From Thomas Macaulay's 1848 History of England.
[W]e are under a deception similar to that which misleads the traveler in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan all is dry and bare; but far in advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of refreshing waters... A similar illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and civilization. But if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana.
.................................
...We too shall in our turn be o
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
-- Douglas Adams
The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance—meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his powers, and so set his understanding in motion.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Norman Kemp Smith), p. A5/B8.
If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.
-- Bertrand Russell
I was worried by my own conclusion, so I built a mathematical model to check it*:
Suppose that there is an urn with 100 balls. You're 99% sure that there are 99 white balls and 1 black, but there's a 1% chance that there are 99 black balls and 1 white.
You're about to be scored on the probability you assign to the correct state of the urn, using a logarithmic scoring method, but before that happens your friend takes a ball from the urn, looks at it, and puts it back. Your friend then tells you what colour it was.
Your prior that your friend would lie is 10%.
Suppose you are given the chance to check the colour of the ball your friend drew. How much are you willing to pay for this knowledge? Will you pay more or less if your friend said that the ball was black?
By my calculations** the expected utility
if your friend said "white", and you don't check is -0.013581774
if your friend said "white", and you check is -0.0037359
if your friend said "black", and you don't check is -0.391529169
if your friend said "black", and you check is -0.155101993
So your you will pay 0.0098 to check if your friend said "white" but 0.2364 if they said "black...
I agree. But, as a slight tangent, I think that after we've dealt with basic problems of rationality - that cause much confusion when poetic language is mixed with science - there is still the fact that science has undeniable aesthetic and emotional effects on people familiar with it. Those things are part of the fun, apart from doing science strictly in order to win, which may have gave Eliezer the idea of weirdtopia with secretive science. Also, I think that being artistically refined and poignant about science differs greatly from plain mysticism. The latter is often a vacuous and cheap trick to invoke a warm fuzzy feeling. The real feat would be to be artistic with the purpose of making people feel emotions that fit the facts.
(In a thread where people were asked whether or not they had a religious experience of "feeling God"):
I had something similar to feeling God, I suppose, except it was in essence the exact opposite. I was in a forest one summer, and I looked up at the sunlight shining through the leaves, and suddenly it felt like I could see each and every individual leaf in the forest and trace the path of each photon that poured through them, and I remember thinking over and over, in stunned amazement, "the world is sufficient. The world is sufficient."
I'd never thought much about religion before that, but that experience made me realize that the material world was entire orders of magnitude more beautiful than any of the tawdry religious fantasies people came up with, and it felt unspeakably tragic that anyone would ever reject this, our most incredible universe, for spiritual pipe-dreams. In a way, you might say I felt the lack of god, and it felt like glory.
-- Axiomatic
Its a shame the idea that "god" is a person with a personality has competed-out other ways of thinking of god. Is there a deep mystery that our own consciousness even exists? Are we connected in that mystery with the billions of other consciousnesses around us? In ignorance of what even consciousness is, are we sure it inheres in our bodies and not somewhere else?
Read the Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions sequence and the Twelve Virtues (especially that of Curiosity). We can't be "connected in that mystery" because the feeling of mysteriousness is a type of ignorance, and ignorance of some phenomenon is a fact about our minds, not about the phenomenon. When something seems mysterious to us, the proper thing to do is to think about how to solve it, not to worship our ignorance.
If god is the label for consciousness beyond your own consciousness, AND you admit the probability that god is not an angry-father-like personality that wants to help some people, hurt other people, and COULD fix everything if he wanted to, the world gets a lot more interesting.
If God means all that, then you've just changed the definition so much that there's no point in ca...
We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning.
-- Carl Sagan
Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey..., without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.
--Samuel Johnson
Is Samuel Johnson's quote a valid or true statement? I understand your central thrust--the inability to do something personally (such as control one's sexual urges) and the disposition to encourage others to overcome that inability are not necessarily contradictory--indeed, they may fall together naturally.
However, in Samuel Johnson's world, and the world in which this "issue" comes up the most, politics, we might imagine that there exist two types of people: sociopathic individuals hungry for power, and individuals who are sincere.
If sociopathic individuals hungry for power are more often hypocrites, then we might, as an efficient rule of thumb (not being able to distinguish the two save through their observable actions!) condemn hypocrites because they are likely to be power-hungry individuals.
