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Rationality Quotes: December 2010
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* "Do not quote yourself."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* Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.
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Comments (331)
"Today I will question my own confusion."
From Today I Will Nourish My Inner Martyr - Affirmations for Cynics by Ann Thornhill & Sarah Wells
"When in total ignorance, try anything and you will be less ignorant."
-- G.Harry Stine, A Matter of Metalaw
You can never knowingly follow that advice, because if you knew you were in total ignorance, your ignorance would be less than total ;).
Yes, but you can at least knowingly commit to following the advice. Build a robot that detects whether you are in total ignorance, and takes a random action if so. Then forget about the robot.
But a robot that one has forgotten about taking a random action for some forgotten reason isn't likely to reduce one's state of ignorance.
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
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.
Why? I can see why there is a greater marginal value to putting more time into learning if you are bright, but why is there a higher marginal value of learning more if you are bright especially if, like almost everything else, there is eventually diminishing marginal returns to learning and bright people know more than not bright people.
Bright people have more unanswered questions, maybe? You can't be pondering the Gibbs paradox without knowing much more about thermodynamics than I currently do.
Three interpretations.
(I hadn't noticed #3 until I read James Miller's comment.)
A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it for a great deal.
-- William A White
Mark Zuckerberg
And the answer is, "Yes! I run the world's biggest honeypot for teenage idiots who want to post pics of themselves racing on a freeway with a suspended license and a beer in the cupholder."
Or no, because someone has to take care of minor stuff too, and some of it has to be done personally. No one manages to do important stuff all the time.
The key is to neglect the minor stuff until it becomes important to do it!
I've found that mindset is really bad for meeting deadlines.
That only works if the effort stays the same and the cost of neglect are acceptable.
I usually shower before it becomes necessary, and brush my teeth from time to time.
Actually, this book, which is where I found the quote, demonstrates how much of a social and political impact Facebook really has. It's definitely an interesting read.
I suspect the answer is "making as much money as I possibly can", and he's doing much better than all of us. He can convert that to other forms of value later.
Pretty close to Lakein's Question: "What is the best use of my time right now?" (from Alan Lakein's How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, 1973).
"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.
The word empty spoils the quotation. The point is that
or
I read it as
“On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.”
--Nietzsche
Isn't this true for any sort of mountains that are difficult to climb, not just the mountains of truth? For example, training makes you better at lying too!
With this in mind, I suppose the difficult part would be correctly identifying the range you're climbing.
Disregarding cliffs and chasms!
| Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.
-- Linus Torvalds
I don't think so. Many, many common practices would be improved by some properly applied theory.
"properly applied" qualifies it as practice
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.
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.
It's about rationality on the grounds that the filesystem programmer had lost sight of the necessity of winning; in this case, putting out code that actually works, rather than code that makes the programmer feel good.
It's painful to write clunky APIs, and pleasant to write elegant APIs... but that doesn't mean much if your elegant code would just be thrown away on release because everyone's already using the existing API.
My first reading of this quote was essentially "the map loses to the terrain". I interpreted "theory" as "our beliefs" and "practice" as "reality".
If your beliefs are defeated whenever they clash with reality, then you have attained a mastery of rationality that very few humans achieve. Torvalds' quote looks to me like an "is" statement rather than an "ought" statement, so I can't agree with your interpretation.
He's talking about the status of the code in question in his Linux tree, the one everyone in the world pulls from, so in that context he does in fact have the power to make his opinions reality ...
According to gerg's interpretation, you're saying that Torvalds' theory wins against practice, which contradicts Torvalds' statement.
I don't think that quite jives. The situation seems to be the opposite: Torvalds' practice (the Linux code base, and its quite healthy community of contributors and users, who would be annoyed if ext4 programs stopped working suddenly) is winning against theory (the notion that the API policy of the Linux kernel should be revised more in favor of elegance over compatibility).
I've been assuming that this subthread is about gerg's interpretation. Are you claiming that interpretation is correct, and offering some clarification, or are you just offering a different interpretation?
The former. Gerg's interpretation is about the map and the terrain, and it seems to me that "the actual codebase in its practical usage" associates closely with "the terrain", while "ideas/predictions about what would make the API more elegant" associates closely with "the map".
Tovalds doesn't have direct access to the reality of his users, but he does have direct access to the code they use.
