A long one:

. . . once upon a time men lived among the giants, who were like themselves but far more powerful, and these giants always had a supply of bread, fruit, milk, and all that was necessary to sustain life, which they must have acquired in ways that cost them little, for they would always give away their goods to whoever knew how to please them. And the giants would also carry them wherever they wanted to go, provided they asked in the proper way. So it came about that men never thought of working, nor of walking, nor of building wagons or ships; instead they became natural orators, and spent all of their time watching the giants, figuring out what would please or displease them, smiling at them or imploring them with tears in their eyes; or else simply pronouncing the necessary words, which had to be memorized exactly, though they had no understanding of the changes of humor that would come over the giants, their brusque refusals, or their sudden willingness. Now, if some man, in those days, had tried to get something for himself by his own industry, they would have laughed him to scorn; for the results of his labor would have been puny beside the immense provisions the giants had amassed; and besides with one false step the giants could easily have crushed those little beginnings of labor out of existence. That is why all human wisdom came down to knowing how to speak and how to persuade; and, rather than move things about with great effort, men chose to learn what words it would take to get one of the giants to do their moving. In short, their main business, or rather their only business, was to please, and above all not to displease, their incomprehensible masters, who seemed nevertheless to be charged with nourishing them and housing them and transporting them, and who eventually carried out their duties, provided they were prayed to. This kind of existence, in which men never knew whether they were the masters or the slaves, lasted for a long time, so that the habit of asking, of hoping, of counting on those stronger than themselves left indelible traces in human nature. . . . That is why, as if they were still waiting for the return of the giants, men do not forget to pray and make offerings, though no giant has ever shown himself . . .

-- "Alain" (Émile Chartier) The Gods. A meditation on childhood.

Day ends, market closes up or down, reporter looks for good or bad news respectively, and writes that the market was up on news of Intel's earnings, or down on fears of instability in the Middle East. Suppose we could somehow feed these reporters false information about market closes, but give them all the other news intact. Does anyone believe they would notice the anomaly, and not simply write that stocks were up (or down) on whatever good (or bad) news there was that day? That they would say, hey, wait a minute, how can stocks be up with all this unrest in the Middle East?

--Paul Graham

In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality.

(...)

In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.

-- George Orwell, 1984

"Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered.
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time; premature optimization is the root of all evil."

--Donald Knuth (see also Amdahl's law)

The Company that needs a new machine tool is already paying for it.

-old Warner & Swasey ad

At home there was a game that all the parents played with their children. It was called, What Did You See? Mara was about Dann’s age when she was first called into her father’s room one evening, where he sat in his big carved and coloured chair. He said to her, ‘And now we are going to play a game. What was the thing you liked best today?’

At first she chattered: ‘I played with my cousin . . . I was out with Shera in the garden . . . I made a stone house.’ And then he had said, ‘Tell me about the house.’ And she said, ‘I made a house of the stones that come from the river bed.’ And he said, ‘Now tell me about the stones.’ And she said, ‘They were mostly smooth stones, but some were sharp and had different shapes.’ ‘Tell me what the stones looked like, what colour they were, what did they feel like.’

And by the time the game ended she knew why some stones were smooth and some sharp and why they were different colours, some cracked, some so small they were almost sand. She knew how rivers rolled stones along and how some of them came from far away. She knew that the river had once been twice as wide as it was now. There seemed no end to what she knew, and yet her father had not told her much, but kept asking questions so she found the answers in herself. Like, ‘Why do you think some stones are smooth and round and some still sharp?’ And she thought and replied, ‘Some have been in the water a long time, rubbing against other stones, and some have only just been broken off bigger stones.’ Every evening, either her father or her mother called her in for What Did You See? She loved it. During the day, playing outside or with her toys, alone or with other children, she found herself thinking, Now notice what you are doing, so you can tell them tonight what you saw.

She had thought that the game did not change; but then one evening she was there when her little brother was first asked, What Did You See? and she knew just how much the game had changed for her. Because now it was not just What Did You See? but: What were you thinking? What made you think that? Are you sure that thought is true?

When she became seven, not long ago, and it was time for school, she was in a room with about twenty children – all from her family or from the Big Family – and the teacher, her mother’s sister, said, ‘And now the game: What Did You See?’

Most of the children had played the game since they were tiny; but some had not, and they were pitied by the ones that had, for they did not notice much and were often silent when the others said, ‘I saw . . .’, whatever it was. Mara was at first upset that this game played with so many at once was simpler, more babyish, than when she was with her parents. It was like going right back to the earliest stages of the game: ‘What did you see?’ ‘I saw a bird.’ ‘What kind of a bird?’ ‘It was black and white and had a yellow beak.’ ‘What shape of beak? Why do you think the beak is shaped like that?’

Then she saw what she was supposed to be understanding: Why did one child see this and the other that? Why did it sometimes need several children to see everything about a stone or a bird or a person?

Doris Lessing, "Mara and Dann"

Just saw on reddit a perfect accidental metaphor: jakeredfield posted this in r/gaming:

For the people that have no played Portal yet, be warned, there may be spoilers up ahead for you.

So anyway, I am a huge fan of Portal, I love everything about the game. I bought it upon release and have played through it multiple times. My friends aren't as big of gamers as me so it took them some time to get their hands on Portal. My one friend didn't have a computer capable of running Portal so I let him play on mine.

I pulled up a chair besides him and eagerly watched him play then entire time. He loved the game. I expected him to. It's an awesome game. But here comes the WTF part...(SPOILERS AHEAD)

He go to the part at the last puzzle, right before GlaDOS tries to kill you in the fire. So then, my friend is like, "Oh, so it's one of those games where you die at the end. Haha, it was a good game." And then he immediately shuts it down. I just sat there. Shocked. In awe. I couldn't believe what I just saw. He turns to me and goes, "Good game, I'd play that again."

This is the part where I just hit him and yell, "IT WASN'T OVER YET!" He was so confused. He loaded it back up to that part and couldn't figure it out. I then pointed it out to him what he needed to do from there. He eventually fully finished the game.

Imagine what would have happened if I wasn't there? How many other people do you think only experienced the game up to this part, because they didn't have someone tell them?

What makes it even more perfect is this reply by Aleitheo:

So rather than try to see if he could live or even just die in the fire he turned off the game before he even saw the "ending"?

Speed is not attained by hurrying; it is an unsought by-product of intelligent and continuous work.

-- Frederick Giesecke, et al, Technical Drawing, 8th ed

"After solving a problem, humanity imagines that it finds in analogous solutions the key to all problems.
Every authentic solution brings in its wake a train of grotesque solutions."

--Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 430

As they say in Discworld, we are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was.

-- Terry Pratchett

Some in their discourse desire rather commendation of wit, in being able to hold all arguments, than of judgment, in discerning what is true; as if it were a praise to know what might be said, and not what should be thought.

Francis Bacon

I will not procrastinate regarding any ritual granting immortality.

--Evil Overlord List #230

The following reminded me of Arguments as Soldiers:

Statistics for the enemy. Anecdotes for the friend. -- Zach Weiner

I'm sorry to have not found his blog sooner.

Apathy on the individual level translates into insanity at the mass level.

-- Douglas Hofstadter

Statistics is applied philosophy of science.

A. P. Dawid

If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.

Paul Graham

People who have been living with serious problems for a long time find it hard to imagine that there's been a solution within their reach all along. For the short term, it's easier to go on putting up with the problem than it is to change one's expectations.

paulwl (quoted here)

ETA: I thought this had the smell of Usenet about it, and on Google Groups I found the original, written by one Alex Clark here. paulwl is actually the person he was replying to.

BTW, there's quite a bit of rationality (and irrationality) on that newsgroup on the subject of people looking for relationships (mostly men looking for women), from way back when. I don't know if 1996 predates the sort of PUA that has been talked about on LW.

Too broad a viewpoint, too philosophical an outlook paralyzes the will.

-- Robert A Heinlein, Lost Legacy

After finishing dinner, Sidney Morgenbesser decides to order dessert. The waitress tells him he has two choices: apple pie and blueberry pie. Sidney orders the apple pie. After a few minutes the waitress returns and says that they also have cherry pie at which point Morgenbesser says "In that case I'll have the blueberry pie."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_irrelevant_alternatives

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Morgenbesser

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.

-Confucius

Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself.

-Chinese proverb

Admitting error clears the score and proves you wiser than before.

--Arthur Guiterman

"But can people in desperate poverty be considered to be making free choices? Many say no. So, is the choice between starving and selling one’s kidney really a choice? Yes; an easy one. One of the options is awful. To forbid organ selling is to take away the better choice. If we choose to provide an even better option to the person that would be great – but it is no solution to the problem of poverty to take away what choices the poor do have absent outside help."

Katja Grace, on Metaeuphoric, Dying for a Donation

At my mother's knee I learned to view religious worship as a practice which lures people away from their duties and pleasures on earth, and breeds in them a thirst for impossible things, the chasing of which can bring no honour or delight but only bewilderment, disappointment, and insanity.

• K. J. Bishop, "The Etched City"

(a sentiment I think applies to all super-stimuli)

"Nor let him [the ruler] ever believe that a state can always make safe choices; on the contrary, let him think that he must make only doubtful ones; because this is in the order of things, that one never tries to avoid one inconvenience without incurring another; but prudence consists of knowing how to recognize the kinds of inconveniences, and to take the least sad for good."

--Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

Kräht der Hahn am Mist, ändert sich's Wetter oder es bleibt wie's ist.

-- Common German folk saying

Translates as "If the rooster crows on the manure pile, the weather will change or stay as it is." In other words, P(W|R) = P(W) when W is uncorrelated with R.

Heed a lesson from a successful practical propagandist. If you want to persuade people that a premise they unconsciously hold is wrong, do not give it a label they will perceive as insulting! If you do this, you make them reluctant to consciously accept that they hold the premise, which will make it more difficult to argue them out of it!

This rule does not hold for conscious premises. It can be effective to make insulting labels for those.

— Eric S. Raymond

(This applies no less strongly to one's own brain.)

Since so many poker opponents often decide at whim, we need to do more than just strategically analyze their actions relative to what they should be doing. We need to watch and listen and determine what they are doing.

--Mike Caro, Caro's Book of Tells

On simpler solutions:

"But still you did not know the algorithm."

"Yes, but I had some idea that it was related to the Azure/Pufferfish algorithm, which in turn is related to the zeta functions that we studied at Princeton. So I just sat down and said to myself if Rudy were going to build the ultimate cryptosystem on this basis, and if Azure/Pufferfish is a simplified version of that system, then what is Arethusa? That gave me a handful of possibilities."

"And out of that handful you were able to pick the right one."

"No," Waterhouse says, "it was too hard. So I went to the church where Enoch was working, and looked through his wastebasket. "

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

I think some time we should have an irrationality quotes thread, kind of in the "how not to" spirit.

You know in those stories where there's this immortal guy and they talk about how bored they are and how boring life is after 5000 years or whatever? I am going to call something.

I am going to call SHENANIGANS.

You know who writes those stories? MORTALS. Folks using some of their PRECIOUS, FINITE LIFE to write a made-up story in which an imaginary person keeps going on about how being immortal is actually sucky and how they're totes jealous that others get to die someday!

Ridiculous!

And kinda sad!

-- Today's Dinosaur Comic

"I submit that claims about God are of this latter sort. There’s simply no reason to take them more seriously than one does claims about witches or ghosts. The idea that one needs powerful philosophical theories to settle such issues I like to call the “philosophy fallacy.”

We will see that people are particularly prey to it in religious discussions, both theist and atheist alike; indeed, atheists often get trapped into doing far more, far riskier philosophy than they need."

--Georges Rey, "Meta-atheism: Religious Avowal as Self-deception" (2009)

(First version seen on http://www.strangedoctrines.com/2008/09/risky-philosophy.html but quote from an expanded paper.)

"What happens when you combine organized religion and organized sports? I don’t know, but I suspect not much would change for either institution."

Scenes from a Multiverse

"Please don't hold anything back, and give me the facts" – Wen Jiabao, Chinese Premier (when meeting disgruntled people at the central complaints offices).

People think of the future as something other people do, But there's something weirder about a society where people don't think about the future. -- Peter Thiel

Life is tough, but it's tougher if you're stupid.

-John Wayne, Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

-Mark Twain

Things are only impossible until they're not.

-- Jean-Luc Picard

On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

-Charles Babbage

To be sure, science is also mistrusted by those who don't like its discoveries for religious, political, ethical, or even esthetic reasons. Some thoughtful people complain that science has erased enchantment from the world. They have a point. Miracles, magic, and other fascinating impossibilities are no long much encountered except in movies. But in the light shed by the best science and scientists, everything is fascinating, and the more so the more that is known of its reality. To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder. -- Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead

Increasingly each year the wild predictions of science-fiction writers are made tame by the daily papers.

Robert Heinlein

[Humanity] had been the mere plaything of nature, when first it crept out of uncreative void into light; but thought brought forth power and knowledge; and, clad with these, the race of man assumed dignity and authority.

-- Mary Shelley, The Last Man

One might expect self-improving systems to be highly unpredictable because the properties of the current version might change in the next version. Our analysis will instead show that self-improvement acts to create predictable regularities. It builds on the intellectual foundations of microeconomics, the science of preference and choice in the face of uncertainty. The basic theory was created by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944 for situations with objective uncertainty and was later extended by Savage and Anscombe and Aumann to situations with subjective uncertainty. Our analysis shows that while the preferences of self-improving systems will depend on their origins, they will act on those preferences in predictable ways. Repeated self-improvement brings intelligent agents closer to an ideal that economists sometimes call “Homo Economicus”. Ironically, human behavior is not well described by this ideal and the field of “behavioral economics” has emerged in recent years to study how humans actually behave. The classical economic theory is much more applicable to self-improving systems because they will discover and eliminate their own irrationalities in ways that humans cannot.

Steve Omohundro, "The Nature of Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence" 2007

Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying

-- The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett

How emotionally entangled are you with your point of view? Test yourself - defend an opposing view, believing your life depends upon it.

-- Marc Stiegler, David's Sling

It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think I'm wrong. The number of people who thought Hitler was right did not make him right... Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

-- Frank Zappa, quoted from The Real Frank Zappa Book

We've all bought and enjoyed books called 'Optical Illusions'. We all love optical illusions. But that's not what they should call the book. They should call them 'Brain Failures'. Because that what it is: a complete failure of human perception. All it takes is a few clever sketches and our brains can't figure it out.

• Neil deGrasse Tyson

Transcribed from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAD25s53wmE

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

-- Seth Lloyd

"Alas, how terrible is wisdom
when it brings no profit to the man that's wise!
This I knew well, but had forgotten it,
else I would not have come here."

--Teiresias to the unrelenting Oedipus, Oedipus the King 316-9, Sophocles

(Assigning a specific location to 'here' left as an exercise for the reader...)

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

-- Aristotle

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Give a man a fishing rod and he'll sell it for a fish.

• ???

The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did not explain, among other things, signposts.

-- Terry Pratchett, "Sourcery"

"Paper clips are gregarious by nature, and solitary ones tend to look very, very depressed." - dwardu

The world around us redounds with opportunities, explodes with opportunities, which nearly all folk ignore because it would require them to violate a habit of thought ... I cannot quite comprehend what goes through people's minds when they repeat the same failed strategy over and over, but apparently it is an astonishingly rare realization that you can try something else.

-- Eliezer Yudkowsky, putting words in my other copy's mouth

The same reign of terror that occurred under Robespierre and Hitler occurred back then in the fifties, as it occurs now. You must realize that there is very little actual courage in this world. It's pretty easy to bend people around. It doesn't take much to shut people up, it really doesn't. In the fifties all I had to do was call a guy up on the telephone and say, "Well, I think your wife would like to know about your mistress."

An upvote to the first person to identify the author of that quote.

"A witty saying proves nothing" --Voltaire

I appeal to the philosophers of all countries to unite and never again mention Heidegger or talk to another philosopher who defends Heidegger.

-Karl Popper

Seibel: The way you contributed technically to the PTRAN project, it sounds like you had the big architectural picture of how the whole thing was going to work and could point out the bits that it wasn’t clear how they were going to work.

Allen: Right.

Seibel: Do you think that ability was something that you had early on, or did that develop over time?

Allen: I think it came partially out of growing up on a farm. If one looks at a lot of the interesting engineering things that happened in our field—in this era or a little earlier—an awful lot of them come from farm kids. I stumbled on this from some of the people that I worked with in the National Academy of Engineering—a whole bunch of these older men came from Midwestern farms. And they got very involved with designing rockets and other very engineering and systemy and hands-on kinds of things. I think that being involved with farms and nature, I had a great interest in, how does one fix things and how do things work?

Seibel: And a farm is a big system of inputs and outputs.

Allen: Right. And since it’s very close to nature, it has its own cycles, its own system that you can do nothing about. So one finds a place in it, and it’s a very comfortable one.

-- Turing Award-winning computer scientist Fran Allen interviewed in Peter Seibel's Coders At Work, p507

(This is a great book, by the way. I strongly recommend it to anyone whose work involves how computers do what they do.)

Happily our civilization possesses two great advantages over past times : scientific knowledge and the scientific spirit. To us have been revealed secrets of life our forebears never knew. And to us has been vouchsafed a passion for truth such as the world has never seen. Other ages have sought truth from the lips of seers and prophets; our age seeks it from scientific proof. Other ages have had their saints and martyrs dauntless souls who clung to their faith with unshakable constancy. Yet our age has also its saints and martyrs heroes who can not only face death for their faith, but who can also scrap their faith when facts have proved it wrong.

--Lothrop Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization

Approximate quote: [You should] go in with a thesis, not a conclusion.

From a BBC program about the media and crime in Detroit. The context was the extent to which Detroit is over-reported as a high-crime city, and someone commented that the BBC had sent someone over for a reason, but they were actually looking at the situation instead of assuming they knew what they were going to see.

Opinions are like sex, you should change your positions if it feels wrong

~ garcia1000, Witchhunt game

"Meanness and stupidity are so closely related that anything you do to decrease one will probably also decrease the other."

--Paul Graham, here.

"All this knowledge is giving me a raging brainer!"

Professor Farnsworth, Futurama

Pendarvis Theory of Technology: "..., it is my theory that everything wrong with everything is the fault of language teachers.

"If a child is taught that it is all right if you mis-spell a word occasionally, or don't always punctuate exactly correctly, then you are teaching that child that small mistakes are okay, as long as people know pretty well what is meant. I feel this is a dangerous attitude to foster in a highly technological society."

-- William Tuning, Fuzzy Bones

Mr President, the Eagle has landed!

• A note, left at Kennedy's grave.

[E]conomic statistics are a peculiarly boring sub-genre of science fiction; extremely useful, but not to be treated as absolute truth.

-- Paul Krugman