mikerpiker comments on Rationality quotes: August 2010 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Cyan 03 August 2010 12:16AM

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Comment author: mikerpiker 03 August 2010 02:55:55AM *  6 points [-]

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

-H.P. Lovecraft

Comment author: DSimon 03 August 2010 03:21:28AM *  9 points [-]

Sounds like Caveman Science Fiction to me. "Why should we risk learning about new things, when there's a possibility they'll be scary?"

Comment author: Kyre 03 August 2010 05:35:17AM *  8 points [-]

I never read Lovecraft as being any kind of metaphor for the real world, so I wouldn't vote this up as a rationalist quote for that reason.

But I like it as a device used Lovecraft to try to convey a sheer magnitude of horror. Can you imagine discovering something so horrific you wished you could delete the whole thing from your memory ? The more you pride yourself as a rationalist, the more horrific it would have to be.

Comment author: AlanCrowe 03 August 2010 11:12:26AM 7 points [-]

This belongs on the parody site http://morewrong.com. Please build it :-)

Comment author: Yvain 03 August 2010 10:13:43PM 15 points [-]

I don't know; the more Less Wrong I read, the more I start to think Lovecraft was on to something.

Delving too far in our search for knowledge is likely to awaken vast godlike forces which are neither benevolent nor malevolent but horrifyingly indifferent to humanity. Some of these forces may be slightly better or worse than others, but all of them could and would swat our civilization away like a mosquito. Such forces may already control other star systems.

The only defense against such abominations is to study the arcane knowledge involved in summoning or banishing these entities; however, such knowledge is likely to cause its students permanent psychological damage or doom them to eternities of torture.

Comment author: Larks 06 August 2010 12:14:57AM 4 points [-]

We've got Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality; maybe you should write Cthulhu Mythos and Rationality ?

Then again, it might be unwise to disseminate it openly.

Comment author: steven0461 06 August 2010 12:18:44AM 11 points [-]

At the Mountains of Sanity

Comment author: gwern 15 November 2010 11:21:16PM *  3 points [-]

I've always enjoyed Vernor Vinge's name for AI: "Applied Theology".

(In, I think, A Fire upon the Deep.)

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 04 April 2014 07:51:56PM 1 point [-]

"Theological engineering" has a nice ring to it.

Comment author: toto 06 August 2010 08:06:27AM 0 points [-]

This seems to be the premise of Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall".

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