Interesting nuance. You have taken "loses" to mean "defeated", presumably leading to "and therefore updated"; I agree that this is by no means an automatic process. But I took "loses" to mean "is less accurate" (which of course makes my interpretation more tautological).
Practitioners can reject an idea for wrong reasons -- for example, because it seems weird and runs contrary to how things were always done.
| "Why did I do that?" I asked.
-- The Poet Who Is Odd, Knapsack Poems by Elanor Arnason
The mind boggles as to what he has actually done that is so strange on reflection.
-- Dr. Weird, "Aqua Teen Hunger Force*
If you're curious, please read the story; it's short, and interesting! Actually, let me just spoil the premise now because I think it's neat and suspect other people will as well.
Knapsack Poems is about an alien race called the goxhat, in which each "person" consists of around 10 individuals, of varying gender. There's no telepathy or anything cheap like that, it's just a cornerstone cultural meme for the goxhat.
So when The Poet Who Is Odd asks themself "Why did I do that?", it's not rhetorical. Arguing with oneself is not uncommon.
It's not necessarily rhetorical even for actual people in the real world. At least, I often find that when I ask myself questions and answer them out loud (or in writing), I get surprising answers. (Arguing with myself is not uncommon.)
Also, you might enjoy Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep.
Interesting... After reading Three Worlds Collide, I've developed a taste for stories involving aliens that are... well, alien. I skimmed that section of the story, but I apparently didn't pick up on enough. Thanks for the recommendation!
— Peter Medawar
Up voted, although I think 'wasted' is a bit harsh. I would call lost time to unsuccessful research a necessary cost. If we all knew exactly which problems to study and which approaches to use it wouldn't be research, it would be divination.
I read the quote not as saying that four-fifths of his time had no value at all but that so-called 'wasted' time is a necessary part of the research process and actually does have value.
As seen elsewhere in this thread, Nietzsche disagrees.
— Yitz Herstein
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.
— John Von Neumann
Incidentally, he was one of the main people behind the invention of Monte Carlo methods for approximating things that were too complicated to calculate exactly.
"Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
-- Charles Darwin
G.K. Chesterton
[EDIT: Found to be erroneous! Sorry!]
I don't feel frightened, not knowing things; I think it's much more interesting.
-Richard P. Feynman
Nice. Do you have a source for that? Google didn't come up with much.
My source was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Cd36WJ79z4 is an autotuned piece which includes footage of Feynman speaking those words, but it looks like it's from interviews with BBC's Horizon.
See under "Doubt and uncertainty":
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/broadband/archive/feynman/index_textonly.shtml
Tch! And the transcript makes it plain that I have been fooled by video editing. I suggest then the following replacement:
"...I don't have to know an answer, I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious Universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is so far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me." - RPF
del
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 the solar system altogether, with all canonical honours it is true, but none the less categorically for all that, and he only allows Him a creative act as regards the primordial nebula. And so in all spheres. In biology, his last great Don Quixote, Agassiz, even ascribes positive nonsense to Him; He is supposed to have created not only the actual animals but also abstract animals, the fish as such! And finally Tyndall totally forbids Him any entry into nature and relegates Him to the world of emotional processes, only admitting Him because, after all, there must be somebody who knows more about all these things (nature) than John Tyndall! What a distance from the old God – the Creator of heaven and earth, the maintainer of all things – without whom not a hair can fall from the head!
~Frederick Engels, Notes and Fragments for Dialectics of Nature
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
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.
I think this quotation actually comes not from a real papal representative but from Brecht's play "Galileo".
(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! ;)
Now should I upvote for the great use of irony, or down for abuses of logic? My joke detector is broken.
The smiley is there as the equivalent of Braille for the joke-blind.
No. I've heard similar. (Although it actually felt uncomfortable to give that answer given that it could be seen as not-not supporting a co-aligned solider that we had decided to burn!)
There is some doubt over the treatment Galileo actually got, and what for.
I think wedrifid meant that e would being seen as supporting a false but favorable quote that everyone else was decrying for being false. [Edited for spelling]
Yes, complete with television show spy talk lingo to extend the analogy.
Some of Galileo's critics argued that at least some of his observations were artifacts of the instrument he was using (the telescope) and even cited experimental evidence in their critiques (such as looking at objects that could be seen with the naked eye as well as through the telescope and observing anomalies like duplication or "halos" through the latter). This is simply standard scientific criticism, not religious nay saying. So, even if the quote is accurate it wasn't necessarily representative of his critics.
