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Rationality quotes: May 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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 (288)
"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
Any ideas for other substitions along the same lines? I came up with these:
Your first impressions of people are frequently wrong.
You should buy low and sell high, instead of the opposite.
Random things are random, even when the same number comes up three times in a row.
"Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise" - Bertrand Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (Part of the full sentence)
Ooh, ignore my note about duplication - yours has a better citation than the previous appearance of the quote.
--Eliot Z. Cohen, The Four Emotions of Tai Chi, The Ultimate Guide to Tai Chi.
---Portal (emph. mine)
Relevance: rationalists should win, importance of saying "Oops"
Makes me think of the FAI problem... As does this:
Wikiquote has this as:
Thanks. Given that most sources I found referenced the 'documentary' Zeitgeist, I am inclined to believe any other source above it. Provenance aside, I thought the quote deserved a mention.
-- Michael Bishop(50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough: Lessons for Philosophy of Science).
-- Michael Bishop(50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough: Lessons for Philosophy of Science).
-- Allan Cromer
-- Mark Twain
--Samuel Johnson
This seems at odds with our notion of subjective probability, where we assume that significant lingering doubt after confidently assigning a 99%+ probability is evidence that your calibration is poor, and your estimate should have been lower.
Does the man really believe the voyage is, all things considered, a good one?
I'm not sure I understand what you mean when you say
The most confusing part about this is the part about poor calibration.
As for the rest, I don't deny that the fact that the man is unwilling to undertake the voyage is evidence that he doesn't think it is worthwhile, at least in ordinary contexts. But I think there is little to recommend the view that acting against your best reflective judgment is impossible or even extremely rare.
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.
Fair enough. Maybe it is typically reasonable to charge people with hypocrisy when they neglect to follow their professed ethical codes.
I still like the quote, even if it is hyperbolic. It is useful to be reminded that there are important cases where failure to live up to one's professed code does not warrant this kind of criticism. Being overly concerned with hypocrisy can make you be unconcerned with living up to a meaningful ethical code. This is especially important in the context of consequentialist morality. This is just a hunch, but I think there are a fair number of intelligent people who shy away from a demanding code for fear of being charged with hypocrisy. But there need be no genuine hypocrisy, at least in any deeply regrettable sense, in professing a demanding ethical code and failing to live up to it. Better to try to live up to a demanding code and fail than meet the demands of an uninspiring and mundane one. (In this kind of case, of course, you aren't just professing the code to curry political favor.)
"He who dies with the most toys is nonetheless dead." --anonymous
Unless one of the toys in question is a cryostat. Then there's still hope.
"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.
Does the length of his sequences imply that Eliezer doesn't understand their subject matter, or that the universe is sometimes actually complicated?
Simplicity and concision are independent. I don't find Eliezer's sequences complicated. They are long, but simple all the way through.
Simplicity and grandmother-explainability are also not the same thing. I'd reject the grandmother quote, but this one I don't have a problem with, even if Einstein never said it.
Something I tell students when I'm teaching programming is "What is not clearly said was never clearly thought."
By the way, Eliezer has already explicitly rejected a similar quote attributed to Einstein.
They're both of dubious authenticity anyway. (I searched around for this version too, and the earliest mention of it I could find was in a 1977 Reader's Digest, and that's only according to a citation in a 2006 book.) That has nothing to do with whether it's true, of course — if a vague maxim like this can count as a rationality quote at all, then that is independent of whether or not Einstein said it.
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,
And Eliezer Yudkowsky said in response:
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.
"Simply" doesn't necessarily mean "concisely" (outside of mathematical formalizations of Occam's Razor). Conciseness is preferable when possible, but being too terse can start impacting comprehensibility. (Think of three programs that all do the same thing: a 1000-line C program, a 100-line Python program, and a 20-line Perl program. The length decreases with each one, but readability probably peaks with the Python program.)
