'One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.
At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.”
God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”'
Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., quoted in Medical World News (September 1, 1972), p. 45, as quoted in Tufte's 1974 book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy; http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/12/the-ethics-of-random-clinical-trials.html
if you're the smartest person in the room, go look for a room with smarter people in it.
A young boy walks into a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, “This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.” The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?” The boy takes the quarters and leaves. “What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!” Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. “Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?” The boy licked his cone and replied, “Because the day I take the dollar, the game is over!”
Found on /r/funny
Mitch Hedberg on the distinction between labels and the things to which they are applied:
I just bought a 2-bedroom house, but it's up to me, isn't it, how many bedrooms there are? Fuck you, real estate lady! This bedroom has a oven in it! This bedroom’s got a lot of people sitting around watching TV. This bedroom is A.K.A. a hallway.
"Claude Shannon once told me that as a kid, he remembered being stuck on a jigsaw puzzle. His brother, who was passing by, said to him: "You know: I could tell you something."
That's all his brother said.
Yet that was enough hint to help Claude solve the puzzle. The great thing about this hint... is that you can always give it to yourself."
--Manuel Blum, "Advice to a Beginning Graduate Student"
The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. [...] Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin.
-- Ted Kaczynski
In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information; extract the knowledge.
Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. These filters protect against advertising.
Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians.
Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects from the media.
-- Marc Stielger, David's Sling
Witching was turning out to be mostly hard work and really short on magic of the zap!-glingle-glingle-glingle variety. There was no school and nothing that was exactly like a lesson. But it wasn’t wise to try to learn witching all by yourself, especially if you had a natural talent. If you got it wrong, you could go from ignorant to cackling in a week ...
When you got right down to it, it was all about cackling. No one ever talked about this, though. Witches said things like “You can never be too old, too skinny, or too warty,” but they never mentioned the cackling. Not properly. They watched out for it, though, all the time.
It was all too easy to become a cackler. Most witches lived by themselves (cat optional) and might go for weeks without ever seeing another witch. In those times when people hated witches, they were often accused of talking to their cats. Of course they talked to their cats. After three weeks without an intelligent conversation that wasn’t about cows, you’d talk to the wall. And that was an early sign of cackling.
“Cackling,” to a witch, didn’t just mean nasty laughter. It meant your mind drifting away from its anchor. It meant you losing your grip. It meant lone...
"Empty arguments with words cannot (in any way) compare with a test which will show practical results."
Ma Jun, inventor or reinventor of the South Pointing Chariot and the differential gear.
That's the thing about power, I think. To some people --those of us who have none-- anyone who has it and uses it is a villain. To those who have it, anyone who tries to stop them from using it is a villain. Because we're all the heroes of our own story, no matter what horrible things we might be doing.
Sometimes people do terrible things with the best of intentions. I don't think that makes them any less guilty. But if you understand their reasons, you might find it more difficult to condemn them out of hand. You might find it more difficult to call them villains.
On the other hand, sometimes people do terrible things with the absolute worst of intentions. But even there, I don't think they're supervillains. I think they're just people.
(emphasis added)
... unfortunately, there is a flaw in the reasoning. ... [T]o say that each of two numbers cannot be bigger than the other is to repeat the statement that is to be proved. It is not correct in logic to prove something by saying it over again; that only works in politics, and even there it is usually considered desirable to repeat the proposition hundreds of times before considering it as definitely established.
— Carl E. Linderholm, "Mathematics Made Difficult"
(There are many more good quotes to be found in this book.)
God is nowhere treated worse than by the natural scientists who believe in him. Materialists simply explain the facts, without making use of such phrases, they do this first when importunate pious believers try to force God upon them, and then they answer curtly, either like Laplace: Sire, je n’avais pas, etc., or more rudely in the manner of the Dutch merchants who, when German commercial travellers press their shoddy goods on them, are accustomed to turn them away with the words: Ik kan die zaken niet gebruiken [I have no use for the things] and that is the end of the matter: But what God has had to suffer at the hands of his defenders! In the history of modern natural science, God is treated by his defenders as Frederick William III was treated by his generals and officials in the Jena campaign. One division of the army after another lays down its arms, one fortress after another capitulates before the march of science, until at last the whole infinite realm of nature is conquered by science, and there is no place left in it for the Creator. Newton still allowed Him the “first impulse” but forbade Him any further interference ‘in his solar system. Father Secchi bows Him out of t...
Coping with radical novelty requires an orthogonal method. One must consider one's own past, the experiences collected, and the habits formed in it as an unfortunate accident of history, and one has to approach the radical novelty with a blank mind, consciously refusing to try to link it with what is already familiar, because the familiar is hopelessly inadequate. One has, with initially a kind of split personality, to come to grips with a radical novelty as a dissociated topic in its own right. Coming to grips with a radical novelty amounts to creating an...
It isn't racist, it's realistic. If an entity thinks with something that we don't even call a brain, we shouldn't trust it because we have no way of knowing its motivations.
