If you like rationalist aphorisms, you might like Aaron Haspel's Twitter feed. Examples:
Once you start to view human interaction as a contest to signal mating fitness, it becomes hard to view it as anything else.
Nothing is art, but anything can be treated as art.
Even the most disinterested truth-seeker is angling for a world of greater rewards for disinterested truth-seekers.
Polytheism is pre-scientific: monotheism is anti-scientific.
Whatever you do for the sake of the children is probably wrong.
Whatever you do for someone's own good is probably mischief.
Better that X guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted. Solve for X.
Tact consists mostly in disguising the fact that some people are better than others.
Adaptive is not optimal.
You are what you fear to appear to be.
The chief problems in moral philosophy are akrasia and imperfect information. It has mostly pretended that they do not exist.
Whatever you have done, you are the sort of person who would do that.
Misspellers learn from speech, mispronouncers from books.
We all have the strength to refuse what we are not offered.
The people are flattered more obsequiously than the monarch ever was.
The incorruptible politician merely prefers power to money.
Katja Grace pointed out something interesting about aphorisms:
Why do aphorisms and cynicism go together?
A good single sentence saying can’t require background evidencing or further explanation. It must be instantly recognizable as true. It also needs to be news to the listener. Most single sentences that people can immediately verify as true they already believe. What’s left? One big answer is things that people don’t believe or think about much for lack of wanting to, despite evidence. Drawing attention to these is called cynicism.
I find these posts very low value. Short sentences like these seem optimised for wit, rather than truth, usefulness or insight. While I suppose theoretically there's no reason why a brilliant and startling idea couldn't be communicated by a simple, short sentence, everything I've ever read on Less Wrong and found useful, interesting and new has been an idea that requires some explanation.
Several theories:
"I wish people would just update on the expectation of being Dutch booked due to inconsistent preferences and give me money."
This sounds like something Steven Wright would say in an alternate universe where I would prefer to be living.
The feeling of knowing that one knows more than others is addicting and almost always wrong.
Oddly, the same seems to be true of feeling that one knows less than others.
Why "Facebook"? Where do these (admittedly neat) aphorisms come from? From stevenkaas's twitter? His (non-public?) facebook? A bit more context would make this post more understandable.
I put more details in the post: "(More context: I use Facebook to share short insights with people who have relatively high estimates of my general sanity. The following are things I posted on Facebook. The stevenkaas reference is referencing the awesomeness of stevenkaas's twitter feed, to which my blurbs just cannot compare.)"
That explains why the choice of title "Facebook aphorisms" is convenient for you, but notice that almost no one else is helped
OK, thanks, now I understand - I originally really thought these were from stevenkaas facebook or something. Seeing the title "Facebook aphorisms" made me expect to see some neat aphorisms you had gleaned from Facebook.
(Also, I didn't know about stevenkaas' twitter - I usually don't read anything on twitter)
One of my goals lately has been to write a thousand words a day. I've noticed that the first three hundred are difficult but the last three thousand come naturally.
300+3000=1000?
This is easiest for me to describe with visual thinking, so it might not makes sense to some people. I think of "attraction" (as in dynamical processes) as a verb. (I realize it's gramatically a noun, but ontologically it's a verb.) When I naively picture attraction it's some stable convergent feature that patterns can't help but be drawn to, even if accidentally; it's teleological, or it's causal, but I don't picture both of them at the same time because my mind runs snapshots of the process going forward or backward, but not both simultaneously. A timeless view would be looking at the forward-causal and the backward-teleological chains as a distribution over space instead of sequential or superimposed time slices, so it doesn't just look like a pattern is emerging over time going towards the future, or just a teleological chain reaching backwards from the future, but both intertwining. It's way easier to see the complementary structure if I envision the process as a block and not a dynamical process. I'm not sure how to make it more clear, and I'm not sure if it's really useful, but I've been playing around with ontology construction a lot and it just felt like a neat trick to me.
ETA: It's also cognitively cheaper for me to visualize things as spatial configurations without any change over time, but I have to sacrifice the number of details I can put into the visualization in order to capture the overall structure.
Unrelatedly, if you reverse everything I said you can do the same thing with nouns.
I don't know about everybody else, but I'm totally confused.
I mean, if it's visual, why don't you just make us a picture or a video, instead of just relying on words (which aren't very good for this purpose)?
Instead of jumping to such a reckless conclusion, why don't you just ask him what he means by "ontologically a verb"?
Esperanto has ontological word classes. They're surprisingly elegant, too.
Having said that, I agree on your main point - natural languages just don't do that.
Please explain. Currently I find this very unlikely given that the idea doesn't seem to make much sense in the first place, and the fact that Esperanto is a naturally-evolved mess due to Zamenhof's original description being vastly underspecified.
Also a few nights ago I had the odd sensation of visualizing the set of common American candy bars as a superimposed image. Not the union of the candy bars, but being able to see all of them at the same time despite them being in the same visual space... there is no analogue of this in actual sight, so I'm not sure why my visual cortex would be able to do that. I can't do it (at least not nearly as well or convincingly) right now. I really wanted to buy a Snickers bar. Anyway this allowed me to look at a lot of things spatially while retaining a lot of detail, but it wasn't a dynamical process that I was visualizing, but a set of objects. This superimposed visualization thing seems pretty cool though; perhaps I can train it to see dynamical processes spatially represented in a small space with lots of details for each spatial representation of a time slice?
Something like this?
(Where each of the shaded rectangles is one of the candy bars.)
And, as to whether there's an analogue of this in actual sight, of course there's not (if I know what you mean), but that doesn't mean that it's an uncommon thing. Just look out into your room (or wherever you are), and imagine that something (such as a dog or something) is there. What's the difference between the actual scene and the imagined scene? Well, the actual one is much more vivid, and the imagined is much less vivid. It's not that you're only seeing the real situation, and not seeing the imagined one; it's simply that the real one is much more forceful to your mind than the imagined. The imagined one is "superimposed" over the other one; you can see both.
So is that how the candy bars were stacked on top of each other on your visual field?
I think of "attraction" (as in dynamical processes) as a verb. (I realize it's gramatically a noun, but ontologically it's a verb.)
For a simple English trick to get verbs that are unequivocally verbs, start your thought with "to." So "to kick." "To open." "To attract." Thinking of a noun as a noun is not as good an example :D
I'm no steven0461/stevenkaas, but perhaps some of these are approaching something like insight. Truthiness, not truth.