As a bayesian update, in the world of politics, we expect that hypocrites are more likely to be power hungry or sociopathic. I see Samuel Johnson's quote as potentially true, but ignoring a world of imperfect information and signaling.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to misattribute it to Voltaire."
-Voltaire
(The phrase was written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall as a summary of Voltaire's attitude toward free speech. Since then, people started attributing it to Voltaire himself, and the myth has spread far and wide, as nobody really checks to see if he actually said that. Hearing something somewhere is plenty of evidence for most people, most of the time, and the conviction gets more solid over time. Which brings me to my second rationality quote, from Winston Churchill: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.")
I've always believed that the mind is the best weapon.
-- John Rambo, Rambo: First Blood Part II
Discussion of how not to get lost in the woods
Arg, this post is bringing back memories of all kinds of backcountry stupidity (including a fair amount of my own stupidity), so I can't resist adding a comment about GPS devices. Any navigation tool -- GPS device, map, compass, sextant, whatever -- only works if you are using the navigation tool to relate yourself to the surrounding landscape. And you should never trust maps, GPS devices, compasses, or any tool if it contradicts what you're seeing in the surrounding landscape. I own a top-notch brand of GPS device, I got a top-quality map to go inside it, and when I checked the map against a landscape I knew well, I found error after error (which is true with all maps, by the way; one of the reasons I like paper maps is that I can make notations on it when I find errors).
Only slightly less interesting in the same comment:
I used to hike a fair amount in the White Mountains in northern New England, and I made a point of reading the accident reports in Appalachia, the annual mountaineering journal of the Appalachian Mountain Club (see www.outdoors.org/publications/appalachia/index.cfm). Every fatality of the year is presented as a case study, and analyzed in terms of what went wrong. Reading those accident reports helped me to learn that people die in the mountains at all times of the year. Knowing how to get out of the woods before hypothermia sets in could in fact save one's life. Appalachia is a great learning tool.
This matter of case studies is intensely valuable.
Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical judgment, which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable.
-- John Stuart Mill
There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
By definition, all but the last doomsday prediction is false. Yet it does not follow, as many seem to think, that all doomsday predictions must be false; what follow is only that all such predictions but one are false.
-Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13
Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain comes joy, delights, laughter, and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations. And by this, in an especial manner, we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear and know what are foul and what are fair, what are bad and what are good, what are sweet, and what are unsavory. ... And by the same organ we become mad and delirious, and fears and terrors assail us. ... All these things we endure from the brain. ...In these ways I am of the opinion that the brain exercises the greatest power in the man.
-- Hippocrates, On the sacred disease (ca. 4th century BCE).
[ In this and other of his writings, Hippocrates shows such an incredible early sense for rationality and against superstition that was only rarely seen in the next 2000 after that -- and in addition, he was not just a armchair philosopher, he actually put these things is practice. So, hats off for Hippocrates, even when his medicine was not without faults of course...]
Edit: DUPLICATE
"Then the one called Raltariki is really a demon?" asked Tak.
"Yes—and no," said Yama. "If by 'demon' you mean a malefic, supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span, and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape—then the answer is no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one respect."
"Oh? And what may that be?"
"It is not a supernatural creature."
"But it is all those other things?"
"Yes."
"Then I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not—so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will."
"Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either."
Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light. (h/t zhurnaly)
If scientists do believe that they are ethically bound to improve the lot of ordinary people, or at least to decrease violence and increase possibilities for the pursuit of happiness, as I do, then perhaps the greatest challenge — and one that has been wholly overlooked here — is "how do we as scientists advance reason in an inherently unreasonable world?" This is a very difficult issue and one that cannot be seriously addressed by simply trying to muscle science and reason into everyday or momentous human affairs. I am privy to hostage negotiations, and be assured that simply telling hostage takers their beliefs are bullshit will get you the opposite of what you want, like the hostage's head delivered on a platter. Of course, that's an extreme case; but reason by backward induction towards the less extreme cases in the actual political and social conditions of our present world and you will find that the tactics proposed at the conference for an unlikely strategic shift in humankind's thinking will most probably blowback and backfire. And I almost thank God that even the best of our scientists are not prominent political negotiators or policymakers.
-- Scott Atran
As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?