The quote says "If you can't explain it simply", not "If you don't explain it simply". In this case, even if we do switch to "concisely" I think it checks out. Indeed, most of the major points Eliezer makes in the sequences could be stated much more briefly, but I get the sense that his goal in writing them is more than just transmitting his conclusions and his reasoning. No, it seems he's writing with the goal of making his points not just intellectually comprehensible but obvious, intuitive, and second-nature. (Of course any intuition-pumpery, analogies, and anecdotes are used to complement good reasoning, not to replace it.) But I have little doubt that, if he really wanted to, he could he boil them down to their essential points, at the potential cost of much of the richness of his style of explanation.
(In any case, I'm not convinced that this quote is specific enough to serve as a usable norm. How simple? How much is "well enough"? Everyone will automatically assign their own preferred values to those variables, but then you're just putting words in Einstein's mouth, or rather, putting meanings in his words; you're taking whatever rule you already follow and projecting it onto him. Fittingly, this is a case where a longer explanation would have been simpler (i.e. more understandable).)
Edit: I think I remember Eliezer once writing something like "Generally, half of all the words I write are superfluous. Unfortunately, each reader finds that it's a different half." That seems relevant as well. (Anyone remember the source of that?)
The latter. On the other hand, the sequences could greatly benefit from some ruthless editing.
EDIT: 5 minutes after I wrote this comment, I googled a part of it, because I was not sure about my English. (I'm Hungarian.) This comment was already indexed by google.
I've noticed that things on LW get indexed by Google really quickly. Wonder why that is. Maybe because LW uses a Google Custom Search, Google pays especially close attention to changes on it?
I think Google pays close attention to anything with a feed (maybe "Anything Google Reader users have subscribed to", since they're necessarily processing the data anyway?). Whenever I post to my own blog, not particularly notable in an absolute sense, the post shows up nearly instantly in Google Alerts.
I think it is a combination of the Digg engine's Recent Posts feature directly interfaced by Google, and LW's high page rank.
This is something I actually struggle with a lot. I read something that strikes me as profound, and that I agree with, but as soon as I try to explain it it's all gone, and I'm left with bits and pieces that don't make much sense to anyone else.
I'm not sure if this is a failure on my part to understand, simplify an idea, or explain it.
Whenever I'm reading things that I want to actually learn and retain, I read with pencil and notebook and write down all the important points in my own words. I've found this to be helpful because it forces me to slow down and think about what I'm reading and how each new piece of information relates to everything that came before it. I've also found that having pencil and paper close at hand encourages picture drawing, which is often helpful when learning something (though it depends on what you're reading).
It means that you had a deep understanding for a few seconds, and then lost it. Or that you got trapped in the same confusion as the author, absorbed what made it seem appealing, and then "corrected away" the confusion.
To determine which one happened, try the following:
Eventually, you should be able to either gain the understanding, or recognize where the error is.
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.
-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.")
An older version: A lie is halfway round the world before the truth can get its boots on.
I looked up the book "Gems from Spurgeon" cited in that link. Here's the whole book.
There is an excellent Terry Pratchett book, "The Truth," which features that phrase as a major plot point.
--Review of The Art of Choosing, by Sheena Iyengar
All liquids, not just drinks? ...I wonder when Coca-Cola will start making liquid soaps, fuel, and lubricants.
One thing is for sure, Coca-Cola corp is definitely losing the overall fermion market to more streamlined business models.
That should be "Iyengar" with an i.
From Thomas Macaulay's 1848 History of England.
.................................
-Vorpal
-- Scott Atran
That's not an 'extreme' case, it's a misleading one. What kind of idiot tries to make a point about the means used to achieve the goal of "Advancing reason" by pointing out that the same means won't work for rescuing a hostage?
You have not made the case that the point is idiotic. Are you under the impression that the idiocy is self-evident to this audience?
Um, yes. That action A is bad for goal X isn't evidence that it's bad for goal Y, unless Y is very similar to X. "Saving the hostage" and "Advancing reason" aren't similar goals.
-- Sam Harris (emphasis in original)
I would love to agree with the sentiment in that quote, but offhand, I can't think of any examples.