The Jesuits of the Collegio Romano that were sent to meet with Galileo verified his observations by using his telescope, but disagreed with his interpretation of them. Therefore, it seems very unlikely that the quote is accurate.
Probably, the quote is a kind of bullshit.
Dueling Cryonics Relevant Quotes:
Tecumseh
Dylan Thomas
Until I reread the quotes, I thought your dueling should be dualing. I learned both that I was wrong, and that dualing isn't actually a word, even if duel and dual are.
However, I came up with the great idea that you could be dual-wielding cryonics quotes :)
Piercing quote in one hand, bludgeoning logic in the other. Surely nobody has resistance to both?
They may have resistance to both, but as long as it's not 100%, we can manage!
Loads of people have resistance to both. Have you never talked with a religious nut? That's when you pull out the implied threat of being made to look stupid in public and triple-wield them.
It can be tricky to pull off, but the results are very gratifying.
I don't know if this quote has already shown up, but it's one of my favorites.
"Consider this: You are the architect of your own imprisonment."
-- Macros the Black (from Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga)
Robert Anton Wilson, The Trick Top Hat
-Benjamin Franklin
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.)
I'm not sure what to make of the fact that "lake" was the answer that jumped out at me.
That was my answer too.
That you are given three of the four letters for "lake" in correct, consecutive order.
I don't remember the original order of the letters in the puzzle, but it must have been constructed to make the intended answer not stand out.
Clearly causality is secondary to grammar; had it been 'ELANK' you would have been right.
For some reason, I really like "a elk".
Well, strictly speaking, if you pile KALE high enough on your canoe, it will also cause it to sink due to excess weight. But that doesn't make KALE the best or most likely answer.
I do like your answer, though.
-Warren E. Buffett
Source: 2002 annual letter to Berkshire shareholders, according to http://research.lifeboat.com/buffett_warns.htm and http://www.insurancejournal.com/magazines/southcentral/2002/03/25/editorsnote/19139.htm
The 2002 letter can be found here:
http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2002pdf.pdf
-Confucius
I think this is a useful way to think of things, so you don't worry about changing and committing another mistake--it's a good way to make yourself cost-sensitive to mistake duration.
Max Planck
p(double post | a quote is awesome and relevant) = 0.87
Which way do I need to update?
Actually, I'm not sure. "Max Plank" isn't mention in a quotes thread. It does have an sequence post essentially dedicated to it and references elsewhere in posts.
Let's see. About:
p(double post | a quote is awesome and relevant) = 0.82
I have updated p(quote is in the quotes section | quote is discussed on the site) and p(quote is attributed) somewhat too.
(And, pre-emptively, I do feel comfortable providing two digits of precision. Not because I have excessive confidence in my ability to quantise my subjective judgements but rather because using significant figures as a method of communicating confidence or accuracy is a terrible idea.)
This seems right but I'm not sure why. Can you articulate your reasons?
Not wedrifid, but you needlessly lose some small amount of information. The digits after the last significant one still are your best bet for the actual value, so you systematically do worse than you could.
Let's see. I need to purge my conclusion cache. (What's the name for Eliezer's post on not asking 'why' but asking 'if'? I definitely needed to apply that.)
Yes, approximately what FAWS said. If I know I'm only accurate plus or minus 0.1 and the value I calculate is 0.75 then it would be silly to round off to 0.8. Compressing the two pieces of information (number and precision) into one number is just lossy. It can become a problem when writing say, 100 too. Although that can technically be avoided by always using scientific notation.
Ooops. To redeem my tarnished honor, I propose an algorithmic solution to the duplicate quote problem: a full list of quotes indexed by author (of the quote). Checking to see if a quote has already been posted would then be a fast operation.
Your honour remains intact! I predicted that the quote had been used, based primarily on how much I like it. Google didn't find it in a quotes thread. I suppose that would mean my honour is tarnished. How much honour does one lose by assigning greater than 0.5 probability to something that turns out to be incorrect. Is there some kind of algorithm for that? ;)
Honour I don't know about; I feel like any honour lost you could gain back by giving us a costly signal that you are recalibrating. But it does let us determine how badly calibrated you are, and then we can make judgements like pr(wedrifid is wrong | wedrifid is badly calibrated).
