Rationality Quotes: December 2010

Tiiba

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* "Do not quote yourself."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* Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.

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.

* "Do not quote yourself."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* Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.

I felt a desire to argue against this quote, but of course a better idea would be to ask what it means.

I'm guessing that "practice" means "the way people are solving this problem now," while "theory" means "the study of what makes a problem-solving method good."

If theorists invent some method that they think is good, but which has already been rejected by practitioners, then I would guess that the theorists have a wrong notion of "good," and they should update their theory on the evidence. If the theorists invent a new method, then there is a chance that it is an improvement, and it may catch on.

If theorists invent some method that they think is good, but which has already been rejected by practitioners, then I would guess that the theorists have a wrong notion of "good," and they should update their theory on the evidence.

Practitioners can reject an idea for wrong reasons -- for example, because it seems weird and runs contrary to how things were always done.

5gerg15y

My first reading of this quote was essentially "the map loses to the terrain". I interpreted "theory" as "our beliefs" and "practice" as "reality".

6David_Gerard15y

Torvalds is an engineer applying engineer's thinking, and here "practice" means engineering. The context was problems with a particularly awful API that just wasn't fit for purpose, but which had twenty years' encrusted usage to work around. He was responding to an ext4 filesystem programmer who was complaining that KDE4 users suffering dataloss on ext4 just weren't using the bad API the way he thought they should, even though other filesystems did not exhibit the dataloss. I must confess that, reading the email, I don't see how he derives the last line from what he's saying above ... it doesn't seem to follow from taking about a 20-years-encrusted SNAFU. Perhaps it does follow from a programmer demanding people use an API the way he thinks they should, rather than the way everyone conventionally had for two decades. Real-world use winning over abstractions of how things should be: [...] It is, however, a widely-quoted statement - it resonates with people somehow. This is not, of course, the same as constituting or being about rationality.