Rationality Quotes: February 2011

gwern

Take off every 'quote'! You know what you doing. For great insight. Move 'quote'.

And if you don't:

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts from LW. (If you want to exclude OB too create your own quotes thread! OB is entertaining and insightful and all but it is no rationality blog!)
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Take off every 'quote'! You know what you doing. For great insight. Move 'quote'.

And if you don't:

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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts from LW. (If you want to exclude OB too create your own quotes thread! OB is entertaining and insightful and all but it is no rationality blog!)
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Anyone want to try and tease a rationality message out of this?

Within the context of Lewis' Christianity, it could be the valid form of the argument from authority: don't believe appealing falsehoods with a little evidence over unappealing truths with a lot of evidence you don't know. To give an example: you tell kids to believe evolution or special relativity without explaining the evidence in detail, but it would still be right for them to have "faith" instead of changing to believe creationism the first time they read a (bogus, but they wouldn't be able to tell) creationist argument on the internet.

5TheOtherDave15y

My take: "Because our cognition is unreliable, we can easily lose sight of truths we started out knowing as we walk along tempting-but-wrong garden paths, especially when strong emotions are involved." In other contexts this is sometimes known as "being so sharp you cut yourself."

9gwern15y

Lewis is saying that if you've disproved faith, your reason is flawed. After all, faith must be right! This is 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence', but in unfamiliar garb. We're not used to seeing it used the other way. (If a study reports ESP, then we ought to suspect problems in how it was conducted or analyzed rather than accept its conclusion - to use a recent example.) I'm sure there are a number of relevant LW posts on the topic like "Einstein's Arrogance".

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Rationality Quotes: February 2011

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Rationality Quotes: February 2011

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