NancyLebovitz comments on Rationality quotes: May 2010 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: ata 01 May 2010 05:48AM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 May 2010 02:40:06PM 3 points [-]

"The choice that you make, your decision, is based on such positive knowledge that the second alternative may as well not exist."

Dumping information if you're simply swamped may well be a good strategy, but the quote is about understanding what you're doing so well that you know what the best choice is.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 01 May 2010 03:26:27PM *  3 points [-]

I don't see that in the quote. It sounds to me like a justification for imposing religious thought-boundaries.

Wikipedia says: "The Teachers of Gurdjieff (ISBN 0-87728-213-7) is a book by Rafael Lefort that purports to describe a journey to the middle east and central Asia in search of the sources of Gurdjieff's teaching, and culminates in the author's own spiritual awakening, by meeting and "opening" to the teachings of the Naqshbandi Sufis."

Comment author: RichardKennaway 01 May 2010 07:10:17PM 1 point [-]

I don't see that in the quote. It sounds to me like a justification for imposing religious thought-boundaries.

Do you see that in the quote? Or only in the frame?

Comment author: PhilGoetz 03 May 2010 05:55:15PM 1 point [-]

I'm not able to interpret the quote without fitting it into some pre-existing frame.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 01 May 2010 04:03:31PM 0 points [-]

As I understand it, Gurdieff and such are claiming it's possible to have sufficiently reliable knowledge such that basing action on anything else obviously isn't attractive.

That kind of certainty does exist in some realms-- if someone claims to have trisected the angle or built a perpetual motion machine, you can be sure there's a mistake or fraud somewhere, and you also aren't going to spend your time trying to achieve those projects yourself.

Whether such knowledge is possible for more complex situations isn't obvious, but I do think that's where he's pointing.

Comment author: Yvain 01 May 2010 04:35:56PM *  4 points [-]

Reading the quote and your explanation, I thought of this:

Through my mind flashed the passage:

"Do nothing because it is righteous, or praiseworthy, or noble, to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do, and which you cannot do in any other way."

Doing what it seemed good to do, had only led me astray.

So I called a full stop.

And I decided that, from then on, I would follow the strategy that could have saved me if I had followed it years ago: Hold my FAI designs to the higher standard of not doing that which seemed like a good idea, but only that which I understood on a sufficiently deep level to see that I could not do it in any other way.

-- My Bayesian Enlightenment

Comment author: CronoDAS 01 May 2010 08:41:13PM 6 points [-]

"Do nothing because it is righteous, or praiseworthy, or noble, to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do, and which you cannot do in any other way."

If I took that advice literally, I wouldn't do much of anything at all.

Comment author: [deleted] 02 May 2010 03:40:06AM 0 points [-]

I'm resisting googling this... Ursula K. Le Guin, right? Though it sounds like something out of the Dhammapada.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 02 May 2010 06:24:35AM 1 point [-]

Yes, the Farthest Shore. here or here

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