers. "Orangutan branched ~12M years ago, gorilla 6M, man 5M, bonobo 0.5M."
Price's Equation? Fisher's fundamental theorem? Hardy-Weinberg law?
Sounds like a traditional-rationality precursor to "hypotheses are expectation-constrainers".
It doesn't sound like that to me. Can you elaborate?
Well, the quote could be interpreted as "Any scientific theory must ultimately produce some numbers, so that reality can be measured and we can see whether the numbers match."
Another interpretation is "A scientific theory ultimately isn't a scientific theory at all unless it's essentially a set of equations."
-- Snocone, in a Slashdot post
Could someone explain why this has been voted up so much? I didn't find it particularly funny, or to have any non-trivial insight.
It shoehorns the use of giggle-inducing curse words into an explanation of religious views. Someone who has only ever been exposed to Beavis and Butthead cartons, and has never heard about "agnosticism," might be able to learn from this type of explanation.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, A Scandal in Bohemia
--Robert A. Heinlein
Sad, but true.
Gall's Law:
John Gall, "Systemantics"
Counterexample: Space shuttle.
Really? I think only 6 of them were built, and 2 of those suffered catastrophic failure with all hands lost.
It doesn't qualify 100%, because there were little prototype shuttles. Still, you have a point. If we have good theories, we can build pretty big systems from scratch. Gall's law resonates especially strongly with programmers because much of programming doesn't have good theories, and large system-building endeavors fail all the time.
Even if there hadn't been prototype shuttles, the shuttle is still reducible to simpler components. Gall Law just articulates that before you can successfully design something like the space shuttle you have to understand how all of its simpler components work.
If an engineer (or even transhuman AI) had sat down and started trying to design the space shuttle, without knowledge of rocketry, aerodynamics, circuits, springs, or screws, it would be pulling from a poorly constrained section of the space of possible designs, and is unlikely to get something that works.
The way this problem is solved is to work backwards until you get to simple components. The shuttle designer realizes his shuttle will need wings, so starts to design the wing, realizes the wing has a materials requirement, so starts to develop the material. He continues to work back until he gets to the screws and rivets that hold the wing together, and other simple machines.
In engineering, once you place the first atom in your design, you have already made a choice about atomic mass and charge. Complex patterns of atoms like space shuttles will include many subdivisions (components) that must be designed, and Gall's Law illustrates that they must be designed and understood before the designer has a decent chance of the space shuttle working.
I think you completely miss the point of Gall's law. It's not about understanding individual components. Big software projects still fail, even though we understand if-statements and for-loops pretty well.
I know that.
It's about an evolution from simpler systems to more complex systems. Various design phases of the space shuttle aren't what falsify that example. It's the evolution of rocket propulsion, aircraft, and spacecraft, and their components.
(EDIT: Also, at no point was I suggesting that understanding of components guarantees success in designing complex systems, but that it is neccessary. For a complex system to work it must have all working components, reduced down to the level of simple machines. Big software projects would certainly fail if the engineers didn't have knowledge of if-statements and for-loops.)
In addition to NMJablonski's point, it is perhaps arguable just how well the Space Shuttle worked. In hindsight it seems that the same amount of orbital lift capacity could have been done rather more cheaply.
It works for a job it isn't used for: launching into a polar orbit to emplace secret military satellites, and gliding a very long distance back to base without a need for a splashdown recovery that might risk its secrecy.
That's what gave it the wings, and once you have the wings the rest of the design follows.
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.
The Columbia shuttle crew would still be with us if this were correct.
Then if that qualifies, what would falsify Gall's Law?
Further reply:
I was contemplating this exchange and wondering whether Gall's Law has any value (constrains expected experience).