Certainly the day-to-day job of the scientist is to prove himself or herself wrong in as many ways as possible, so as not to leave that job to others. But what eventually yields prestige is being right.
One possible counter-example I can think of is the Michelson-Morley experiment, the "most celebrated null experiment in the history of science" to quote one short-breathed biographer. But by several accounts I have read it only became "the most celebrated" thirty-odd years later, once the significance of Einstein's work had sunk in. Before that it seems to have been possible at least to regard it as an anomaly to explain away, for instance via "ether drag" theories.
So even this attempt to prove myself wrong doesn't reach as far as I should hope.
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:
I don't think science generally lives up to its own ideals... but as I grow older and more cynical I find myself admiring the mere fact that it has those ideals and that every so often I find examples of people living up to them :-)
Jane Jacobs
And Rumours of War, time-travel story on the Ynglinga Saga blog.
I was deeply confused for a moment, since I know that no such passage appears in the Ynglinga Saga and that the Icelandic prose style means no such passage ever could; perhaps clarify that that is something entirely different?
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
Discussion of how not to get lost in the woods
Only slightly less interesting in the same comment:
This matter of case studies is intensely valuable.
-- Bertrand Russell
As it turns out, it is perfectly rational to inspect evidence that contradicts your beliefs more closely than evidence that confirms them. If evidence goes against your beliefs it is more likely to be fake evidence. As the saying goes, your strength as a rationalist is your ability to detect fabricated evidence.
EDIT: As Ben Elliot points out in this post this argument really only applies if you happen to be a perfect Bayesian (and you aren't). In real life you're biased toward confirmatory evidence, and so often you really should check it over disconfirmatory evidence. However, it is worth keeping track of which things you're doing to compensate for a human bias, and which things you're doing because they're optimal for Bayesians.
No. This is an easy mistake to make, but it has bad consequences. Detecting fake evidence is only an instrumental goal, in service to the more important goal of maximizing the accuracy of your beliefs. There is a common trap, where all the evidence you see, on both sides, would fall if you challenged it, but you only challenge the pieces you disagree with; and then you add up the remaining, also-invalid evidence, and conclude that you were right all along. It is theoretically possible to counter this bias directly, by discounting confirmatory evidence that you haven't taken the time to challenge according to a well-calibrated prior probability that it's invalid. However, I don't know if anyone can actually do this in practice, and it seems like it would be very difficult to do without carefully formalizing and writing down everything.
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".
You try harder to investigate unexpected evidence!
If you're really sure of your conclusion, my maths is probably wrong somewhere. If you think the model itself is inappropriate, please point out how.
EDIT: Of course, if your friend lies 50% of the time, you care just as much about checking confirmatory evidence as disconfirmatory evidence, but then your friend isn't really "offering you a fact".
*And if I wasn't worried, I wouldn't have built a mathematical model!
**Using base 2 logs.
jimrandomh's point might have been that you don't try at all to investigate expected evidence. So you'd pay 0.2364 to check if they said 'black', but if your friend said 'white' you wouldn't pay to check anything, you'd scoff at the suggestion.
Your result is important, though. Equal checking is wrong, lopsided checking is wrong. Only checking exactly as much as is required by the mathematics is okay.
I dig what you've done, but as a mathematician, my instinct would be to do calculations like this with variables instead of made-up numbers... that way you can be sure that your results hold In General.
Sure, I just couldn't be bothered. If you ignore the complicating factor of having black balls in the white urn and vice-versa (i.e. we look at the problem where the urn is 100% white or 100% black). then the maths is easier, and we can quickly see that this always holds whatever variables we put in.
In fact, it also works for many different scoring algorithms. If our scoring algorithm is f(x) then it the proof works whenever xf(x)+(1-x)f(1-x) is increasing on [0.5,1].As far as I can tell this happens all of the time that f(x) is increasing on [0,1].
But do keep in mind that that instinct is often strong evidence, especially in Near domains.
"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.
http://deoxy.org/evasion/4.htm
-- John Stuart Mill
-- Alfred North Whitehead
-- 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.
