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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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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)
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.
Do you know what text that quote is from? I just started reading the Latter-Day Pamphlets.
Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
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?
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.
-- Rafael Lefort, "The Teachers of Gurdjieff", ch. XIV
This is a deep idea and should get more air time on LW.
The crux of the issue is: if you have 4 bits of information, you can only choose between 16 alternatives. The problem is to quantify how much information you really have (it may seem like you have a lot of info, but most of it is probably noisy, so shouldn't be weighted at full value) and the size of the set of choices from which you need to select a single element. If the choice class is too big, you should randomly shrink it - bite the bullet, tie yourself to the mast and throw away choices for no reason other than that you have too many.
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.
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."
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.
Reading the quote and your explanation, I thought of this:
-- My Bayesian Enlightenment
If I took that advice literally, I wouldn't do much of anything at all.
I'm resisting googling this... Ursula K. Le Guin, right? Though it sounds like something out of the Dhammapada.
Yes, the Farthest Shore. here or here
Do you see that in the quote? Or only in the frame?
I'm not able to interpret the quote without fitting it into some pre-existing frame.
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.'
P.D. Ouspensky, "In Search of the Miraculous", ch.17
"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?
Leisure? Happiness? Aurelius, the emperor, was always on the move with his army trying to preserve his empire and worried about his conniving son, Commodus. Beethoven was a reclusive single man, who grew ill and deaf in later years. Schopenhauer was a self-absorbed and misogynistic single man (though he supposedly enjoyed walking his poodles). Nietzsche was a precocious and convalescent single man. Why not add Wittgenstein to the list? Selection bias?
"This is the first test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible value to him."
-- William Lyon Phelps
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.
I thought values were arational?
Exactly.
Yes - but the original quote said "of no possible value", not "of no possible use". :)
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."
"I don't believe important statements just because someone makes them. Even if I make them."
-- William T. Powers
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
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.
That is inconsistent with what I imagined the well-known fact of "Japanese reliability" to mean.
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.
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.
Aldous Huxley
Stephen Jay Gould
"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.
Maybe just a claim that rationality about history is hopeless.
--Napoleon Bonaparte
Or maybe just so hard that you should not expect that you have achieved it, even if your story about why something had to happen seems really compelling.
The quote dismisses argument by analogy, not rationality. Weather forecasts are not made by metaphor.
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.
Edit: DUPLICATE
Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light. (h/t zhurnaly)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/mx/rationality_quotes_3/
Well, this is ironic.
Most of yours wouldn't come up in a search though.
Which raises the question of what is an acceptable failure rate.
-- 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.
-- John Rambo, Rambo: First Blood Part II
-- Carl Sagan
-- Ollie, The Mist, 2007
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:
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
Copy here.
-- 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.
-- 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.
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
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".
Yes, it's an interesting topic. I find interesting the general phenomenon that economic development seems to make economies ever more fragile and liable to collapse; http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ is the best source I know of for this kind of thinking.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/ discusses some of this.
This is not at all accurate description of what happened to Romans, and I find it rather dubious that he knew enough about Mayas or Chaco inhabitants to make such claims as opposed to pulling it out of his ass.
I'm not sure if economic development actually makes economies more fragile and prone to collapse - if a very undeveloped economy collapses, do we not notice it because we label it something else, e.g. famine or civil unrest?
The theory goes that less developed economies almost by definition have wasteful redundancies and lack of hyper-specialization.
As we've seen with the Green Revolution and the last few centuries, the freeholding small farmer is highly inefficient - they produce far less food with far more human input than our farming system. But! The small farmers are highly resilient: if a bomb takes out one Afghani village, the others are unaffected. On the other hand, if a bomb takes out a country's only refinery or port, all its farms are soon going to grind to a halt because they're mechanized and need gas.
So it's a trade-off: efficiency versus resiliency/redundancy. Market economies seem to be biased towards efficiency and against redundancy - efficiency pays off now, resiliency much later if ever. (If I really wanted to be trendy, here's where I'd bring up black swans.)