I think it does. If an engineer today claimed to have successfully designed an Albucierre engine, I would probably execute an algorithm similar to Gall's Law and think:
The technology does not yet exist to warp space to any degree, nor is there an existing power source which could meet the needs of this device. The engineer's claim to have developed a device which can be bound to a craft, controllably warp space, and move it faster than light is beyond existing technological capability. We are too many Gall Steps away for it to be probable.
Basically, the shuttle is a system of rockets carrying a space-worthy airplane as payload. Both of these components had predecessors. Had the shuttle been the first rocket or first space-worthy airplane, it would have falsified Gall's Law.
I'm not sure.
Isn't the first rocket or airplane also built on simple technologies?
Couldn't one continue to reduce components to simpler devices until you get to basic joints, inclined planes, tensors (springs), incendiary materials (fuel), etc - that all would have had to be developed and understood before an engineer could design the rocket / airplane?
(EDIT: I realize that I'm essentially positing that Gall's Law holds if all technology should be reducible to simple machines, and that what we call "technology" is improving, refining, and combining those designs.)
I'm not saying that the first rocket and first airplane falsified Gall's Law. I'm saying that, had the space shuttle, in the form in which it was actually built, been the first rocket or the first airplane, it would have falsified Gall's Law.
Suppose a hyperintelligent alien race did build a space shuttle equivalent as their first space-capable craft, and then went on to build interplanetary and interstellar craft.
Alien 1: The [interstellar craft, driven by multiple methods of propulsion and myriad components] disproves Gall's Law.
Alien 2: Not at all. [Craft] is a simple extension of well-developed principles like the space shuttle and the light sail.
You can simply define a "working simple system" as whatever you can make work, making that a pure tautology.
I would say that Gall's Law is about the design capacities of human beings (like Dunbar's Number), or is something like "there's a threshold to how much new complexity you can design and expect to work", with the amount of complexity being different for humans, superintelligent aliens, chimps, or Mother Nature.
(the limit is particularly low fo Mother Nature - she makes smaller steps, but got to make much more of them)
That's not my point. My point is that Gall's law is unfalsifiable by anything short of Omega converting its entire light cone into computronium/utilium in a single, plank-time step.
Edit: Not to say that Gall's Law can't be useful to keep in mind during engineering design.
I agree.
All of these concepts are imprecisely connected to the real world. Does anyone have an idea for how we could more precisely define Gall's Law to more ably discuss real expected experience?
I'm considering a definition which might include the phrase:
"Reducible to previously understood components"
I think the key insight here is that you get a limited number of bits, in design space, to bridge between things that have already been shown to work, and things that have yet to be shown to do so.
For purposes of Gall's law, we are interested in the number of bits of design that went into the space shuttle without ever having been previously shown to work. So you have to subtract off the complexity of "the idea of an airplane", which we already had, and of the solid fuel booster rockets, which we already knew how to build; and also of any subassembly which got built and tested successfully in a lab first -- but perhaps leaving some bits or fraction of a bit to account for the unknown environment when using them on the real shuttle, versus in the lab.
The first development of the electronic circuit would have been a case of a complex technological system that worked, but was not based fundamentally upon existing simpler machines. The first use of chemical propulsion - gunpowder / rocketry - might have been a similar case.
(EDIT: Upon further consideration, chemical propulsion is based upon the simpler technologies of airtight confinement and incendiary materials. However, I still think the electronic circuit was effectively the rise of a new fundamental device with complex behavior unconnected to more basic technologies. If anyone thinks they can reduce the circuit to simpler working devices I would be fascinated to explore that.)
It's a good question. I'm turning over various possibilities in my mind.
Do you still hold that the space shuttle falsifies it?
If so, I'd be interesting in hearing your reasoning, and other examples you consider similar.
Electroplating and electrolysis of water both involve a circuit, but aren't overwhelmingly complex. Samuel Thomas von Sommering's electrochemical telegraph was based on electrolysis. It's not like someone pulled doped silicon semiconductors straight out of the lightning-struck sand.
The "inverse proposition" given is actually the contrapositive of (i.e. is equivalent to) the original statement.
