Rationality quotes: August 2010

Cyan

This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Getting from "other people's minds are probably similar to mine" to "I care about other people's minds" still requires some implicit premises or some psychological features beyond egoism (e.g. empathy).

Specifically it requires "I care about myself" with saner boundaries around what counts as 'self' as the implicit premise.

Added: Any specific reason for the downvote?

0ShardPhoenix16y

Evolution (of genes and/or memes) is probably sufficient to generate this.

-1[anonymous]16y

That's a better response to Will's post than to the Donne quote. Donne only states that all humans influence each other's existence to some minimal degree, butterfly-effect-style (I would object, incidentally, that such influence may not always be desirable); it's Will that brings up the similarities between humans as his moral foundation.