:P
Particularly when the 'prediction' was largely my way of complimenting the quote in a non-boring way. :P
I was actually relieved when I didn't found it wasn't in the quotes thread. I wasn't sure what I would update to if it was a double post. Slightly upward, only a little - there were too many complications. I can even imagine lowering p(double post | a quote is awesome and relevant) based finding that the instance is, in fact, a double post. (If the probability is particularly high and the underlying reasoning was such that I expected comments of that level of awesome to have been reposted half a dozen times.)
The tricky part now is not to prevent my intuitive expectation from updating too much. I've paid particular attention to this instance so by default I would expect my intuitions to base to much on the single case.
You add the log of the probability you gave for what happened, so add ln(1-0.87) = -2.04 honor. Unfortunately, there's no way to make it go up, and it's pretty much guaranteed to go down a lot.
Just don't assign anything a probability of 0. If you're wrong, you lose infinite honor.
I like it, but that 'no way to make it go up' is a problem. It feels like we should have some sort of logarithmic representation of honour too, allowing for increasing honour if you get something right, mostly when your honour is currently low.
To what extent do we want 'honour' to be a measure of calibration and to what extent a measure of predictive power?
I agree; the typical human brain balks and runs away when faced with a scale of merit whose max-point is 0.
Yes.
In other words, my honor as an epistemic rationalist should be a mix of calibration and predictive power. An amusing but arbitrary formula might be just to give yourself 2x honor when your binary prediction with probability x comes true and to dock yourself ln (1-x) honor when it doesn't. If you make 20 predictions each at p = 0.5, 0.55, 0.6, 0.65, 0.7, 0.75, 0.8, 0.85, 0.9, and 0.95 for a total of 200 predictions a day and you are perfectly calibrated, you would expect to lose about 3.4 honor each day.
There's gotta be a way to fix this so that a perfectly calibrated person would gain a tiny amount of honor each day rather than lose it. It might not be elegant, though. Got any ideas?
Zero does seem more appropriate either as a minimum or a midpoint. If everything is going to be negative then flip it around and say 'less is good'! But the main problem I have with only losing honor based on making predictions is that it essentially rewards never saying anything of importance that could be contradicted. That sounds a bit too much like real life for some reason. ;)
The tricky part is not so much making up the equations but in determining what criteria to rate the scale against. We would inevitably be injecting something arbitrary.
You're supposed to have a probability for everything. The closest you can do to not guessing is give every possibility equal probabilities, in which case you'd lose honor even faster than normal.
You could give yourself honor equal to the square of the probability you gave, but that means you'd have incentive to phrase it in as many questions possible. After all, if you gave a single probability for what happens for your entire life, you couldn't get more than one point of honor. With the system I mentioned first, you'd lose exactly the same honor.
I can't remember the Post I got that from. It wasn't talking about honor.
This is the only possible system in which you're rewarded most for giving the answers accurately, and your honor remains the same regardless of how you count it. For example, predicting A and B loses the same honor as predicting A and predicting B given A.
Technically, you can use a different log base, but that just amounts to a scaling factor.
A naive suggestion could be to take log(x) - log(p), where p is the probability given by MAXENT. That is, honor is how much better you do than the "completely uninformed" maximal entropy predictor. This would enable better-than-average predictors to make their honor go up.
This of course has the shortcoming that maximal entropy may not be practical to actually calculate in many situations. It also may or may not produce incentives to strategically make certain predictions and not others. I haven't analysed that very much.
The hard part would then be making that list algorithmically. An easier algorithmic method would be to do approximate string matches with previous quote threads, using something like the Smith-Waterman algorithm for pairwise local sequence alignment. This is what biologists do when they have a gene sequence and want to know if something like it is already in the databases, and there's no reason why the method shouldn't also apply just as well to English text.
The way this would look to users is just a text box where you paste in the quote, and it'll tell you if the quote has been posted before. Even easier to use than a full list of quotes.
The quotes idea is pretty much wrong. And sadly sometimes used as an argument against life extension.
It took me a few minutes to see what you meant there. I read 'quotes' as a simple plural. Which leads to a parsing of your first sentence as a position of some merit purely by accident.
Really? Well, I suppose that would actually make sense according to a certain not-outright-insane value system.
Yes.
