Miller comments on Rationality Quotes: December 2010 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Tiiba 03 December 2010 03:23AM

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Comment author: Miller 04 December 2010 04:33:09AM 3 points [-]

"I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." -- Groucho Marx

Comment author: JoshuaZ 08 December 2010 02:56:30AM 1 point [-]

This may be funny but the actual context makes it a) less rationalist and b) a bit sad. There's some argument that he was actually talking about the standard at the time that Jews couldn't have any access to the trendier clubs.

Comment author: Miller 11 December 2010 04:59:36PM *  1 point [-]

Interesting -- below I give the wikipedia take on it.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Groucho_Marx

I sent the club a wire stating, "PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER".

Telegram to the Friar's Club of Beverly Hills to which he belonged, as recounted in Groucho and Me (1959), p. 321

Groucho sent the quote to a club which he was a member of, that was founded by a Jew. I can see how one could infer an ironic reference to antisemitism from that. Interesting that the quote as often paraphrased drops the 'people like me' part.

Comment author: simplicio 08 December 2010 01:44:29AM 1 point [-]

It's funny, but NO NO NO! This is exactly why rationalists suck at forming socially cohesive groups! :)

Comment author: wedrifid 08 December 2010 02:21:33AM 2 points [-]

That doesn't seem all that likely to me. It would seem somewhat more likely if the quote was 'will not'...

Comment author: Miller 04 December 2010 04:37:30AM 1 point [-]

I rather immediately decided to see if this had been posted before. Google indexed this comment within 2 minutes.

Comment author: Tuna-Fish 07 December 2010 01:35:51AM 2 points [-]

This site uses the google custom search (see sidebar), and it provides a feature for on-demand indexing. I suppose it shares the index it makes with google proper.

alongandunlikelystringtotesthypothesis

Comment author: Tuna-Fish 07 December 2010 01:41:18AM 0 points [-]

So far, this has been a failure -- the test string still isn't found by google, and the previous post doesn't even show up in the custom search yet.

Had to stop polling because google now thinks I'm a bot.

Comment author: Perplexed 07 December 2010 01:47:53AM 1 point [-]

I found the posting easily enough by searching "google custom search lesswrong". Try your experiment again using a shorter string.

Comment author: gwern 12 December 2010 03:40:44AM 1 point [-]

Imagine my surprise when I once added a reference to a Wikipedia and 20 seconds later googled it to see whether I missed anything - and that WP article was prominent in the hits.

Comment author: wedrifid 04 December 2010 04:49:41AM 0 points [-]

Google does seem to love this site! (I wonder if Google has specialised technology in place for handling reddit based sites.)