-- Anne Frank, 3 May 1944, aged 14
Sir Kenneth Clarke, "Civilisation" (Excerpt on YouTube.)
These seem mostly like applause lights.
"Applause light" is the applause light here.
-- Jack Handey's Deep Thoughts
"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."
One of the most insidious sources of confusion, I find, is the distinction between the meaning of a word and its most frequent uses. It ties into the whole "Applause Lights" phenomenon, particularly "Fake Norms".
P.S. Belatedly: Welcome to Less Wrong! Feel free to introduce yourself in that thread.
-- Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics
This reminds me of B. F. Skinner's criticism of William James
Before he can add something of substance to the discussion of the epistemological problems of economics, Ludwig von Mises must look back in time, to previous events, and offer them as the explanation of why we want or desire things and why we also call those things agreeable or good.
I think Mises's point is rather that concepts like "good," "bad," "evil," "right," "wrong," "ought to" and "rights" all reduce back down to variations on "I desire it"/"It brings me pleasure" and the opposite. In other words, all ethical systems are dressed up (subjective) consequentialism and they only appear otherwise due to semantic confusion.
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
Death by Lob's Theorem to this quote.
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.
What if I am right 9 times out of 10 when I say I am 90% sure of something, but I am never or very rarely more than 50% sure of propositions of the form "This stock's price will go up/down, over a relevant time frame"?
-- Christopher Hitchens
One thing that bugs me about this quote is that it isn't strong enough. It might give people the impression that it's up to the reader's opinion or personal preference to decide what to believe or not believe. They're allowed to believe in something they have no evidence for, you're allowed to dismiss it, everyone's happy.
Well, clearly we can assert anything we want, so the quote becomes:
And we notice that evidence doesn't change depending on whether you're considering something for belief or dismissal, so the quote becomes:
So Hitchens is really telling us that prior probabilities tend to be small, which is true since there are almost always many possible hypotheses that the probability mass is split between.
You're assuming that probability mass tends to be split between stuff. This would be true, if all interesting statements were mutually exclusive or something. But consider the hypothesis that at least one statement in the Bible is true. This hypothesis is very complex, and yet its prior probability is very large.
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.
Well the evidence here isn't really "the fact that it has been asserted" but "the fact that it has been asserted in a context where truthfulness and authority are usually assumed". The assertion itself doesn't carry the weight. If we're playing poker and in the middle of a big hand I tell you "I have the best hand possible, you should fold." that isn't evidence of anything since it has been asserted in a context where assumptions about truthfulness have been flung out the window.
Or it's sufficient to conclude that one's estimate should be less than 1/2^5. Without providing additional evidence (such as "I saw the THHTT outcome") your claim is rather dubious and -- in the realm of humans -- this probably is a good indicator that you are lying or are crazy. I'm not sure how one should update your posteriors.
Suppose I tell you that my password is D!h98+3(dkE4. Do you conclude that since I don't want you to know my password, I must be trying to mislead you as to what my password is, and so the probability that this is my password is actually less than 1/95^12?
If I assert that the outcome as THHTT, either I'm lying or I'm not lying, and there's little evidence either way. What little evidence there is probably doesn't push my probability of telling the truth below 3%, and surely the strength of the evidence has little, if anything, to do with the prior probability of the coin showing THHTT.
Good point. Thanks for batting down my idiocy here, much obliged =D
"There are no married bachelors."
My dad has a Bachelor's degree.
Is he married?
Yes, to mom.
"There are no married unmarried men."
I add this grudgingly, as deliberately seeking ambiguity in a clear sentence is just being fatuous; it's not a valid objection.
I was wrong. On further reflection, this is a failed attempt to refute this point, though I don't think the ensuing discussion of Kant actually gets to why.
If you're familiar with the definition of bachelor, then this statement equates to, "There are no unmarried married men." Any statement of the form "No A are not-A" is completely uninformative. As it can be decided a priori for any consistent value of A, stating it demonstrates nothing.
