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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts from LW.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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote comments/posts from LW.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.

The fact that you had to choose so ridiculous an example suggests that Paul Graham is basically correct.

No it doesn't. It suggests that when selecting examples for the purpose of countering generalizations wedrifid chooses examples that are clear and unambiguous to anyone who correctly parses the claim rather than choosing the most likely counter example. This is particularly the case when rejecting the extent of a general claim while accepting the gist - as I went out of the way to make explicit.

I also reject the idea that the second example I gave is at all unrealistic:

Punish all observed incidents of stupidity with physical beating.

Corporal punishment for stupidity is an actual (hopefully mostly historical) thing.

Corporal punishment for stupidity is an actual (hopefully mostly historical) thing.

I can't help this quote:

"Stupidity is always a capital crime."

--N-Space, Larry Niven

2gjm15y

For the record, I took you to be proposing a single counterexample with two components, rather than two separate counterexamples; I'm sorry for the misunderstanding. Now that I know the second bullet point was meant to be a separate counterexample, I have a different objection to it: I am unconvinced that any implementable version of it would both reduce stupidity and increase meanness. (The most likely outcome, I think, would be to increase meanness while replacing more blatant varieties of stupidity with more widely spread lower-level stupidity.) EDITED to add: Oh, one other thing. If it happens that (1) it was you who downvoted me and (2) you did so because you thought I downvoted your previous comment, then you might want to know that I didn't.

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Rationality Quotes: February 2011

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Rationality Quotes: February 2011

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