A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).
If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top … that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.
Buckminster Fuller
Kołakowski's Law, or The Law of the Infinite Cornucopia:
For any given doctrine that one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of arguments by which to support it.
Leszek Kołakowski
Rule I
We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.
To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.
Rule II
Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.
As to respiration in a man and in a beast; the descent of stones in Europe and in America; the light of our culinary fire and of the sun; the reflection of light in the earth, and in the planets.
Rule III
...The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intensification nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.
For since the qualities of bodies are only known to us by experiments, we are to hold for universal all such as universally agree with experiments; and such as are not liable to diminution can never be quite taken away. We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own dev
I know this is well known, but to supplement the T-Rex:
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
-Alfréd Rényi/Paul Erdős
Yes, and don't forget the dual result that a comathematician is a device for turning cotheorems into ffee.
The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report.
A more direct paraphrasing would be, Just because I don't have all the answers doesn't mean that your answers are correct.
A concrete example: just because scientists don't currently know everything about how evolution happened, that doesn't mean that Young Earth Creationists are right. Typical YEC debating strategy is to look for gaps (real or imagined) in our current theories, and act as if that proves that God created the world in six days, and from the dust created every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, etc.
"We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this." is a fallacy. (The Politician's Syllogism.) Mencken's statement pretty clearly includes the course of action of not taking action; he's stating that any action is not necessarily better than no action, and that taking on any belief is not necessarily better than holding no belief.
I don't think either of you are getting it right. I'm not familiar with the context of this particular quote, but knowing it's from Mencken, he's clearly referring to various idealistic busybodies and their grand (and typically disastrously unsound) plans to solve the world's problems. The quote is directed against idealists who assume moral high ground and scoff at those who question their designs.
...When I was halfway through my Ph.D. I formulated a hypothesis: The proximate challenge that keeps you from graduating is that you have to write a thesis. But the ultimate challenge to getting your Ph.D. is this: You somehow have to learn to understand, deep down, that all your romantic notions about the Ph.D. are bunk, that you will be exactly the same person on the day after you get it that you were the day before, and that you need to stop waiting for the day when you feel like a god and just write something down and get on with life.
It may take you years to accept this, and it may drive you to drink, but after you get to that point you can graduate.
Only then will you be able to live with the fact that your thesis looks like crap to you. Your thesis will always look like crap to you. Either you will have figured out absolutely everything and your thesis will look incredibly boring to you, because you've moved on, or -- vastly more likely -- your thesis will look woefully incomplete because, geez, there is so much that you couldn't figure out, and you're just so stupid!
Or, most likely of all, you will think both of these things at the same time.
Similarly: Being the world's foremo
From desert cliff and mountaintop we trace the wide design,
Strike-slip fault and overthrust and syn and anticline...
We gaze upon creation where erosion makes it known,
And count the countless aeons in the banding of the stone.
Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks & shells are found;
Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground.
The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.
There are those who name the stars, who watch the sky by night,
Seeking out the darkest place, to better see the light.
Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will,
Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still.
High above the mountaintops, where only distance bars,
The truth has left its footprints in the dust between the stars.
We may watch and study or may shudder and deny,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the sky.
By stem and root and branch we trace, by feather, fang and fur,
How the living things that are descend from things that were.
The moss, the kelp, the zebrafish, the very mice and flies,
These tiny, humble, wordless things--how shall they tell us lies?
We are kin to beasts; no other answer can we bring.
The truth...
Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will, Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still.
What evidence is there that Galileo was tortured?
So far as I know, he wasn't, just placed under house arrest. It jumped out at me too; you really have to get these poems exactly right on a factual level or it takes a lot away.
The modern conception of Galileo as someone harshly prosecuted for his beliefs seems rather exaggarated: in reality, he was even explicitly encouraged to write a book on the subject by the church. It was only when he offended the Pope in his book that he got sent to house arrest.
...In the end, Cardinal Bellarmine, acting on directives from the Inquisition, delivered him an order not to "hold or defend" the idea that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still at the centre. The decree did not prevent Galileo from discussing heliocentrism hypothesis (thus maintaining a facade of separation between science and that church). For the next several years Galileo stayed well away from the controversy. He revived his project of writing a book on the subject, encouraged by the election of Cardinal Maffeo Barberini as Pope Urban VIII in 1623. Barberini was a friend and admirer of Galileo, and had opposed the condemnation of Galileo in 1616. The book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was published in 1632, with formal authorization from the Inquisition and papal permission. [...]
Earlier, Pope Urban VIII had personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against helio
So far as I know, he wasn't, just placed under house arrest.