If you aren't clear on the meaning of bachelor, then this statement would require a citation of the definition in order to be convincing. This would constitute supporting evidence, and it would serve to demonstrate the meaning of "bachelor."
Thus, this does not go to refute the claim that an assertion without supporting evidence demonstrates nothing, as that is clearly the case here.
Tom and Sue, acquaintances through friends of theirs, got legally married, with no ceremony, in order for Tom to avoid being drafted to fight in a war. They barely know each other. They have not spoken to each other in a long time and (obviously) have no children. Neither wears a wedding ring. They plan to void the marriage as soon as the laws allow, with no further transfer of property between them.
Tom is a married bachelor.
There's a reason the term "bachelor" exists, and it's not to make Kant right.
This is just playing with connotations. A bachelor is an unmarried man, so one could say that Tom acts like a bachelor despite being married. He is not a bachelor, though. To show this has a practical implication, assume Tom met Mary: the two could not get married immediately. If he were a bachelor, they could. He therefore lacks necessary properties of bachelorness (most significantly, not being married), and cannot be a bachelor, even if he may live his life much as a bachelor would.
This just looks like an instance of using contradictory language to indicate that Tom fits the the conventional definitions of neither a bachelor or a married man. You could also say Tom is a single spouse. Bachelor happens to have connotations of referring to lifestyle rather than legal status which makes your meaning plainer. The fact that language is flexible enough to get around logic doesn't mean married bachelor isn't a logical contradiction or that Kant is wrong.
My point is that we have words because they call out a useful, albeit fuzzy, blob of conceptspace. We may try to claim that two words mean the same thing, but if there are different words, there's probably a reason -- because we want to reference different concepts ("connotations") in someone's mind.
It's important to distinguish between the concepts we are trying to reference, vs. some objective equivalence we think exists in the territory. The territory actually includes minds that think different thoughts on hearing "unmarried" vs. "bachelor".
ETA: My point regarding Kant was this: He should have seen statements like "All bachelors are unmarried" as evidence regarding how humans decide to use words, not as evidence for the existence of certain categories in reality's most fundamental ontology.
"All things end badly - or else they wouldn't end"
Almost all relationships end in unhappiness or death. Or unhappiness leading to death.
"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)
Claude Lévi-Strauss
I'm a big fan of Ken Binmore, and this quote captures a lot of my dissatisfaction with LW's directions of inquiry. For example, it's more or less taken for granted here that future superintelligent AIs should cooperate on the Prisoner's Dilemma, so some of us set out to create a general theory of "superintelligent AIs" (including ones built by aliens, etc.) that would give us the answer we like.
Would it be correct to say you mean "should" in the wishful thinking sense of "we really want this outcome," rather than something normative or probabilistic?
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.
But blowing out the candle actually would make it easier to find your way (it ruins your night vision).
Not if the forest is sufficiently dark that your night vision doesn't have enough light to work with.
That seems like an easy case to test, provided you have some way to re-light the candle.
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]
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.
Daniel Dennett, interview for TPM: The Philosopher's Magazine
If the point is to get them to answer or reason about the topic, then I think we should reject the statement that "there is no polite way of asking." We should find a way of asking politely, such as teaching them to process our questions instead of answering with cached thoughts. Being offensive doesn't win.
I also think it's a poorly phrased question, since it's easily brushed off with "yes/no", avoiding any of the deeper implications in an apparent effort to make it catchy and instantly polarizing.
If the point is to upset people, to feel righteous, or to signal tribal affiliation, then go right ahead.
This is not universally true, but I would support trying to create nonoffensive ways to deliver the message - the combination of direct and conciliatory methods is probably more powerful than either alone.
Yes, I considered that to be the primary statement under contention.