Link appears to be broken.
--Alan Perlis, Epigrams in Programming
Cox's theorem seems to reduce the gap between the formal and the informal, by deriving probability theory from axioms that seem easier to informally assess.
"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
-- Stephen J. Gould
(In a thread where people were asked whether or not they had a religious experience of "feeling God"):
-- Axiomatic
Is this really different from the mentality that says people permanently dying is a good thing because it's a feature of atheism, which is a good belief system because it's true?
In spirit of full disclosure, not all religions were possessed by tawdry fantasies. Some embraced the regularity and beauty physical law as a sign of Bog's greatness. Unfortunately this little glitch contributed to me getting stuck thinking that Judaism is actually was rational for 20 years. I stopped thinking too early.
"R. Simeon b. Pazzi said in the name of R. Joshua b. Levi on the authority of Bar Kappara: He who knows how to calculate the cycles and planetary courses, but does not, of him Scripture saith, but they regard not the work of the Lord, neither have they considered the operation of his hands." (Babylonian Talmud, Sabbath 75, about 1700 years back)
Right, and this is what I was used to as well, though I wasn't familiar with that quote. ("Bog" is handy. I like that.)
As for the "glory" -- yes, I've felt it too. Exactly, exactly the same way. "The world is sufficient." But that sense of joy can't be enough to keep you going, because sometimes the world is horrible, and it is not sufficient, not for me, not as long as I have the capacity to love people and worry for them. Joy is there, but it's not the whole story.
Got Bog from Heinlein. I nice positive side effect of shedding mental handcuffs is that I restarted my sci-fi reading career, and being out for 20 years left me with a huge green pasture ;)
I also think my own break with religion started with an emotional experience, or perhaps the experience just broke the dam of all the mental incoherence I have piled up under the carpet. I saw pics from Haiti of medical workers piling up children's bodies; I 'knew' then that if god exists he does not give a crap about things I care about; I was never 'religious' enough to think that me and my children are any 'better' than what I saw in front of me. The rest was a trivial exercise in comparison (mostly historical research and some logic).
In general the problem with religion that it's a web of beliefs, and people cannot extricate themselves one strand at a time, the strands simply tend to regrow (though weaker, I think). You need a powerful emotional experience to pull enough threads all at once.
Incidentally, this is a big benefit on the something to protect emphasis here.
You probably know this, but Bog is the Russian (similar in other Slavic languages) word for God.
Funny, of course I know it - Russian was my first language, but somehow I parsed it as being a whimsical made up word; I knew I was out of practice, but not this much!
I would question that this is a rationality quote. It's a quote about how atheism is better for aesthetic reasons.
On the surface, yes.
It's an anecdote that the "numinous" feelings that the religious sometimes cite as evidence of God can equally well be interpreted the opposite way. We can pull out Bayes' Theorem to show that these numinous feelings really don't make belief in God more rational. This isn't a hugely controversial point here, but I think what this says about seizing on how evidence supports one's side without considering the ramifications for the other is worth remembering.
True, but I had the feeling that some readers here would like it anyway. (I view this as more of a "quotes LW readers would like" thread than a literal "rationality quotes" thread.)
Also, it does fit into the joy in the merely real ethos, which in turn makes it emotionally easier to accept rationalism and reductionism.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Norman Kemp Smith), p. A5/B8.
Hmm, this would be cooler if not for the fact that light does move faster in a vacuum.
"the light dove." :P
Oh wow, I completely missed the point. Thanks =)
-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon
Vote this up! What could be more rational than to be skeptical about skepticism?
Being skeptical about skepticism about skepticism?
I was disappointed to find that Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary didn't have such a term. I had thought it would be a similar definition, and an ironically close name, though searching again showed me that the Lexicon is based on the Dictionary.
That what you were thinking of?
-- John Dewey
-Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13
Most "doomsday predictions" do not actually predict the total annihilation of the human race.
It might be postulated that we don't have records of most correct doomsday predictions because the predictor and anyone listening met with doom.