Modern systems are highly resilient and redundant in places where this is likely to pay off. Look at the power system. Look at the Internet. They are capable of working in spite of big localized failures.
The Internet is sometimes capable of working. It can go down and has; the Morris worm wasn't even malicious (according to Morris). Designs for 'Warhol worms' which do the same thing in just a few minutes have been floating around since the mid-nineties - it's just that botnets are more profitable. And even inadvertent mistakes can cripple lots of functionality.
In the real world, malicious attacks are just as valid a source of failure as randomness. (It doesn't matter why the patient dies if he dies.)
Neither Morris worm nor any other worms caused long term damage to the Internet.
Neither societal collapse nor any other economic failure caused long term damage to the Humanity.
Actually, I think modern economies have more redundancy and are less prone to a catastrophic collapse than more primitive ones. My point was that people seem to have become lazier, especially intellectually, over the last few decades, which could cost them dearly in a prolonged economic contraction.
More redundancy? I don't see that at all.
Where's the redundancy in your water supply? 'Bottled water at my local Walmart' doesn't count. Where's the redundancy in your shelter? You don't know how to build one, even if you had the saws and whatnot to make use of the trees in your yard (assuming you have a yard with trees in it and aren't - like millions - an apartment dweller). There's no redundancy in your food supply; even rural dwellers might no longer have some chickens in the yard which could be eaten, or a solid vegetable garden. And so on.
And 'lazier' is a cop-out. If modern economies lead to mental laziness, and that reduces resiliency/redundancy, modern economies reduce resiliency-redundancy! The exact mechanism doesn't matter - the ultimate result does. 'The operation was a success; unfortunately, the patient died.'
They have more redundancy at least to the extent that they operate with a greater surplus of wealth above subsistence. The greater interconnectedness and surplus wealth of modern economies also allows for resources to be quickly re-allocated across large geographical distances in response to a localized disaster.
In primitive economies the majority of the population are often living very close to a subsistence level and are able to accumulate little in the way of savings or capital to fall back on in hard times. In wealthier modern economies a disruption may cause dramatic swings in relative wealth but starting from a much higher level means there is a considerable cushion before facing a life threatening situation.
How do you propose to measure redundancy? One possible way to attempt to quantify redundancy might be to look at how modern vs. primitive economies cope with natural disasters. Modern economies usually see greater damage in dollar terms than primitive economies but much less loss of life as a percentage of the affected population. The lower casualty rates can be attributed to a number of properties of modern economies that derive from their greater wealth and interconnectedness. This includes things like higher quality, more robust buildings; greater stocks of non-perishable food, clean water and medicine; better trained, funded and equipped emergency services; quicker and better resourced rescue efforts from outside the worst affected area; a population that is not starting out in a state of malnourishment or ill health and greater individual resources enabling many to get out of the worst affected area.
Another possible test of redundancy would be to look at how modern economies cope with large scale warfare. Both Japan and Germany were more advanced pre-WWII than many poor countries today. Both countries lost a major military conflict which involved extensive destruction of infrastructure and massive civilian and military casualties. Both countries recovered over time and there are few if any examples of countries which started out with less modern economies, suffered comparable levels of damage due to warfare and demonstrated greater resiliency by recovering faster.
So in what sense are primitive economies more resilient than modern economies? You might argue that they suffer less dramatic swings in wealth in response to disruption than wealthier modern economies but in a disaster situation I would suggest the really important thing is not the magnitude of the change in wealth but whether it takes you 'below zero' and leads to individual deaths or total societal collapse. On this measure the historical record suggests to me that modern economies are more robust than primitive ones.
Another possible meaning might be that while no individual primitive economy is more robust than a modern one they are less interconnected and so failure in one does not cause a cascade to others. This sounds plausible in theory but I don't see strong historical evidence in this direction.