According to Owen Gingerich's The Great Copernicus Chase, the 1633 decree calling Galileo to be interrogated* read, in part, as follows:
Galileo Galilei ... is to be interrogated concerning the accusation, even threatened with torture, and if he sustains it, proceeding to an abjuration of the vehement [suspicion of heresy] before the full Congregation of the Holy Office, sentenced to imprisonment....
(Emphasis added.) Gingerich goes on to say:
On the next page the results of the interrogation are recorded. In Italian are Galileo's words: 'I do not hold and have not held this opinion of Copernicus since the command was intimated to me that I must abandon it.' Then he was again told to speak the truth under the threat of torture. He responded: 'I am here to submit, and I have not held this opinion since the decision was pronounced, as I have stated.' Finally, there is a notation that nothing further could be done, and this time the document is properly signed in Galileo's hand. Galileo was sent back to his house at Arcetri, outside Florence, where he remained under house arrest until his death in 1642.
(Emphasis adde...
imagine if a presidential candidate mentions how his will was broken by torture in Vietnam, and afterward it's revealed that all that happened was that he was told he might be tortured, so he spilled the beans immediately. I wouldn't expect his poll numbers to go up.
I would still say that torture was used to break his will. To say this would be accurate, if not precise (because I'm not specifying whether I mean a particular act or an institutionalized practice). Whether his will proved too easy to break to satisfy the electorate is another matter.
If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day.
John Archibald Wheeler
Getting caught up in style and throwing away victory is something for the lower ranks to do. Captains can't even think about doing such a carefree thing. Don't try to be a good guy. It doesn't matter who owes who. From the instant they enter into a war, both sides are evil.
Related to: Politics, Protection
A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse, not a remarkable mathematician.
--Samuel Johnson
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."
— T.H. White (The Once and Future King)
For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.
~René Descartes, Discourse on the Method
It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful, they are found because it was possible to find them. -J. Robert Oppenheimer.
David Hume was right to predict that superstition would survive for hundreds of years after his death, but how could he have anticipated that his own work would inspire Kant to invent a whole new package of superstitions? Or that the incoherent system of Marx would move vast populations to engineer their own ruin? Or that the infantile rantings of the author of Mein Kampf would be capable of bringing the whole world to war?
Perhaps we will one day succeed in immunizing our societies against such bouts of collective idiocy by establishing a social contract in which each child is systematically instructed in Humean skepticism. Such a new Emile would learn about the psychological weaknesses to which Homo sapiens is prey, and so would understand the wisdom of treating all authorities - political leaders and social role-models, academics and teachers, philosophers and prophets, poets and pop stars - as so many potential rogues and knoves, each out to exploit the universal human hunger for social status. He would therefore appreciate the necessity of doing all of his own thinking for himself. He would understand why and when to trust his neighbors. Above all, he would waste no time yearning for utopias that are incompatible with human nature.
-- Ken Binmore, in Natural Justice, p56
This is a bit long for a rationality quote and isn't really a quote but short enough and worth the read: The most poetic and convincing argument for striving for posthumanity (via aleph.se).
We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.
Dr. Manhattan (Watchmen)
It is still an unending source of surprise for me how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a piece of paper can change the course of human affairs. -Stanislaw Ulam
In 1923, England and France divided between them the previously Turkish territories of what are modern Syria, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine. They drew a pencil line on a map to mark the treaty border.
It turned out that the thickness of the pencil line itself was several hundred meters on the ground. In 1964, Israel fought a battle with Syria over that land.
People were killed because someone neglected to sharpen their pencil. That's "scribbles on a piece of paper" for you.
Ref: a book found by Google. I originally learned about this from an Israeli plaque at the Dan River preserve near the border.
If, instead of welcoming inquiry and criticism, the admirers of a great author accept his writings as authoritative, both in their excellences and in their defects, the most serious injury is done to truth. In matters of philosophy and science, authority has ever been the great opponent of truth. A despotic calm is usually the triumph of error. In the republic of the sciences, sedition and even anarchy are beneficial in the long run to the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
William Stanley Jevons, Theory of Political Economy, 1871: p.275-6
“But for that matter, how do you explain the fact that the statues of Easter Island are megaliths exactly like the Celtic ones? Or that a Polynesian god called Ya is clearly the Yod of the Jews, as is the ancient Hungarian Io-v’, the great and good god? Or that an ancient Mexican manuscript shows the Earth as a square surrounded by sea, and in its center is a pyramid that has on its base the inscription Aztlan, which is close to Atlas and Atlantis? Why are pyramids found on both sides of the Atlantic?”
“Because it’s easier to build pyramids than spheres. Because the wind produces dunes in the shape of pyramids and not in the shape of the Parthenon.”
“I hate the spirit of the Enlightenment.”
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has, nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some bright morning to find it gone, clean vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of his life gone with it. I have myself known such a man; and who can tell how many histories of circle-squarers, metaphysicians, astrologers, and what not, may not be told in the old German story?