It's not a strategy I wish to use, so I decided to speak out against it even as I realize that's kind of the point, to have purists who can continue to show that there's further to go, and a spectrum of other positions to provide a more gradual path.
I recognize the potential usefulness of it even as I deride it; I am good cop.
Crap Mariner (Lawrence Simon)
The opposite of rose-tinted spectacles: shit-tinted shades.
--Sarpedon, The Iliad, as quoted in Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation
PartiallyClips
Shai Simonson and Fernando Gouvea, "How to Read Mathematics"
-- The Gods, XKCD
"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
I prefer Yeats' phrasing:
By the way, I am uncertain as to how to think about the quantification (number / proportion / "ballpark estimate") of real people who fit the concept of Russel's "wiser people", or Yeats' "best".
How far off would I be if I were to estimate the quantity of such wiser and better people as "less than one third of the population of any given tribe" ?
Is anyone brave enough to say it should be thought of as a drastically smaller quantity?
Is anyone brave enough to realize how much they themselves actually fit the description for the "fools and fanatics" or "worst" -- and then, after realizing it, actually become the better?
Or am I perhaps better off to not pick at the idea?
I'm quite comfortable to ballpark < 5%.
That is about my impression too. I'm less sure about the 'worst'. I'd go with up to a third but perhaps symmetry is intended.
Phillip K. Dick
Welcome to Less Wrong, though! Introduce yourself.
Duplicate.
-- Gautama Buddha
I like to point out that spreading this quote is an example of violating it: Buddha never said that. I'm not sure who did originally write it, but it's not found in any Buddhist primary source. "Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many!"
I've heard it might be a rough paraphrase of a quote from the Kalama Sutta, but in its original form, it would not qualify as a "rationality quote"; it's more a defense of belief in belief, advising people to accept things as true based on whether believing it is true tends to increase one's happiness.
Edit: See RichardKennaway's reply; he is correct about this one. I think I was thinking of a different quote along similar lines.
What is a Buddhist primary source? None of the discourses were written down until some centuries after the Buddha's time. The discourses that we have do themselves exist and whatever their provenance before the earliest extant documents, they are part of the canon of Buddhism. The canon has accreted layers over the centuries, but the Kalama Sutta is part of the earliest layer, the Tripitaka.
You've heard? That it might be? :-)
It is readily available online in English translation. It attributes these words directly to the Buddha:
and in another translation:
If I had the time, I'd be tempted to annotate the passage with LessWrong links.
ETA: For the second translation, the corresponding paragraph is actually the one preceding the one I quoted. The sutta in fact contains three paragraphs listing these ten faulty sources of knowledge. Buddhist scriptures are full of repetitions and lists, probably to assist memorisation.
ETA2: Rationalist version: Do not rest on weak Bayesian evidence, but go forth and collect strong.
Great catch. Upvoted.
I actually don't think this is right though. I'm pretty sure the original form is about the importance of personal knowledge from direct experience. I think the wikipedia article makes this clear, actually. I suppose you're taking your reading from:
But the emphasis here should be on "when you yourselves know", not "these things lead to benefit and happiness". Keep in mind the kind of teachings being addressed are often strategies for happiness so it makes sense to be concerned with whether or not a teaching really does increase happiness.
I don't see why we can't take it as an injunction to trust only experiment and observation. It seems about right to me.
(ETA: Except of course he's talking about meditation not experiment and ignores self-deception, placebo effect, brain diversity and the all important intersubjective confirmation, but I'll take what I can get from the 5th century B.C.E.)
We must be careful who we let define what is sustainable.
Jason Stoddard in Shine, an anthology of near-future optimistic science fiction.
-- 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 offensive rebounds "keep shooting it" might be a good message. I don't know a lot about the sport. But even hockey players aren't shooting from the other side of the rink.
Outside sports there are occasions where 'missing' is worse than 'not shooting' and if the chances of 'missing' are high enough or the cost of 'missing' sufficiently high it can be a really bad idea to 'shoot'.