Finally I suppose you may be claiming that modern economies are more vulnerable to some black swan event beyond anything that appears in the historical record. This is obviously a hard theory to test. My feeling however is that a disaster of unprecedented type or scale would not be qualitatively different to previous disasters. You might see greater swings in 'dollar damage' or even relative wealth but the modern economies would still do better in absolute terms before and after such an event than primitive economies.
Is bad government a sort of disaster which should be considered in this discussion?
West Germany bounced back a lot more than East Germany.
More primitive societies don't have centralized government, so they don't have the risk of government going bad on a grand scale.
Possibly. I wasn't considering it because I took 'modern economies' to imply (more or less) liberal democracies with (more ore less) free markets. I interpreted the original comment to be in reference to the theory that the increasing interconnectedness, globalization and specialization we observe within such economies is making them more vulnerable to catastrophic collapse. Bad government is certainly a problem but I hadn't seen it as a major component of this line of thinking.
It is an interesting question whether more complex economies (in the sense I describe above) must necessarily go hand in hand with more centralized government. I don't think that is the case and I certainly hope it is not the case (because it implies that complex economies must inevitably self-destruct) but it is a disturbing possibility.
The Soviet Union or the Third Reich were more like a "modern economy" than they're like hunter-gatherers or primitive agriculturalists, and (though it doesn't seem likely so far), a modern economy is more likely to have a government that goes bad than it is to turn into h-g or p.a.
When I was talking about centralized government, I didn't mean central economic planning. (Did you?) I just meant that modern governments have well-defined centralized control over (usually) a good-sized region and population.
The canonical example here is, I think, China. Going from the impressive Renaissance-like period of 100 Schools of Thought during the Warring States period, to Zheng He, then to stultification.
This is obvious; but it seems like little of the surplus is devoted to distributing infrastructure and resources or defending against rare contingencies like a highly specialized and interdependent society must. Let's say that America is per capita $20,000 higher than subsistence thanks to specialization and interdependence; what fraction of that goes to the previous listed needs? FEMA, for example, is a few billion a year or ~17$ per capita; even adding in all the other disaster-preparedness services such as the strategic petroleum reserves, does it compensate enough?
I don't. That's far above my pay-grade. It's an interesting area of thinking and like most interesting areas, doesn't have all the answers rigorously worked out - any more than SIAI has all the details of AI worked out, and much of which thinking relies on us finding certain propositions plausible.
Rare examples of nation-building gone right. How's Haiti working out? Or Argentina? Both used to be among the richest countries in the world. I've heard Iran was depressed for centuries after the Mongols destroyed their extremely elaborate agricultural systems. Primitive places like Afghanistan just keep on trucking.
And then there are examples of highly advanced economies sabotaging themselves. The Mayans come to mind, as does the 'Fertile Crescent' - thanks to salinization caused by millennia of agriculture, not so fertile any more!
The Great Depression. The Asian currency crisis. Recent events.
I think we need to clarify a lot of our underlying assumptions and terminology if we are to bridge the yawning epistemic gap that appears to lie between us. Let me try and clarify my interpretation of some of the terms we are using and see if we are on the same page.
You originally said: "I find interesting the general phenomenon that economic development seems to make economies ever more fragile and liable to collapse". There's at least three terms we could be disagreeing on here: economic development, fragile and collapse. By economic development I understood 'a trend towards greater complexity, interdependence and specialization'. By fragile I understood 'easily broken or destroyed' rather than merely volatile or erratic. By collapse I understood 'cease to function due to a sudden breakdown' rather than merely impaired function. I dispute the strong interpretation of this sentence implied by the definitions I give here but do not necessarily dispute a weaker interpretation.