Charles Sanders Peirce
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
Richard Feynman
Farnsworth A: You people and your slight differences disgust me. I'm going home. Where's that blue box with our universe in it?
Farnsworth 1: Oh, you'd like to get back to your evil universe, wouldn't you? And destroy your box with our universe inside it.
Farnsworth A: Nonsense! I would never do such a thing unless you were already having been going to do that!
--Futurama
The important thing is not to shout at this point, Vimes told himself. Do not ... what do they call it ... go spare? Treat this as a learning exercise. Find out why the world is not as you thought it was. Assemble the facts, digest the information, consider the implications. Then go spare. But with precision.
[I have had cause to apply this one recently. It particularly resonated to see it in the book just now.]
There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
-Samuel Butler
Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.
Charles H. Spurgeon
Not always. I know someone who narrowly avoided Auschwitz who would beg to differ; her worst enemies were definitely external.
Your comment raises a very delicate point and I'm not sure that I am tactful enough to make it clearly.
Zooming out to get a broader view so that we can notice what usually happens, rather than the memorable special case, we notice that most Germans were enthusiastic about Hitler, all the way from 1933 to 1941. It is hard to reconstruct the reasons why. Looking at the broad picture we get a clear sense of people being their own worst enemies, enthusiastically embracing a mad leader who will lead them to destruction.
The message that history is sending to Alan is: if you had been a young man in Germany in 1933 you would have idolized Hitler. There are two ways to respond to this sobering message. One is to picture myself as an innocent victim. There were plenty of innocent victims, so this is easily done, but it dodges the hard question. The other response is to embrace the LessWrong vision and to search for ways to avoid the disasters to which self-deception sentences Man.
You're right, and I think that the reason it's so hard to make that point tactfully is because of how scary it is. If we go down that line of thought honestly, we can imagine ourselves firing up the ovens, or dragging manacled people into the belly of a slave ship, and feeling good about it. This is not a comfortable idea.
But there's another, more hopeful side to this. As MartinB points out, it's possible to understand how such monstrous acts feel to the people committing them, and train yourself to avoid making the same mistakes. This is a problem we can actually attack, as long as we can accept that our own thoughts are fallible.
(On a lighter note: how many people here regularly catch themselves using fallacious logic, and quickly correct their own thoughts? I would hope that the answer is "everyone", or at least "almost everyone". If you do this, then it shows that you're already being significantly less wrong, and it should give a fair amount of protection against crazy murderous ideologies.)
Can't you say "not always" about pretty much any quote? They aren't meant to be taken as universal truths that apply to all people and all circumstances across all of time ;-).
Rationality quotes: very many from @BadDalaiLama on Twitter.
(Edit: there's also this handy archive.)
Isaac Newton's argument for intelligent design:
...Were all the planets as swift as Mercury or as slow as Saturn or his satellites; or were the several velocities otherwise much greater or less than they are (as they might have been had they arose from any other cause than their gravities); or had the distances from the centers about which they move been greater or less than they are (as they might have been had they arose from any other cause than their gravities); or had the quantity of matter in the sun or in Saturn, Jupiter, and the earth (and by consequ
If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen to look like oxen, and each would make the gods’ bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.
Xenophanes
From Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series:
"Certainly, my situation is unique," Sazed said. "I would say that I arrived at it because of belief."
"Belief?" Vin asked.
"Yes," Sazed said. "Tell me, Mistress, what is it that you believe?"
Vin frowned. "What kind of question is that?"
"The most important kind, I think."
Vin thought, then shrugged. "I don't know what I believe."
"People often say that, but I find it is rarely true."
Overall, however, we've done better by avoiding dragons than by slaying them. -Warren E. Buffett
The course of human progress staggers like a drunk; its steps are quick and heavy but its mind is slow and blunt
-Jesse Michaels of Operation Ivy
Posted because it's a useful and evocative metaphor: the drunk feels himself leaning or falling in one direction, and puts his foot down in that direction to steady himself. If he doesn't step far enough, he is still leaning in the same direction, and he steps again. In this way we can make fantastic progress in directions we don't like while getting further away from the ways we did want to go.
I just came across this and thought it was a pretty funny dialogue: "Reality is that which does not go away upon reprogramming." (Check the first 4 comments here: Chatbot Debates Climate Change Deniers on Twitter so You Don’t Have to)
This is of course a paraphrase borrowed from Philip K. Dick's famous statement:
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
I shared this on another website and got this comment:
Heh, that's one way to pass the Turing Test. Don't make your bot smarter, make it seek out dumb people.
'Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
Pope, Essay on Criticism
Research must contrive to do business at a profit, by which I mean it must produce more effective scientific inquiry than it expends. No doubt it already does so. But it would do well to become conscious of it's economic position and contrive ways of living upon it. -CS Peirce
And should you ask yourselves, "How can we know that the oracle was not spoken by the Lord?" -- if the prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and the oracle does not come true, that oracle was not spoken by the Lord; the prophet has uttered it presumptuously: do not stand in dread of him.
Deuteronomy 18:20-22
half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at
solomon short (david gerrold's fictional character)
Out-of-sample error equals in-sample error plus a penalty for model complexity
Y.S. Abu-Mostafa, in explaining the VC inequality of PAC learning.
There are times I almost think
Nobody sure of what he absolutely know
Everybody find confusion
In conclusion he concluded long ago
And it puzzle me to learn
That tho' a man may be in doubt of what he know,
Very quickly he will fight...
He'll fight to prove that what he does not know is so!
Scooping the Loop Snooper
an elementary proof of the undecidability of the halting problem
by Geoffrey Pullum
...No program can say what another will do. Now, I won't just assert that, I'll prove it to you: I will prove that although you might work till you drop, you can't predict whether a program will stop.
Imagine we have a procedure called P that will snoop in the source code of programs to see there aren't infinite loops that round and around; and P prints the word "Fine!" if no looping is found.
You feed in your code, and the input it needs, and
Most of the founding Zetas members–the original 40–were trained elite soldiers who received instruction in radio communications, counter-insurgency and drug-interdiction. But the Army forgot to add a few ethics lessons into the education mix. And that was a big fucking mistake.
"...for we judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done."
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh ch. 1
I chose and my world was shaken, so what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not.
Sunday in the Park with George, by Stephen Sondheim
A universe that needed someone to observe it in order to collapse it into existence would be a pretty sorry universe indeed.
— Randall Munroe, xkcd – Mutual
Q: Don't you think sire, that the TV commercials should look more like real life?
A: On the contrary! I think life should be more like TV commercials.
Beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you.
(Developed in the context of biblical interpretation, of course. But despite my nontheism, I've found the principle behind it to be widely applicable.)
For the young who want to by Marge Piercy
The poem is mostly about not being recognized as having a magical ability to do things until after you've succeeded. I'm just posting the link because it's more trouble than it's worth to make the line breaks show up properly.
"Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas."
Erwin Rommel, The Rommel Papers (1982) edited by Basil Henry Liddell Hart http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel#Sourced
"But building your life's explanations around science isn't a profession. It is, at its core, an emotional contract, an agreement to only derive comfort from rationality."
-Robert Sapolsky, in a essay reply to "Does science make belief in God obsolete?"
"All of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them."
---George Eliot, "Middlemarch"
When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity; when many people >suffer from a delusion it is called religion.
~ Robert M. Pirsig
Now the actual quote's out of the way, here's my version: when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity; when many people suffer from a delusion it is called society.
Not a quote about rationalism, but probably relevant to Less Wrong:
...Pure Death
We looked, we loved, and therewith instantly
Death became terrible to you and me.
By love we disenthralled our natural terror
From every comfortable philosopher
Or tall, grey doctor of divinity:
Death stood at last in his true rank and order.
It happened soon, so wild of heart were we,
Exchange of gifts grew to a malady:
Their worth rose always higher on each side
Till there seemed nothing but ungivable pride
That yet remained ungiven, and this degree
Called a conclusion not to be denied.
T
All my confidence comes from knowing God's laws.
-- Talib Kweli (substitute "nature" for "God")
Justice is an artefact of custom. Where customs are unsettled its dictates soon become dated. Ideas of justice are as timeless as fashions in hats.
-John Gray, Straw Dogs
Who has not experienced the chilling memory of the better things? How it creeps over the spirit of one's current dreams! Like the specter at the banquet it stands, its substanceless eyes viewing with a sad philosophy the make-shift feast.
-Theodore Dreiser, The Titan
There are times I almost think, Nobody sure of what he absolutely know. Everybody find confusion, In conclusion he concluded long ago. And it puzzle me to learn , That tho' a man may be in doubt of what he know, Very quickly he will fight... He'll fight to prove that what he does not know is so!
There are times I almost think Nobody sure of what he absolutely know Everybody find confusion In conclusion he concluded long ago And it puzzle me to learn That tho' a man may be in doubt of what he know, Very quickly he will fight... He'll fight to prove that what he does not know is so!
"However insistently the blind may deny the existence of the sun, they cannot annihilate it. " - D. T. Suzuki
"Normal humans don't interest me. If anyone here is an alien, a time traveler, slider, or an esper, then come find me! That is all."
--The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, vol 1
I got burned during a debate because I trusted the history from my physics textbook. After having read several books on the history of science (rather than summaries inside larger works) I am convinced that the Dark Arts on on full display even in natural science coursework.