He is assuming that there will be a doomsday - also known as begging the question (http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html#begging). It is also quite possible that no doomsday predictions are true. This is one of my gripes with existential risk theories, all I have read depend on the assumption that eventually there will be an end.
No, I don't think so. He is making a claim about what implications follow from a certain fact. That fact is the definition of "a doomsday prediction". All that follows from that definition is that all but one will be false. Of course, even that last one (so to speak) might be false, but, even if this is so, it doesn't follow from the definition.
This is not a case of begging the question. It is just being clear about what implies what.
-- Carl Sagan
-- John Rambo, Rambo: First Blood Part II
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
Here's some context...
The quote's from Mostly Harmless, the fifth book in the Hitchhikers Trilogy. Buy here, read online here.
"All mechanical or electrical or quantum-mechanical or hydraulic or even wind, steam or piston-driven devices, are now required to have a certain legend emblazoned on them somewhere. It doesn't matter how small the object is, the designers of the object have got to find a way of squeezing the legend in somewhere, because it is their attention which is being drawn to it rather than necessarily that of the user's."
Considering the source, I was surprised and a little disturbed when I noticed this legend didn't seem to be well known in the Singularitarian community.
In that same vein:
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan p.203
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness
Fear invasion from Mars!
Better: Rank beliefs according to their plausibility multiplied by the harm they may cause.
Unless you're risk averse.
I've had 2 Japanese cars. They're reliable; but when something does break, it's often hidden deep inside the engine so you need to have a mechanic pull the engine out and charge you $700 to replace a $10 part.
Is this not true true of most modern cars, not only Japanese ones?
Decades ago, drivers could and did repair engines themselves, but today's cars require more knowledge, training, and tools than the hobbyist is likely to have.
The expense of repair says little about reliability. Mean time to failure would be better.
Expected cost per year, including purchase cost, repair cost, and cost of time spent dealing with failures, would be better.
BTW, cars from heavy snow country last somewhere between 2/3 and 1/2 as long as cars down south (no official statistics, just my observation). This is due to just a few days per year when the roads are salted. Do the math, and you'll find it's probably cheaper to take leave without pay and stay home from work on days after it snows - even before taking into account the time saved by not working.
That is inconsistent with what I imagined the well-known fact of "Japanese reliability" to mean.
-- Ollie, The Mist, 2007
Unfortunately the classic essay "Understanding Neurotypicality" is gone, the owner's web pages removed. But there are similar pages still available, for instance, this from Greg Egan
In http://wlug.org.nz/GregEganOnNeurotypicalSyndrome
And more indexed here: http://www.neurodiversity.com/neurotypical.html
"If the brain needs ... to make pair-bonding compatible with self-awareness - it will lie, shamelessly, as mush as it has to, in order to make the strategy succeed."
Neat typo: it preserves the meaning of the passage. If you don't see how, read it as "If the brain needs you to feel romantic love, it will lie -- as mush, it has to -- in order to succeed."
Copy here.
Bitrot marches on; a copy at The Wayback Machine should be more durable.
I love this one. I don't really understand why it got downvoted, yet bizarre mystical religious quotes from nutcases in the Ouspensky/Gurdjieff tradition got upvoted...
I have many questions.
Would you have balked at the idea that we are all, metaphorically, in prison and must seek above all else to escape, if I had quoted a known rationalist?
Do you rate any differently the idea that the task is to understand things so completely that the single right course of action is unmistakable, now that Yvain has quoted Eliezer to that same effect?
Do you think the context of a horror story confers a better aura of rationality on Rain's quote?
Why do you love the idea that we are all insane homicidal maniacs, and dislike the idea that there is a way to follow, whether we like it or not, and that the fundamental question in life is whether one makes the only possible choice, or turns away from it? Is your response entangled with whether these things are true or false?
When Eliezer appears to you in a clown suit, will you laugh and turn away?
Taken in the context of a general probe attack, this attempt at humor seems out of place.