Seen on bumper sticker, via ^zhurnaly.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --- Aristotle
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.
-Louis Aragon
-David Stevens
--via The Economist, "a saying of statisticians".
--von Neumann
-- Clay Shirky
http://friendlyatheist.com/2008/02/29/complete-the-atheist-joke-1/
My initial response was to chuckle, but when my analytical capacities kicked in a moment later I was disappointed.
If his initial assumptions was that he was walking into a bar, does that make him atheist in this metaphor? Substitute "walked into a bar" by "believed there is a god", the thing I assume it is a metaphor of. You will see it makes no sense.
I think it makes sense, as a poke at atheists.
Think about it this way. You walk into a bar, and you see no bartender. In your mind, you say "anything that is a bar will have a bartender. No bar tender, not a bar." Of course, the best thing to do before revising your assumptions is to wait for a bar tender. Maybe he/she is in the bathroom.
Similarly, if you claim there is no evidence of god that I've seen in my lifetime, you are using the wrong measure. Why should god (if there is one) make itself obvious during the short period that is a human lifetime.
This is almost an "irrationality quote" instead of a rationality quote, but still enlightening.
I was with you up until the "similarly". After that you start privileging the hypothesis - you should expect a god to make itself obvious during a human lifetime, by any description of a god ever proposed in history.
Many atheists were formerly theists.
Still, I suppose it might have been better as "A scientist walked into what he thought was a bar, but seeing no bartender, barstools, or drinks, he revised his initial assumption and decided he only walked into a room."
--- Mark Liberman
"In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined."
Thomas Szaz
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.
Deleated as a repeat.
A repeat, but a good one.
WIlliam Thomson, Lord Kelvin
One I got while reading Jaynes's Probability Theory recently:
-- Laplace
The wizard who reads a thousand books is powerful. The wizard who memorizes a thousand books is insane.
Bertrand Russell
Note: phaedrus has provided a citation to "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism", noting that this quote is only part of the sentence.
Oooh, thanks to RobinZ and phaedrus! I hadn't seen the second part, and didn't have the citation.
Thanks RobinZ, The full quote is "Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise, and everything precise is so remote from everything that we normally think, that you cannot for a moment suppose that is what we really mean when we say what we think."
But the partial quote is much more crisp.
Alfred North Whitehead
Freeman Dyson
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.
Wow - I think I felt real physical pain in my eyes as I read that one.
-- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
The author was transformed by reading "Behavior: The Control of Perception"(1973) and began a research program whose early years(?) seem to have been summarized in "Mind Readings: Experimental Studies of Purpose"(1992)
This has been discussed here before.
The problem is that Marken's models don't actually have predictive power; he just fits a function to the data using as many free parameters as he has data points, and marvels at the perfect fit thus derived. One doesn't need to think highly of the current state of psychology to realize that Marken is a crank, and that any recognition Marken has in the PCT community is a sign that they are bereft of actual experimental support if not basic scientific reasoning skills.
The interaction you linked to was interesting. I didn't realize there was already a back story within this community with positions staked out and such. I offered the quote because it seemed like a beautifully mathematical objection to existing work that was "up this community's alley" but I haven't worked into the actual mathematics or experiments themselves. For example, I hadn't purchased either of the books that I linked to, not have I studied them - I simply assigned them high EV given the quality of the author's text.
Your comments, in the interaction you linked to, seem like a good arguments against Marken's theory (specifically the claim that his work involves more free parameters than data points appears to be a good argument against the theory, if true). However, in all of that back and forth, I noticed many links to "lesswrong heuristics" but I didn't notice any outside links to an actual research papers detailing methodology.
I'm substantially more ignorant on the subject than either you or your previous interlocutor and it took me a while to even understand that "PCT" was the theory Marken supports, that you two were taking the pro and con towards it, that your text was mostly between each other with a substantial amount of knowledge assumed. I wish you had both linked more, because it would have been educational.