The other area that needs clarification is covered by your question 'does it compensate enough?'. I certainly think that economic development will tend to make societies better off in absolute terms under essentially all disaster situations that we have a historical precedent for. If you measured volatility of wealth by some measures you might find modern economies more volatile but in the context of concern for 'collapse' or existential risk it is not volatility in itself that is dangerous but the potential for going 'below zero' - being wiped out in investment terms. If you are at subsistent level a 10% drop in wealth (in the broadest sense) could be fatal. In a modern economy losing 50% of your wealth is painful but completely survivable for most people. In other words it is possible for modern economies to be both more volatile from some perspectives and less prone to collapse because of the much greater buffer provided by the extra wealth they create.
I feel that if you are going to make the claim and wish to defend it then it is incumbent upon you to at least attempt to propose some measure by which the truth of your claim might be judged. Otherwise you are merely engaging in wordplay and not rationality.
Haiti's problems are deep rooted. It has nothing that can be described as a modern economy and that is part of its problem. Argentina is a very different case. It has had a history of economic mismanagement and financial crises but it is in a completely different league to Haiti (10x GDP per capita and vastly better off by any measure of economic or social development). Argentina is actually something of a success story in Latin America at the moment after its troubles at the turn of the century and Buenos Aires is considered a 'hot' destination.
But we could get into a long and involved discussion of history and debate interpretations and how they support or contradict your theory. I'd rather hold off on that until we can establish the exact nature of any disagreement we have.
I consider these support for my view in that all were examples of great volatility but not of anything approximating collapse. They in no way canceled out the benefits of the periods of economic growth that preceded them (and followed in the first two cases).
I actually think people tend to underestimate the frequency and severity of crises of various kinds but overestimate the long term impact. I am much more pessimistic than average about the current economic situation (see my New Year's predictions here for example) but much more optimistic about how things will ultimately turn out than most people would be if they expected the same level of disruption.
All I was doing was raising an interesting theory and linking to those who do defend it.
I feel as if I had mentioned that the sky looked kind of blue today and wasn't that kind of interesting, and the person standing next to me immediately said, 'oh, blue - physiologically or by wave-length? Are you taking into account Rayleigh scattering? For that matter, is it blue by absorption or reflection? Let's see your numbers, chap, I think you may be having me on.'
You ask some interesting questions, but I see now that any reply is just going to lead to an in-depth argument/discussion which I am not equipped for and don't really feel like having now. If you want to argue about, I've already pointed to a relevant forum.
EDIT: To the downvoters: consider what you're saying by downvoting - 'I disapprove of someone explicitly withdrawing from a conversation, and would rather that one side simply never reply and leave the other person hanging.' Is that really what you would prefer?
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.
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
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".
It's a reasonable hypothesis that Kant came up with, but until he's tested it -- or at least thought of a way to test it -- he should have been more tentative about it.
Hmm. What do we mean by weight? Mass * g?
Huh?
Edit: Never mind. Googled.
No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking.
--Voltaire
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
-Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13
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.
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.
Duplicate.
Duplicate.
Sorry about that.
Duplicate.
It's wise to make a habit of hitting the search bar before posting quotes.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Norman Kemp Smith), p. A5/B8.
(In a thread where people were asked whether or not they had a religious experience of "feeling God"):
-- Axiomatic
I would question that this is a rationality quote. It's a quote about how atheism is better for aesthetic reasons.
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.
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.
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.
The exact opposite happened to me: I read a bunch of sci fi, and since very few of the authors I read were religious, I was essentially getting an atheistic worldview through books. That conflicted with my religious beliefs, and God lost.
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!
Mr. Axiomatic is fortunate to have exercised Original Sight to arrive at the realization that mere reality is worthy of joy. I was oblivious to this until I started reading all the popular atheists saying how reality is great, and then when Eliezer handled it in a series with the utmost clarity and depth.
-L. A. Rollins, Lucifer's Lexicon
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?
I was looking for skeptic specifically, but that's a close second.
-- John Dewey
-- Stephen J. Gould
-- Bertrand Russell
-- Alfred North Whitehead
-- John Stuart Mill
-- 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.