-- Ollie, The Mist, 2007
"History is like the weather. Themes do repeat themselves, but never in the same way. And analogies became rhetorical flourishes and sad ex post facto justifications rather than explanations. In the end, they explain nothing."
-Errol Morris
Here is what he said prior to making the statement I quoted (to give you some context):
Take historical analogies. I believe that historical analogies are always wrong. This a long discussion, but, to me, the most dangerous thing about Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler at Munich is not the fact that Munich happened and it led to further Nazi aggression and so on and so forth, but that the example of Munich has been used to support thousands upon thousands of bad policies and inappropriate decisions. LeMay called JFK’s recommendation for a “quarantine” (that is, a blockade) in the Cuban Missile Crisis “worse than Munich”. Would nuclear war have been a better alternative? But nuclear war was averted by Kennedy’s policies. And thirty years later the Soviet Union collapsed without the need for nuclear war. Was LeMay right? I don’t think so. But again, the example of Munich was invoked to justify the invasion of Iraq. Appeasing Saddam, appeasing Hitler. The use of the Munich analogy does not clarify, it obscures.
"This is the first test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible value to him."
"If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are turning around in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims, if he could understand what they are losing, he would understand that there can be only one thing that is serious for him---to escape from the general law, to be free. What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death? Only one thing: How to save himself, how to escape: nothing else is serious."
P.D. Ouspensky, "In Search of the Miraculous", ch.17
But the sense of understanding no more means that you have knowledge of the world than caressing your own shoulder means that someone loves you.
-- Michael Bishop(50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough: Lessons for Philosophy of Science).
The new CEO of Coca-Cola in the 1980s had a problem with his senior vice-presidents who thought the company was doing well because they had 45 percent of the soft drink market. He asked them, "What proportion of the liquid market - not just the soft drink market - do we have?" That turned out to be only two percent. The resulting change in the world view of the company led Coca-Cola to increase sales revenue by thirty-five times in just over ten years.
--Review of The Art of Choosing, by Sheena Iyengar
Science is not ’organized common sense'; at its most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against the ancient, anthropocentric prejudices that we call intuition.
-- Stephen J. Gould
Q: How much does the smoke weight?
A: Subtract from the weight of the wood that was burned the weight of the ashes that remain, and you will have the weight of the smoke.
--Immanuel Kant
I recall being taught them (as in, the teacher said "these are the 4 elements: earth, fire, wind, and water" and had us each make a full page drawing to plaster on the wall; no mention that it was an antiquated Greek model or anything) in kindergarten and/or elementary school in Peru. Aether was also mentioned as the 5th element, but it was handwaved as being too advanced for us or something. Frankly, I don't think they had any idea what the hell they were talking about; somebody just told them that those were the elements and they passed it on.
"71-hour Ahmed was not superstitious. He was substitious, which put him in a minority among humans. He didn’t believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless weren’t true. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no one else believed. There are many such substitions, ranging from ‘It’ll get better if you don’t pick at it’ all the way up to ‘Sometimes things just happen."--Terry Pratchett, Jingo
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Albert Einstein
This relates well to my earlier frustration about the cop-out of vaguely appealing to life experience in an argument, without actually explaining anything.
Right on. I'm thinking about writing an "explain yourself" series that shows how you can overcome the supposed barriers to explaining your position if there's actual substance to it to begin with.
ETA: 5 upvotes so far -- sounds like a vote of confidence for such an article.
ETA2: Message heard loud and clear! I'm working on an article for submission, which may expand into a series.
Maybe this detracts from my previous agreement with the quote, but there's a difference between explaining in person, vs. explaining in writing for a general audience. With the former, you can get immediate feedback as to which parts you're not explaining well and appropriately redirect your focus, while in the latter you have to cover all the possible confusions.
This phenomenon was revealed most starkly in one of the articles in the quantum physics sequences, when I replied to the article by saying,
So, decoherence is a valid scientific theory because it makes the same, correct predictions as the one involving collapse, but is simpler.
There, that didn't take 2800 words, now, did it?
And Eliezer Yudkowsky said in response:
Silas: I've tried just saying that to people, it doesn't work. Doesn't work in academic physics either. Besides which, it may not be the last time the question comes up, and there's no reason why physicists shouldn't know the (epistemic) math.
The fact that something can be explained simply doesn't deny the problem of inferential distance, in my view; it just means that each step is simple, not that there won't be many steps depending on how much of the listener's knowledge you can build on.
[...] but we have no guarantee at all that our formal system contains the full empirical or quasi-empirical stuff in which we are really interested and with which we dealt in the informal theory. There is no formal criterion as to the correctness of formalization.
-- Imre Lakatos, "What Does a Mathematical Proof Prove?"
ETA: When I first read this remark, I couldn't decide whether it was terrifying, or just a very abstract specification of a deep technical problem. I currently think it's both of those things.
What many people believe to be concentration is merely the act of thinking about concentration. A student who is told to concentrate probably will instinctively express a serious countenance and then reflect on the need to concentrate.
--Eliot Z. Cohen, The Four Emotions of Tai Chi, The Ultimate Guide to Tai Chi.
Scientists spend an extraordinary amount of time worrying about being wrong and take great pains to prove others so. In fact, science is the one area of discourse in which a person can win considerable prestige by proving himself wrong.
-- Sam Harris (emphasis in original)
The first person to come to mind for me was Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege who is famous for basically inventing symbolic logic (specifically, predicate logic with quantified variables). He spent an enormous amount of time working on the thesis that the results of mathematics flow rather directly from little more than the rules of logic plus set theory. He aimed to provide a constructive proof of this thesis.
Bertrand Russell discovered a logical flaw (now called Russell's paradox) in Frege's first book containing the constructive proof when the second book in his series was already in press and communicated it to Frege. Russell wrote of Frege's reaction in a bit of text I recall reading in a textbook on symbolic logic but found duplicated in this document with more details from which I quote:
...As I think about acts of integrity and grace, I realise there is nothing in my knowledge to compare with Frege's dedication to truth. His entire life's work was on the verge of completion, much of his work had been ignored to the benefit of men infinitely less capable, his second volume was about to be published, and upon finding that his fundamental assumption was in error, he respond
He drew a deep breath, closed his eyes, drew old lessons to his mind. “What is, is. No loss is made better by dwelling on it; no pain is cured by the mind’s eye regarding it. Accept the casualties. Assess your capabilities. Continue the mission.” The recitation made him feel a little better; a cold clarity came to him.
And Rumours of War, time-travel story on the Ynglinga Saga blog.
Skeptic, n. One who doubts what he does not want to believe and believes what he does not want to doubt.
-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon
We live in an age of uncertainty, complexity, and paranoia. Uncertainty because, for the past few centuries, there has simply been far too much knowledge out there for any one human being to get their brains around; we are all ignorant, if you dig far enough. Complexity multiplies because our areas of ignorance and our blind spots intersect in unpredictable ways - the most benign projects have unforseen side effects. And paranoia is the emergent spawn of those side effects; the world is not as it seems, and indeed we may never be able to comprehend the world-as-it-is, without the comforting filter lenses of our preconceptions and our mass media.
-- Charles Stross (Afterword: Inside the Fear Factory)
"Society is composed of persons who cannot design, build, repair, or even operate most of the devices upon which their lives depend...
In the complexity of this world people are confronted with extraordinary events and functions that are literally unintelligible to them.
They are unable to give an adequate explanation of man-made phenomena in their immediate experience.
They are unable to form a coherent, rational picture of the whole. Under the circumstances, all persons do, and indeed must, accept a great number of things on faith...
Their way of understanding is basically religious, rather than scientific; only a small portion of one’s everyday experience in the technological society can be made scientific...
The plight of members of the technological society can be compared to that of a newborn child. Much of the data that enters its sense does not form coherent wholes. There are many things the child cannot understand or, after it has learned to speak, cannot successfully explain to anyone...
Citizens of the modern age in this respect are less fortunate than children. They never escape a fundamental bewilderment in the face of the complex world that their senses report. They are not able to organize all or even very much of this into sensible wholes...."
--Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-Of-Control (1989), Langdon Winner
Two comments:
1) Magic: the Gathering strategy was developed and refined almost entirely through the Internet. If you want to be a competitive Magic player, you need the Internet.
2) If you need narrow advice - "how to fix a broken faucet" is pretty narrow - than the Internet works pretty well. If you want to learn to be a plumber, yeah, the Internet kinda sucks, but if you have relatively limited needs, it works.
Dedication, absolute dedication, is what keeps one ahead -- a sort of indomitable, obsessive dedication and the realization that there is no end or limit to this because life is simply an ever-growing process, an ever-renewing process.
-- Bruce Lee
You've been wrong about every single thing you've ever done, including this thing. You're not smart. You're not a scientist. You're not a doctor. You're not even a full-time employee. Where did your life go so wrong?
---Portal (emph. mine)
Relevance: rationalists should win, importance of saying "Oops"
You can’t prescribe decently for something you hate. It will always come out wrong. You can’t prescribe decently for something you despair in. If you despair of humankind, you’re not going to have good policies for nurturing human beings. I think people ought to give prescriptions who have ideas for improving things, ought to concentrate on the things that they love and that they want to nurture.
..."You pride yourself on freedom of choice. Let me tell you that this very freedom is one of the factors that most confuse and undermine you. It gives you full play for your neuroses, your surface reactions and your aberrations. What you should aim for is freedom from choice! Faced with two possibilities, you spend time and effort to decide which to accept. You review the whole spectrum of political, emotional, social, physical, psychological and physiological conditioning before coming up with the answer which, more often than not, does not even satis
This reminds me of something I read in C.S. Lewis which is quite rational: the purpose of curiosity is finding answers. It's not dithering for the sake of dithering, or debate for the sake of debate. The goal is to find out what the right answer is, as accurately as possible, not to eternally keep all the options open. That's how I understand the quote.
Of course, real curiosity can look like dithering and endless debate because people are being very careful not to get things wrong.
“They must find it difficult… Those who have taken authority as the truth, rather than truth as the authority.” – Gerald Massey
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome return of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
-- Mark Twain
Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.
Stephen Jay Gould
"I don't believe important statements just because someone makes them. Even if I make them."
-- William T. Powers
"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise"
"Expert" claims originating in subjective evaluation can be safely ignored for what they are: sentimental autobiography.
-- Michael Bishop(50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough: Lessons for Philosophy of Science).
Scientific thinking,which is analytic and objective, goes against the grain of traditional human thinking, which is associative and subjective. Far from being a natural part of human development, science arose from unique historical factors.
-- Allan Cromer
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field.
Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962)
"A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life."
-Baruch Spinoza
"He remembered the pride filled glow that had swamped Gyoko's face and he wondered again at the bewildering gullibility of people. How baffling it was that even the most cunning and clever people would frequently see only what they wanted to see, and would rarely look beyond the thinnest of facades. Or they would ignore reality, dismissing it as the facade. And then, when their whole world fell to pieces and they were on their knees slitting their bellies or cutting their throats, or cast out into the freezing world, they would tear their topknots or rend their clothes and bewail their karma, blaming gods or kami or luck or their lords or husbands or vassals—anything or anyone—but never themselves."
-Shogun
The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a “pet” notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.
-- John Dewey
...Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depen
Ultimately, a carefully-maintained lack of self awareness is the only bulwark standing between any of us and the depths of madness.
-- Kwi Jung
"The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others."
"Society begins to appear much less unreasonable when one realizes its true function. It is there to help everyone to keep their minds off reality." Celia Green, The Human Evasion.
Breaking out of bad habits, rather than acquiring new ones, is the toughest aspect of learning.
-- Edsger Dijkstra
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
--Bertrand Russell
The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report.
My definition of a stupid person: A stupid person is a person who treats a smart person as though they're stupid.
(Clearly this isn't an actual definition, but it works pretty well if you reframe it as evidence rather than as a necessary or sufficient condition.)
And that is the way of the world, that some men put errors into circulation and others afterwards try to eradicate those same errors. And so both sorts of men have something to do.
Truth is context dependent. It happens that there are some contexts we all share.
-- Kwi Jung
It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
--Charles Darwin, "The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals", ch.3.
The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines.
--Freeman Dyson
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
The engineer does not believe in black magic, voodoo, or rain dances. The engineer believes in scientific truth, that is, truth that can be verified by experiment.
Samuel Florman
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.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to misattribute it to Voltaire."
-Voltaire
(The phrase was written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall as a summary of Voltaire's attitude toward free speech. Since then, people started attributing it to Voltaire himself, and the myth has spread far and wide, as nobody really checks to see if he actually said that. Hearing something somewhere is plenty of evidence for most people, most of the time, and the conviction gets more solid over time. Which brings me to my second rationality quote, from Winston Churchill: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.")