That said, I'd like to see such links if you know of any. If I can swiftly dismiss Marken's work without further thought, that would be a very efficient use of time. Can you direct me to the links showing an example of his experimental work so I can verify that his research program is crippled by mathematical overfitting? The best I could find was Perceptual organization of behavior: A hierarchical control model of coordinated action but it was pay-walled so I can't access it now to look into it myself.
The paper discussed in that interaction can be found here without a paywall.
As stated then (the conversation can be taken up from about here if not earlier), I think it's quite likely that simple control circuits can be found in facets of motor response; but Powers, Marken and Eby had been talking about control theory in cognitive domains (like akrasia) as if they could isolate simple circuits there, and my search for any kind of evidence turned up only this sort of embarrassing tripe.
And really, the math here is important— it's not a matter of disagreeing with interpretation, it's the plain fact that a generic model with 4 free parameters can be tweaked to precisely fit 4 data points, and it's clear from the paper that this is what Marken did. You simply need more data points than free parameters in order to generate any evidence in favor of a model; the fact that he never mentioned this, and instead crowed about the impressive fit of his model to the data, indicate either gross ignorance of how mathematical models work, or outright intent to mislead (coupled with an utterly incompetent peer review process.)
The gauntlet remains thrown, if anyone wants to point to an experimental study which demonstrates a discernible control circuit in a cognitive task (apart from tasks, like tracking a dot, which have an obvious motor component— in these, I do expect control circuits to be a good model for certain behavior). I would be surprised, but it would suffice to give credence to the theory in my eyes.
Through judicious abuse of my employer's resources, I have acquired a copy of the PDF - PM me an email address and I'll send it to you.
Thanks Robin! I have read this paper now, but it still doesn't seem to address the arguments that orthonormal linked to :-/
The 1986 study appeared to me to be basically well done, offering a fascinating paradigm that could be extended in many directions for further research with a reasonably strong result by itself. It basically confirmed the positive claims of Marken that hierarchical arrangements of negative feedback loop systems (designed, with a handful of optimized parameters, and then left alone) can roughly reproduce trained human behavior in a variety of dynamically changing toy domains, supporting the contention that whatever is operating in the human nervous system after a period of training is doing roughly the same effective computations as the model.
In the text, Merken addresses the "motor control literature" as making claims whose refutation was partly the purpose of his experiments.
It required a little more googling to figure out the claims he was trying to reject... but basically he seems to be objecting to the claim that mammals work as open loop controllers (that is, generating action signals based on an internal model of the world that are sent into the world with no verification loop or secondary corrections). This claim appears to have been founded mostly on things called "deafferentiation experiments"... which turned out to be aesthetically horrifying and also turned out to not actually prove the general case of "open loop" claims.
The most infamous of these experiments, (warning - kind of disturbing pictures) was basically:
The ability of monkeys mutilated in this fashion to (eventually?) move around purposively was taken as evidence that there was not a hierarchically arranged set of negative feedback motor control systems implemented in their nervous system. In practice (after the scientist was arrested for animal cruelty, PETA's request for custody was denied, and the monkeys were brainscanned, euthanized, and autopsied) it turned out that the monkey's brains had been massively re-wired by the experience. The practical upshot of the experiments seem to have primarily been to serve as dramatic evidence of adult primate brain plasticity (which they didn't believe in, back then?) rather than as confirmation of a negative feedback theory of motor control. (Probably there's more to it than that, but this is my first draft understanding.)
Merken dismisses these experiments in part by pointing out the difficulty of preventing negative feedback control processes if there are many sub controllers that can use measurements partially correlated to the measure being optimized and concludes with falsification examples and criteria for the general theory and the particular model that are not subject to this objection:
In short, I'm still impressed by Merken. His reasoning seems clean, his experiment, robust, his criticisms of motor-control and trait-theory, well reasoned. My very broad impression is that there may be a over-arching background argument here between "accurate model in the head producing aim and fire success" versus "incremental goal accomplishment via well tuned reflexes and continuous effort"? If that back story is operative then I guess my posterior probability was just pushed a little more in the direction of "reflexes and effort" over "models and plans".