--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.
Yes, and that is to me one of the main attractions of Bayesianism; but nevertheless, there is still a jump there between our informal considerations and formal means, and that ineradicable jump is what Perlis is talking about.
Link appears to be broken.
Fixed, thanks.
"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
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.
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?
Good point. Clarified.
"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
Niels Henrik David Bohr (1885-1962)
Jane Jacobs
Reminds me of non-atheists who try to give advice to those of us who would like to make atheism into a significant movement ("New Atheists" etc.) under the implausible pretense that they're just trying to help us be more effective.
Your point seems to have a valid core, but perhaps making the observation right next to this quote is not... um... is not what one might do after reflecting for a while about moral symmetry and the content of the message that suggests that we should generally try to focus on positive outcomes and the unrealized potential in things we already love?
You're right.
"A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life."
-Baruch Spinoza
Does that mean "a free person thinks that death is the worst of all things" or "a free person thinks less often about death than about any other thing"?
(The former doesn't seem to have that much to do with freedom, so I'm guessing he meant the latter... in which case I agree with him, but probably not in the way he intended: yes, we won't think about death very often once we're free from it.)
I think he means that it is irrational to ponder death when those moments can be spent living life productively. Not sure if I agree -- doesn't the thought of one's death often propel us to great action, while lack of such thoughts leads to complacency? Anyways here is the the proof from the Ethics:
Proof.— (67:1) A free man is one who lives under the guidance of reason, who is not led by fear (IV:lxiii.), but who directly desires that which is good (IV:lxiii.Coroll.), in other words (IV:xxiv.), who strives to act, to live, and to preserve his being on the basis of seeking his own true advantage; wherefore such an one thinks of nothing less than of death, but his wisdom is a meditation of life.
-- 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.
Also, my understanding is that neither Michelson nor Morley ever stopped believing in a luminiferous aether and spent much of their remaining careers trying to show there was one.
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 :-)
Árni Magnússon
There are people who do both, unintentionally or not. And the last line strikes me as cynicism for cynicism's sake.
-- 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.
Leaving aside your claim that Atran's analogy is idiotic, the evidence seems to point away from your claim that this idiocy is self-evident to this audience. The Atran quote stands at 7 votes, while your comment stands at –2 votes.
That isn't proof, of course. Upvoting doesn't necessarily imply agreement, though the upvoters—and I am one—probably consider the quote to be at least non-idiotic. And your comment's downvotes (none of which are mine) may be due more to its strong language than to disagreement. But still, isn't this strong evidence that the quote's idiocy is not self-evident to the rest of this audience?
-Vorpal
A rationality quote from Space Battles? Really?
(I regard many posts in Non-sci-fi as examples of politics as a mind killer. Edit: I'm pretty sure even most of the denizens there wouldn't claim it's really about debate, at any rate. But... the quote is Actually pretty funny)
Yeah, I used to post a fair bit on Space Battles years and years ago as a teenager, but in retrospect the vast majority of debates there (both the Star Trek vs. Star Wars type stuff and the political stuff) were about trying to "win" the argument high-school-debate style, rather than trying come to a reasonable conclusion or discover something new. It was fun until I realized that everyone was just arguing around in circles though :).
ps Star Trek > Star Wars 4 lyfe
From Thomas Macaulay's 1848 History of England.
.................................
--Review of The Art of Choosing, by Sheena Iyengar
That should be "Iyengar" with an i.
Thanks =)
-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.
.
How is that related to rationality?
"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.
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.
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.
This is an excellent diagnosis, and those are excellent suggestions for really learning the material.
I had a similar problem when I read Feynman's QED. His explanation felt so simple and easy to understand when I read it, but when I tried to explain it to someone else I couldn't make it make sense.
Does the length of his sequences imply that Eliezer doesn't understand their subject matter, or that the universe is sometimes actually complicated?
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?
"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?)
"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.