Yes, but it says "never trust", not "don't trust by default". It should be possible for non-brain-based beings to demonstrate their trustworthiness.
Edit: Also, you can't spell "REALISTIC" without "RACIST LIE". Proof by anagram. So there.
"The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year.
Unless you give at least forty-five minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your ninety minutes of a night are chiefly wasted. This means that your pace will be slow.
Never mind. " - Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 hours per day.
The brighter you are, the more you have to learn. -- Don Herold
I don't know the context of this, I came across it as a quote, but I can see two totally different interpretations, both true.
ADDED: Make that five interpretations.
The two I had in mind were:
Epistemic responsibility - you have an ethical obligation to learn because you can.
The more you have to learn - I don't know about you, but I am about as likely to stop learning as to stop breathing - I'm not likely to do either voluntarily.
I swear, if I write a column saying it was a beautiful day yesterday, I'll get at least two letters informing me that it wasn't a nice day for the people starving in Bangladesh, and if I wasn't such a heartless son of a bitch who only thinks about himself, I'd realize that and stop talking about the weather, so I should do everyone a favor and kill myself. -- Tom Naughton
That reminds me: when I was little, there was a puzzle in a happy meal that said, "Rearrange these letters to spell something that can make a canoe sink: ELAK." The correct answer, of course, was "leak". I was upset, because my answer was "a elk". (And now that I think about it, if you draw this as a causal diagram, "lake" should be a valid answer too.)
"Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it." -- Steven Pinker
"The proper, wise balancing of one's whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour."
--Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours Per Day
...To learn to write well is to pursue a connection between your facility with language and the content, intellectual and otherwise, of your character. I do not mean by this that people who cannot write well have no character or that writing is the only way in which people can show their character. I mean, simply, that you cannot write well if you do not make this connection, because not to make it is to fail, as a writer, in holding yourself accountable for the quality of your own thinking. Or, to put it another way, it is to fail to take your own intellect
"they have attained [happiness] by realising that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.
Now, shall I blush, or will you?
Do not fear that I mean to thrust certain principles upon your attention. I care not (in this place) what your principles are. Your principles may induce you to believe in the righteousness of burglary. I don't mind. All I urge is that a life in which conduct does not fairly well accord with principles is a silly life...
I apologize if this is a duplicate, for I cannot find it with the search bar:
What are the facts? Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" — what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!
Time Enough for Love (1973) or The Notebooks of Lazarus Long (1978), Robert...
Dueling Cryonics Relevant Quotes:
When it comes time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.
Tecumseh
...Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into tha
"I thought a little [while in the isolation tank], and then I stopped thinking altogether. … incredible how idleness of body leads to idleness of mind. After two days, I’d turned into an idiot. That’s the reason why, during a flight, astronauts are always kept busy."
Oriana Fallaci as quoted in Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, by Craig Nelson, which cites 'Fallici, Oriana If the Sun Dies. New York. Atheneum, 1967', seen on http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/12/11/after-two-days-id-turned-into-an-idiot/
I hate that quote; it's completely backwards and depends entirely on selection effect.
Many ideas accepted as self-evident, both true and false, are first violently opposed. Many ideas violently opposed are first ridiculed. However, most ridiculed ideas stay ridiculed, and most violently opposed ideas stay violently opposed.
Similarly: If you win, before that they probably fought you. If they fight you, before that they probably laughed at you. And if they laugh at you, before that they probably ignored you.
The key to getting a reputation for being brilliant is actually being brilliant, not just acting like you are.
HPMOR demonstrates:
1) People usually don't recognize faked genius as faked when they see it; they don't realize what's missing from "genius" characters in their fiction.
2) However, if you then show them real genius, they can recognize it as new, different, better, and important (though they may not realize what the added ingredient was).
And if you're one of those types of people that are always trying to figure out what region of the multiverse they're in, or how many identical copies of them have been created by an intergalactic superintelligent trickster, or what anthropic reference class they're in, or whether they're living in a computer simulation, or how their choices will impact maybe-logically-impossible counterfactual worlds — you know, one of those people — decision making can be really difficult. ;)
Asked by Galileo to look through his telescope at the newly discovered four moons of Jupiter, a representative of the pope answered: "I refuse to look at something which my religion tells me cannot exist." -- newscientist
(Isn't it obvious that this isn't the sort of thing a real person would be likely to say? Especially not the sort of person who would be sent to Galileo by the Pope.)
Shhh! That quote is a soldier for Our Side, don't break it! ;)
The quote isn't accurate. There was argument over what was being seen through the telescope, not about whether to look through it. Details from a guy who wrote a book on Galileo here.
Every month on the month, Less Wrong has a thread where we post Deep Wisdom from the Masters. I saw that nobody did this yet for December for some reason, so I figured I could do it myself.
* 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." --Tiiba
* Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB. That's like shooting fish in a barrel. :)
* No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.