If there is some trick still lurking here, Orthonormal, that you could point me to and spell out in detail rather than by reference to assertions and hand-waving rationality heuristics, that would be appreciated. The more time I spend on Merken's work, the more I find to appreciate. At this point, I've spend a day or two on this and I think the burden of proof is on you. If you take it up successfully I would be in your debt for rubbing a bit of sand out of my eyes :-)
I don't understand what the quote is trying to say. What are the unrecognized consequences of the open-loop model?
It sounds like the author is upset that psychologists don't believe he has a model of behavior that explains 99% of some output variable using only one input variable. I'd have a hard time believing too.
Tom Siegfried, Odds Are, It's Wrong, on the many failings of traditional statistics in modern science.
--Voltaire
""Not evil, but longing for that which is better, more often directs the steps of the erring"
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
-- R Scott Bakker, Neuropath
You mean, like every Bayesian believes their prior is correct?
Prior can't be judged. It's not assumed to be "correct". It's just the way you happen to process new info and make decisions, and there is no procedure to change the way it is from inside the system.
Locked in, huh? Then I don't want to be a Bayesian.
If someone was locked in to a belief, then they'd use a point mass prior. All other priors express some uncertainty.
Since you are already locked in in some preference anyway, you should figure out how to compute within it best (build a FAI).
What makes you say that? It's not true. My preferences have changed many times.
Distinguish formal preference and likes. Formal preference is like prior: both current beliefs and procedure for updating the beliefs; beliefs change, but not the procedure. Likes are like beliefs: they change all the time, according to formal preference, in response to observations and reflection. Of course, we might consider jumping to a meta level, where the procedure for updating beliefs is itself subject to revision; this doesn't really change the game, you've just named some of the beliefs changing according to fixed prior "object-level priors", and named the process of revising those beliefs according to the fixed prior "process of changing object-level prior".
When formal preference changes, it by definition means that it changed not according to (former) formal preference, that is something undesirable happened. Humans are not able to hold their preference fixed, which means that their preferences do change, what I call "value drift".
You are locked in in some preference in normative sense, not factual. This means that value drift does change your preference, but it is actually desirable (for you) for your formal preference to never change.
I object to your talking about "formal preference" without having a formal definition. Until you invent one, please let's talk about what normal humans mean by "preference" instead.
Bayesians don't believe they lucked into their priors. They have a reflectively consistent causal explanation for their priors.
Even if their explanation were correct, they would still have lucked into them. Others have different priors and no doubt different causes for their priors. So those Bayesians would have been lucky, in order to have the causes that would produce correct priors instead of incorrect ones.
Priors can't be correct or incorrect.
(Clarified in detail in this comment.)
This downvoting should be accompanied with discussion. I've answered the objections that were voiced, but naturally I can't refute an incredulous stare.
Sounds mysterious to me. Priors are not claims about the world?
Not quite. They are the way you process claims about the world. A claim has to come in context of a method for its evaluation, but prior can only be evaluated by comparing it to itself...
But that still doesn't need to be luck. I got my priors offa evolution and they are capable of noticing when something works or doesn't work a hundred times in a row. True, if I had a different prior, I wouldn't care about that either. But even so, that I have this prior is not a question of luck.
Then it would make sense to use some evolutionary thingy instead of Bayesianism as your basic theory of "correct behavior", as Shalizi has half-jokingly suggested.
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.
I think I agree with that: There's nothing necessarily delusive about believing you got lucky, but it should generally require (at least) an amount of evidence proportional to the amount of purported luck.
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Charles Darwin, "The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals", ch.3.