Probe attack... yes, that's one reason I find quite a few of the questioning responses here agitating or frustrating. Just like a port scan, they have all the patterns of an attack, are used to discover weaknesses and flaws, and can be generally invasive and exhaustingly thorough, even though they're part of the standard toolkit and even more often used for troubleshooting. Enlightenment++
I take your point about a "probe attack" and now I find what I wrote unsatisfactory. I'll try again:
Blueberry loves the idea that we're all insane homicidal maniacs, and doesn't like the other ideas, apparently on the grounds that the latter appear in a religious context. This looks like a classic example of judging the truth by the clothes it appears in.
Maybe I should have posted it like this:
Edit: DUPLICATE
Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light. (h/t zhurnaly)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/mx/rationality_quotes_3/
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
He left out the weight of the air...
I agree, of course. But don't be too harsh on Immanuel Kant, who had no knowledge of modern chemistry but was able to understand, that Aristotle was essentially wrong in his views about "natural places of light things up on the sky and heavy things down here on Earth".
People understood that Aristotle's understanding of natural place didn't work long before Kant. As early as the 1300s, Oresme laid out problems with this view. The work of Galileo and others made it clear that it didn't make sense. Newton removed any remaining doubts about this. And Newton died about when Kant was born. That Kant knew that Aristotle was wrong is no credit to Kant.
As to the chemistry matter, I'm not completely sure but I think that idea also was around before Kant. Robert Boyle wrote The Skeptical Chemist about 70 years before Kant was born and he touches on the idea of conservation of mass. Hooke also died before Kant was born and did work involving mass loss in chemical reactions. I don't think this can be substantially credited to Kant either.
Kant "quoted a philosopher" in his book. An unnamed philosopher, who answers the described way.
Kant promoted the idea of his predecessors and contemporaries against the still popular views of Aristotle, in his time.
Even today, you can hear a lot of "five elements" and "the fifth element" and so forth. An Aristotelian myth, very much alive even today.
What?
Is this another non-US thing? I never hear talk of the "four elements" except in mocking of how foolish the ancients must have been to think that (for instance) wood contains fire. And it was hardly an Aristotelian original.
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.
That is one of the most deeply fascinating and frightening anecdotes I have ever heard on LW.
Could you please elaborate on why you regard it as such? I can think of a couple of things to take away from it that would be frightening (that people will repeat "earth, fire, wind, and water" as easily as they will "carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and fluoride", for instance), but I feel like I must be missing something because I wasn't expecting that kind of response.
Part of it is that. But it also that someone could be so divorced from modern science that it wouldn't occur to them that earth varies in nature. Or that they hadn't heard that water is hydrogen and oxygen. Or if they have heard that, they didn't try to reconcile it at all with the claim about water being elemental. The notion that there are people out there who are that uncritical not for any motivated reason (as some religious individuals are) but out of simply humdrum everyday lack of thinking. And that such people would then go on to teach other people?
I guess I shouldn't have found this as disturbing as I did. But I generally have a low opinion of humans, and it seems like no matter how cynical or pessimistic I am, I'm sill surprised by their behavior.
I had a science teacher in about 5th grade who told us that
She was surprised and skeptical when I told her that cells were made of atoms.
Not quite as extreme, but I had a science teacher (iirc, in junior high (that's 7th through 9th grade) who said very firmly that the sun is not a star, the sun is the sun.
The four elements is still really popular in new-agey circles. I believe my element is "air" and it has something to do with my birthday or astrological sign. The four element thing is really central to Wiccan practice, or it least it was in middle school when I learned this stuff (doing spells and shit was at that time very popular among 14-year-old girls and I was a 14-year-old boy).
I had never heard of quintessence until I studied Aristotle, though.
I'm a somewhat casual Neo-pagan-- I enjoy the rituals.
As far as I can tell, the four elements are viewed as a convenient source of symbolism, but not believed in literally.
I don't know about Wiccans, but Neo-paganism is a community of practice, not belief. Neo-pagans cover the range from atheism to literal belief.
-- 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...]
I don't know, to me he's just stating that the brain is the seat of sensation and reasoning.