It would be bad even if the premise were true. Then the pure idea of 'yeah, we have to let you all die because otherwise all the shiny new ideas would not prosper' is so much out of proportion. Most people do not even work in idea maintaining, but do pretty mundane jobs, or moonlight as grandparents.
Over time I notice the occasional instance of ageism in young people. It is very easy to ignore collected experiences of others, and in some cases bad. It would be awesome to have people still around that lived through history. Instead each generation to some degree forgets what was before.
It hurts me each time someone (my age or younger) claims how he does not care about history at all, because -
because - there are not enough elves and wizardesses in that genre of story?
No. It is more a case of 'history is old stuff, that happened a long time ago, is done & over with, and does not matter any more'. Why care about the past when so much is happening right now.
I do not think the way history is dealt with is that much better, to some degree visiting historic museums or sites is just signaling.
That is basically the concept behind 'costly signalling', that people will pay time and money to visit a museum in order to signal, and in doing so accidentally learn something about history.
thx for the reminder
And in middle aged people and old people too. :)
The premise is true and generally accepted as such; a slightly more formal treatment was given by Kuhn, but it amounts roughly to "new scientists produce advancements, old scientists stick to dogma, the status of oldies is so powerful they have to die or retire for advancements to prosper."
I hope there have been some changes in the way scientists work since the 1960s. Also I hope that it depends on the specific field.
As a conclusion of the initial argument one could add time limits to tenure, but please lets not argue for killing off scientists justs for being to old.
This might be the answer you are looking for.
No real need to kill them off, as long as new ones are being born. Unanimity is nice, but simple majorities can usually get the job done.
As for your time limits idea, I might go further, and send everybody back to school to get a new PhD every 100 years: in a new field, at a different school, in a different language.
I am happy to see how it will turn out
You're only going to give me 100 years to study mathematics, uninterrupted?
B-b-but! That's nowhere near enough time!
Nice way to put it! To phrase it another way:
To argue in favor of mortality because of fears of entrenched conservatives is to demand capital punishment where term limits would suffice.
Thank you!
Try to get someone to put it in these words. Usually no one demands the killing of professors, or even mentions how he likes to have old people die from neglect.
If someone boldly states that he wants all these old people to die to free up space, or what ever, than you probably found a person you do not actually want to have a discussion with.
I completely forgot about a very important point. When rejuvenation actually works, then it might also make the brain work better, younger and so on. If it is true, that great scientists do their most important work before reaching age X, then after a rejuvenation they might be able to do even more with their good as new brain + more experience. Then it would not be a matter of getting rid of holders of old ideas, but find a way to deal with people that have an unreachable time advantage, that cannot be made up. It would be good for society to keep experienced mind in work.
Kuhn did not say that. His notion of paradigm advancement had a lot to do with a lot of other things. His canonical example of paradigm change (the Copernican revolution) had people actively changing their minds even in his narrative. And there are a lot of problems with his story of how things went, see for example this essay.
Furthermore, in many other shifts where new theories came into play, the overall trend happened with many old people accepting the new theory. Thus for example, Einstein's special relativity was accepted by many older physicists.
...While Einstein himself rejected quantum mechanics!
(And, yes, I'm aware of the philosophical glitches in the Copenhagen Interpretation. But Einstein refused to accept QM on principle, and I'm not sure any evidence could have convinced him, which is rather poor form for one of the greatest thinkers of all time.)
This is probably wrong. If Einstein were transported to today we could almost certainly convince him of the correctness of quantum mechanics. Not only that, the guy did a lot of important quantum mechanics research, which should suggest that it's not as simple as "he rejected it." Wikipedia says that he initially thought matrix mechanics was wrong, but became convinced of it when it was shown to be equivalent to the Schroedinger forumulation.
You are probably right on with this comment, but I think I may have misunderstood you on one point. Did you mean "it's not as simple as 'he rejected it.' "? The way it is now looks like it contradicts the rest of the post.
Also, I recall that Einstein did change his mind at least one important point, the existence of the "cosmological constant." So that implies he wasn't especially close-minded.
History of science is good stuff -- economists should try it some time. Once you start looking it's usually pretty easy to appreciate the wry maxim that scientific advances are usually named for the last person to "discover" them, not the first.
figleaf
"When I start to wonder if black swans exist, I put down my copy of Mind and pick up my copy of Nature."
-- Ariadne (former columnist in New Scientist).
