Rationality quotes: May 2010

ata

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.

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."

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?

0NancyLebovitz16y

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.