Aristotle thought it was the heart. Both had arguments for their respective positions. Aristotle studied animals a lot and over-interpreted the evidence he had accumulated: to the naked eye the brain appears bloodless and unconnected to the organs; it is also insensitive, and can sustain some non-fatal damage; the heart, by contrast, reacts to emotions, is obviously connected to the entire body (through the circulatory system), and any damage to it leads to immediate death.
Also, in embryos the brain is typically formed much later than the heart. This is important if, like Aristotle, you spent too much time thinking about "the soul" (that mysterious folk concept which was at the same time the source of life and of sensation) and thus believed that the source of "life" was also necessarily the source of sensation, since both were functions of "the soul".
Hippocrates studied people more than animals, did not theorize too much about "the soul", and got it right. But it would be a bit harsh to cast that as a triumph of rationality against superstition.
No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking.
--Voltaire
Someone just threw you off the Golden Gate Bridge.
There's one problem thinking won't much help with.
But then again, to make that point I had to reach for a problem nothing could be done about.
Alas, rigorous truth is the constant enemy of the aphorism.
There are problems which happen so quickly that you can't do sustained thinking while you're in the middle of them, but sustained thinking might help install good reflexes for the general case.
For example, I fell safely on ice for the first time this past winter. I'm reasonably sure that the Five Tibetans (a sort of cross between yoga and calesthenics) strengthened the muscles around my knees and possibly had other good effects such that I didn't twist my knee.
The thinking how to fall to get a minimal possible damage is still a potential way out.
At least, the thinking increases your odds to survive in any situation you are thrown into.
How many people died needlessly of chocking, when they could invent the auto Heimlich - but they failed to do so?
Well, unless I've remembered it wrong, only two or three people have ever survived that fall. If I'm wrong, substitute a plane. Or a personal unprotected atmospheric re-entry.
Sometime there really are problems that can't be helped.
Falling toward a black hole would do. No way out, except in the form of Hawking radiation, much later in your death.
But don't give up even then! Schwartzshild coud be wrong. Think hard in any circumstances!!
-- Bruce Lee
This statement is only partly true: under narrow view, an irrational position. It seems to steer people into irrationality. But people already are irrational. It says "let every your action follow from your asserted values. Let every moment be such an action."
So long as one of your values is to improve your value function, you should be okay.
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)
--Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-Of-Control (1989), Langdon Winner
Not to mention that if all but a few were destroyed and there was a need to rebuild technology and set up society again basic skills needed to do this would be non existent in the general public things like chemistry, electronics and mechanics, things we base our lives on today, are not common knowledge and we wouldnt be able to rebuild what we have today
What -are- you talking about?
We have massively literate societies and a culture in which all the knowledge is shared massively. After a crisis, the remaining few would have to pick up a lot of skills they lack before crisis, but they would have the means to do so in said stores of knowledge, plus the immense advantage of knowing that the things destroyed are possible. The general public -is- capable of learning.
Hunter-gatherers had no knowledge of chemistry, electronics, and mechanics, nor any concept that the things we do with them were possible.
Quoting myself, but since this is a reply maybe I can get away with it. I left this as a comment several months ago about a danger in the current recession that most commentators seem to miss:
You can see the same kinds of problems with people being unable to do basic home repair, like fixing a faucet or a porch railing. I remember in the late 1970s there were a lot of people doing their own remodeling and stuff, partially because of the sucky economy at the time.
If the economy doesn't really start to improve, we could be looking at a situation worse than the Great Depression, even if none of the financial indicators get as bad, simply because people are much more dependent on buying services through the economy and less able to do for themselves than any previous "hard times".
At least we have the Internet, so we are better able to find directions on how to do something we've never done by ourselves before.
The Internet sucks for learning. See my short post http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/04/web-is-still-not-adequate-for-serious.html . Plus what you need for actually doing things are skills which you cannot pick up by reading, even with decent sources.
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.
I got nothing from my tracking system until I used it as a source of critical perspective, not on my performance but on my assumptions about what was important to track.
-- Gary Wolf
"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
This sounds like a claim that rationality is hopeless.