I pick up my copy of the Sibley Guide to Birds.
Mitch Hedberg on the distinction between labels and the things to which they are applied:
And more Mitch Hedburg, illustrating how redrawing the map won't alter the territory.
-- Kafka, The Trial
"I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." -- Groucho Marx
I rather immediately decided to see if this had been posted before. Google indexed this comment within 2 minutes.
Google does seem to love this site! (I wonder if Google has specialised technology in place for handling reddit based sites.)
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
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.
I found the posting easily enough by searching "google custom search lesswrong". Try your experiment again using a shorter string.
It's funny, but NO NO NO! This is exactly why rationalists suck at forming socially cohesive groups! :)
That doesn't seem all that likely to me. It would seem somewhat more likely if the quote was 'will not'...
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.
-- Albert Einstein
"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune... to lose both seems like carelessness." - Oscar Wilde (though he didn't mean it to refer to cryonics).
[Edit: correction, thanks ciphergoth]
Thanks for the explanation, wouldn't have thought about it from this angle without it. It's pretty good when read in this way. Upvoted.
"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.
"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; and that conduct can only be made to accord with principles by means of daily examination, reflection, and resolution. What leads to the permanent sorrowfulness of burglars is that their principles are contrary to burglary. If they genuinely believed in the moral excellence of burglary, penal servitude would simply mean so many happy years for them; all martyrs are happy, because their conduct and their principles agree.
As for reason (which makes conduct, and is not unconnected with the making of principles), it plays a far smaller part in our lives than we fancy. We are supposed to be reasonable but we are much more instinctive than reasonable. And the less we reflect, the less reasonable we shall be. The next time you get cross with the waiter because your steak is over-cooked, ask reason to step into the cabinet-room of your mind, and consult her. She will probably tell you that the waiter did not cook the steak, and had no control over the cooking of the steak; and that even if he alone was to blame, you accomplished nothing good by getting cross; you merely lost your dignity, looked a fool in the eyes of sensible men, and soured the waiter, while producing no effect whatever on the steak. " - Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 hours per day.
That sounds all deep and wise... until you observe that it seems to be an arbitrary redefinition of 'happy', redefinition of 'genuinely believe in the moral excellence' or blatantly wrong as a matter of fact. The accuracy of the claim doesn't seem to be an important part of the intent, that is, it is bullshit.
Other parts of the excerpt are not bad - that part is just a point that people often try to take too far. The benefits of internal coherence and happiness are not tautological. Not even close.
"Even though it is a path of 1,000 miles, you walk one step at a time. Consider this well." - Miyamoto Musashi
"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." Henry David Thoreau
Wait... I can read that two ways and they are both worth a quote - for entirely different reasons.
But be careful of writing your conclusion first!
-George Bernard Shaw
"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
Heh. I got to that line in the book and promptly tweeted it.
"Any fool can have an opinion; to know what one needs to know to have an opinion is wisdom; which is another way of saying that wisdom means knowing what questions to ask about knowledge."
--Neil Postman, "Building a Bridge to the 18th Century"
-- Laurens Van der Post
--John Holt
Amusingly, the first time I read this I misread "scared" as "sacred." And it works either way.
And for an added twist I read it as "scarred"...
Seth Godin
How cute. Also, on a related note:
He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake
Oh, you better watch out
You better not cry
Better not pout
I'm telling you why
Santa Clause is coming to town
ie. I think the quote is unhealthily idealistic. An exhortation for good behaviour by means of conveying a false model of reality.
I knew you'd react to it that way.
I disagree.
You were thinking of me as you wrote that? I'm flattered. :)
Depends on what I was thinking. :-)
Surprisingly enough it doesn't.
Whatever happened to 'fake it till you make it'?
Duelling quotes!
Aristotle
Another translation
"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." -Oscar Wilde
Montaigne
Strikes a blow against education as the source of reason, but also strikes a blow against reason requiring training. Ambivalent.
Montaigne
"I don't think anyone should have to do anything educational in school if they don't want to." -- Cordelia's character, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Theories have four stages of acceptance. i) this is worthless nonsense; ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view, iii) this is true, but quite unimportant; iv) I always said so.
-- J.B.S. Haldane
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
"Imagine being told you were made for a purpose, and that longevity and happiness are not in the list of design objectives." -David Eubanks, Life Artificial
Arthur Schopenhauer