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.
Munich is notorious in this respect. But this instance does not prove the rule.
Edit: In fact, it's pretty clear that if there are lessons from history we shouldn't assume we know them until after we see the pattern. And one event does not make a pattern. Appeasement has worked really well in lots of times and places.
There's a sample bias - People are likely to try appeasement when they are powerless, which makes appeasement unlikely to work.
It's also the kind of thing that gets forgotten when it works but remembered forever when it fails. See Appeasement in international politics.
The quote dismisses argument by analogy, not rationality. Weather forecasts are not made by metaphor.
Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
A fun quote, but not an especially rational one, I think. Just as I can't stand people who try to recast mysticism in the language of science (Deepak Chopra, etc.), I think we should avoid recasting science in the language of mysticism. Who's going to better understand stars after hearing them compared to Jesus? It won't even increase people's appreciation of science; it'll increase their appreciation of some other unrelated thing that they'll learn to refer to by the word "science".
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.
There have been martyrs for conscience, though.
That's a better model than stars, which, not to press a point, are inanimate.
Stars don't die on purpose though, it's not as impressive.
Are you implying that Jesus' crucifixion was an example of suicide via cop?
Aldous Huxley
-- Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle, 1863
I disagree with this one. Listening to yourself is not as good a way to have new insights as listening to other people.
He says,
and concludes that the alternative is to get news by listening to yourself. Actually, newspapers and neighbors are better sources of new information than yourself; and observing the external world can be even better.
The notion is not that information "from yourself" has useful content, but that it has some special spiritual value attached to it. This could be parsed out in a meaningful way to be talking about maintaining personality integrity (say, just for instance, by reducing conflicts between your beliefs). But I have a prior around .95 that says that when you hear someone talking about your "inward life", they're talking religion.
I debated whether to post this, considering the likelihood he was talking about mystic goodness of self, but I feel the core content is important, regardless of its "hidden meanings."
We did have an entire series on luminosity (contrast with "inward life"), many other articles on self-examination techniques, and we shy away from gossip and politics, which most certainly were the news articles of the day to which he referred.
"This is the first test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible value to him."
-- William Lyon Phelps
This seems impossible. If you respect those who "can be of no possible value" to you, and this causes others to hold you in higher regard, and if the esteem of others confers any value to you, then those you respected were valuable to you in that way.
It might be more accurately rephrased as "can confer no interpersonal advantage on him."
Or perhaps ". . . no possible worth to him other than the satisfaction of having upheld his values."
Therefore, gentlemen are irrational. QED.
Only if niceness, or the welfare of others, or any of the many possible reasons to value people you don't find personally useful, are irrational terminal values.
Yes - but the original quote said "of no possible value", not "of no possible use". :)
I thought values were arational?
P.D. Ouspensky, "In Search of the Miraculous", ch.17
Stephen Jay Gould
Duplicate.
It's wise to make a habit of hitting the search bar before posting quotes.
Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong.
-Thomas Carlyle
It's a nice quote, but I would rather think that science originated from the fact that people noticed correlations between things, and then some exceptionally bright people noticed increasingly non-obvious correlations, say in medicine or planetary positions.
I can see the 'something is wrong' part in more recent science, i.e., people experimenting, wondering 'hmm, that's funny,.. not what I expected'. Many scientist might discard such findings, but sometimes some lucky soul found something that is both 'wrong' and not an error of measurement, and discover something new.
-- Rafael Lefort, "The Teachers of Gurdjieff", ch. XIV
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.
Reminds me of something Jesus said: "The truth will set you free." By which I think he actually meant something very Buddhist, and sinister: Stop being attached to people and things.
Later amended by David Foster Wallace to 'The truth will set you free, but not until it's done with you.'
"I don't believe important statements just because someone makes them. Even if I make them."
-- William T. Powers
"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."
-- William Lyon Phelps
Like Marcus Aurelius, Beethoven, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche?
Duplicate.
Errol Morris
(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.)
"Jews don't read books: We study them." (Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf)