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Rationality Quotes: February 2011
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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts from LW.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.
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Comments (347)
"Meanness and stupidity are so closely related that anything you do to decrease one will probably also decrease the other."
--Paul Graham, here.
I voted the comment up - because there is a relationship there. There are just other correlations and causal influences that are somewhat stronger in some situations.
The fact that you had to choose so ridiculous an example suggests that Paul Graham is basically correct. (I think the correct reading of "anything you do to decrease one will probably also decrease the other" is "if you pick something that decreases one, it will probably decrease the other" rather than "literally every single thing that might decrease one will, with high probability given that you do that particular thing, decrease the other".)
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:
Corporal punishment for stupidity is an actual (hopefully mostly historical) thing.
I can't help this quote:
--N-Space, Larry Niven
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.
--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.
"All this knowledge is giving me a raging brainer!"
Professor Farnsworth, Futurama
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.)
-- Terry Pratchett, "Sourcery"
Paul Graham
— Eric S. Raymond
(This applies no less strongly to one's own brain.)
On simpler solutions:
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
-- Today's Dinosaur Comic
David Hume - "Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals"
— Dwight Schrute ("The Office" Season 3, Episode 17 "Business School," written by Brent Forrester)
Sounds like reversed stupidity.
Or a different version of rubber-ducking.
I won't ask what that means, because I could presumably easily find out by searching; but I won't search, because I don't care enough (and I'm already here as a distraction from what I meant to be doing).
/not sure if should provide a useful link or not.
It would be better to explain why that is a bad thing when you post statements such as that.
The 'least convenient possible world' might be relevant too. I translated the verbal self interrogation as something that would elicit responses along the lines of "would doing this thing distinguish one as an idiot?" In practice the question probably would be useful. In fact, in practice only an idiot would really reverse the stupidity of an idiot when asking that question of themselves. Breath, eat, etc.
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
Sidney chooses pies on the basis of popularity. Apple pie is more popular than blueberry pie. Apple pie is so popular that pie eaters have grown sick of it. They quickly gorge on the new cherry pie. When the fad dies down, they are still sick of apple pie and begin a blueberry revival. Sidney correctly predicts that blueberry will be more popular.
His preferences in that scenario do not violate independence of irrelevant alternatives (that might be your point; I'm not sure). This is meant as an intuition pump to show the absurdity of violating IIA, not a watertight argument that the observed behaviour does in fact violate it.
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
"Language is a drum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the while we wish to move the stars to pity." -- Flaubert
--Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
How is this a rationality quote?
Thanks for asking. I linked it on purpose to wikipedia from where I quote:
Tempus fugit is a succint admonition to focus on what is really important as opposed to what is merely salient. Focus on the not urgent but important things(quadrant 2 in the covey matrix).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MerrillCoveyMatrix.png
I thought it was a good quote, although I'm not sure LWers need to know it. (On the other hand, one might think the same thing of curing aging or helping cryonics, but Eliezer's essay on his dead brother still got a substantial reaction.)
Do you like this one better?
--Cato the Elder; Epistles (94) as quoted by Seneca
Francis Bacon
It doesn't help that undergraduate philosophy has rather a lot of enumerating the history of philosophical arguments regardless of quality.
I shall have to quote this a good deal more when dealing with people who chide me for not mentioning all the possible objections that philosophers consider to still be in play.
Well, sexual selection chose wit as the target for our intelligence, not discernment of the truth of matters of Far concern. Anybody can figure out the truth of the Near, where is the impressiveness in that? Nobody can verify Far claims, so we don't know who should impress us.
C.S. Lewis, "Religion: Reality or Substitute?", in "Christian Reflections".
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.
Except that Lewis' Christianity was not based on any authority deemed infallible. He reasoned himself into it, while recognising the fallibility of reason. His writings set out his arguments; they do not tout any source of authority whose reliability he has not already argued.
But how can one rightly reason, while recognising one's fallibility? That is an issue for rationalists as well.
Let me fix the original quote for you:
When a long argument produces a conclusion that strikes one as absurd, one sometimes just has to say, "This is bullshit. I don't know what's wrong with the argument, but I'm not going along with it."
I think the flaw in the syllogism is "the human reason, unassisted, has a low chance of retaining its hold on truths." We certainly forget a great deal of procedural and propositional knowledge if we don't use it on a regular basis, but that's different from letting go of a belief because you are passionate about how inconvenient the belief is. Once a belief takes root -- i.e., after you announce it to your friends and take some actions based on it -- it is usually very difficult to let go of that belief.
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."
That's a good moral, but to me Lewis's quote seems to be more simply interpreted as an exhortation against successful doubt. Our thinking is certainly unreliable, but compensating for that with a fixed intention to keep believing whatever we're currently obsessed with seems like exactly the wrong thing to do; it essentially enshrines motivated cognition as a virtue.
Having a "settled intention of continuing to believe" X shares with having a "high prior probability for" X the property that quite a lot of counterevidence can pile up before I actually start considering X unlikely.
This is not a bad thing, in and of itself.
Of course, if X happens to be false, it's an unfortunate condition to find myself in. But if X is true, it's a fortunate one. That just shows that it's better to believe true things than false ones, no matter how high or low your priors or settled or indecisive your intentions.
Of course, if I start refusing to update on counterevidence at all, that's a problem. And I agree, it's easy to read Lewis as endorsing refusing to update on counterevidence, if only by pattern-matching to religious arguments in general.
Point taken, but Lewis wasn't operating within a Bayesian framework. I haven't read a lot of his apologetics, but what I remember seemed to be working through the lens of informal philosophy, where a concept is accepted or rejected as a unit based on whether or not you can think of sufficiently clever responses to all the challenges you're aware of.
From this perspective, a "settled intention of continuing to believe" implies putting a lot more mental effort into finding clever defenses of your beliefs, and Lewis's professed acceptance of reason implies nothing more than admitting challenges in principle. Since it's possible to rationalize pretty much anything, this strikes me as functionally equivalent to refusing to update.
And, of course, enshrining the state of holding high priors as virtuous in itself carries its own problems.
(nods) Mostly agreed.
You get it.
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".
The one that immediately comes to mind for me is making your explicit reasoning trustworthy. Lewis was exhorting Christians not to trust their explicit reasoning.
"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
"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
--Mike Caro, Caro's Book of Tells
-- The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
So that's where Woody Allen got it from.
I haven't been able to find the original source of the Woody Allen quote, but it seems "The Colour of Magic" was published in 1983, and Google Books finds some copies of the Woody Allen quote predating that.
Ahh, nevermind then. (I only looked it up on Wikiquote, which referenced a bio-photo-book from 1993).
...I thought you were being ironic. o_o
The following reminded me of Arguments as Soldiers:
I'm sorry to have not found his blog sooner.
Weiner has a blog? My life is even more complete.
Just saw on reddit a perfect accidental metaphor: jakeredfield posted this in r/gaming:
What makes it even more perfect is this reply by Aleitheo:
I just had to comment on this, it's too perfect. Thanks.
You're welcome. :)
I am going to shamelessly and totally steal this example for when talking about anti-deathism to anyone.
Seriously, thank you so much.
You're welcome. No need really to thank me. After all, I shamelessly stole it too. It was just too perfect. :)
Unfortunately, I think I saw somebody else play that section correctly before I played it myself. Still, if I had died, I would've come back at the last time I saved. That would've clued me in that I was supposed to survive, and I probably would've figured it out in one or two more tries tops.
KanadianLogik adds:
It's possible that if there were several copies of Chell, some of them did.
~ garcia1000, Witchhunt game
It would be more accurate to say that you should critically look over the evidence again if your position feels wrong. A belief can be justified by logic and still be at odds with intuition, making it still feel wrong. Example: There are compelling arguments that simulation hypothesis is at least somewhat likely to be correct. However, my intuition tells me that the simulation hypothesis is just plain false. I know that this is a subject that my intuition is poorly suited for, so I follow the logic and estimate a non-negligible chance of being in a simulation, despite it feeling wrong.
But unlike sex you shouldn't change positions just for fun and novelty.
You should experiment with multiple positions, then use the best one.
Depends on how useful you think the experience of being a devil's advocate is.
-Confucius
-- Seth Lloyd
I read this as an argument against having taxes.
The difference being that with taxes nothing is actually 'lost' it is just relocated, where it can be accessed again. Whereas with energy you can only move from high to low concentrations, so there can be genuine loss of usable energy.
I initially like it as well, suppose its a good example of not believing something merely because it corroborates an already existing belief (most people dislike taxes).
Well, taxes can cause a genuine loss of wealth (as distinct from money) depending on how they're spent and how they're collected, however taxes can also cause a genuine gain in wealth, again depending on how they're collected and spent.
I would like to get rid of one or two of them. Its painfull to see how often really inevitable things get confused with those that could at least in theory be dealt with.
-- Frank Zappa, quoted from The Real Frank Zappa Book
Zappa was a fantastic example of someone who kept their head firmly screwed on while simultaneously exercising his inner rampaging weirdness. Everyone should read the book.
-John Wayne, Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)
-old Warner & Swasey ad
-Chinese proverb
Sometimes they only unlock the deadbolt, and you need a friend to help push open the door. Sometimes the door is on the top of a cliff, and you need to climb up the rope of Wikipedia to get there. And so on. A lot of people who are having trouble learning something are having trouble realizing what resources they have available.
Its a bizarre feature of university life that it is very difficult to get students to take opportunities for help, even when they are obviously and explicitly provided.
And the reasons those students don't take opportunities for help tend to be embarrassingly pathetic. Like, so embarrassing that they avoid even thinking about it, because if they made their real reason explicit, they would be pained at how dumb it is. (I've done this sot of thing myself, more times than I'm comfortable with.)
For example, I discovered that a significant fraction of the students in a certain class were afraid to ask questions of the professor because they found him scary. Now, I know the professor in question, and he's a friendly person who wishes that his students would talk to him more -- but he has an abrupt, somewhat awkward way of speaking, and an eastern European accent. Such superficial details are apparently what leaves the biggest impression on most people.
Or there are the guys who get depressed and stop coming to class for a week or two, and then keep on not coming to class because they haven't been to class for a while, and it would be hard trying to get back up to speed. I really sympathize with these guys, but that doesn't make their reasoning any saner. (A fair number of them come in at the end of a semester to flunk their final exams. Damn it all, this is painful to watch.)
Or there are the people who won't read textbooks, or Wikipedia, or whatever, because they feel like everything ought to be covered in class well enough that they can just show up every day and get a good grade. I can not think of any good pedagogical reason why this should be so, and indeed, it usually isn't.
I could go on. There are plenty more examples. But instead I think I'll just paraphrase the not-actually-evil professor from eastern Europe. "These kids," he said. "They aren't resourceful because they have never had to be resourceful. They need more adversity in life. When I was their age, I had to bribe a local official just to get a dorm room."
I've often found that this is so. I do try to read my textbooks, at least the assigned readings, because...well, because you're supposed to, I guess. But for most of my first year classes (three anatomy courses, psych 101, microbiology) just going to class was enough. (I did of course take detailed notes, with colourful diagrams, and then study from my notes afterwards. I have now bequeathed my anatomy notes to a friend a couple of grades younger.) One possible reason why this is true for me is that I like biology-related subjects, and I've always read anything I could get my hands on, and so I arrived in university to find that I already knew at least 50% of the material.
Areas where this isn't true: English classes, history classes, etc, where there are a lot of required readings that cover material not covered in class, and where there are essays or papers to be written on material that isn't covered in class. And of course there's no rule that you can get good grades without reading textbooks. It just happens to be true sometimes, for some people.
My experience of students here at [prominent UK university] is that they are very unwilling to ask for help because they have never needed to do so before, and so consider asking for help as a sign of weakness/low intelligence/low status.
This makes a certain amount of sense, the people who have been able to meet entry requirements are likely in the top percentile of their subject and been the best or nearly at their school. Generally this has been the result of either natural ability or brute force work (memorising equations and examples etc) rather than acting strategically and gaining study skills such as the ability to find new sources f information or ask for help. So they either despair at the seeming impossibility of their tasks, or spend increasingly large amounts of time brute forcing the work and burn out.
It takes a lot for people to understand that needing help doesn't mean you are stupid, but that the work is hard and its supposed to be hard.
That's not "adversity", that's "solvable problems requiring initiative".
-Mark Twain
Transcribed from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAD25s53wmE
How do you define “illusion”? I think an illusion is a type of brain failure. An optical illusion is even more specific. Therefore, I think the term is wholly appropriate — and “brain failure”, while not at all inappropriate, is just unnecessarily vague.
Disagree, at least in some instances. Many of these are just results of optimizing for normal environment.
There is a theorem in machine learning (blanking on the name) that says any "learner" will have to be biased in some sense.
I don't understand. Does that mean they have priors?
I think it's another way of putting it, though IIRC the biases are not always explicitly prior probabilities, they could just be a way the algorithm is constructed. Choosing the specific construct is acting on a prior.
The No Free Lunch Theorem.
Also, just because we can't expect to be free of bias doesn't mean that the bias is "proper functioning" of the hardware. An expected failure, perhaps, but still a failure.
</pedantry>
I make a finer distinction of "failure" as something that's inefficient for it's clear purpose. E.g. Laryngeal nerve of the giraffe. Evolution will do that on occasion. Sensory interpretations that optical illusions are based on are often optimal for the environment, and are a complement to the power of evolution if anything. Viewing something that is optimal as a failure seems like wishful thinking (though I suspect this is more of a misunderstanding of neurobiology).
Actually, that seems kind of fair. Something is a "failure to X" if it doesn't achieve X; something is a "failure" if it doesn't achieve some implicit goal. You can rhetorically relabel something a "failure" by changing the context.
Vision works well in our usual habitat, so we should expect it to break down in some corner cases that we can construct: agreed. For me to argue further would be to argue the meaning of "failure" in this context, when I'm pretty sure I actually agree with you on all of the substance of our posts.
I really do not want to argue about semantics either, but our agreed interpretation makes Niel's statement equivalent to "our visual system is not optimal for non-ancestral environments", which is highly uninteresting. I think the Dawkin's larengyal nerve example is much more interesting in this sense, since it points out body designs do not come from a sane Creator, at least in some instances (which is enough for his point).
Since we do not live in the ancestral environment now, I think the quotation could be just underlining how we should viscerally know our brain is going to output sub-optimal crud given certain inputs. Upvoted original.
(a sentiment I think applies to all super-stimuli)
"A witty saying proves nothing" --Voltaire
That's been posted (a few times) before. Though it may be worth repeating.
-Karl Popper
I don't like this quote. It is amusing but not very rational. It is not rational to ignore arguments because they were made by an awful person. It also isn't rational even if one thinks that an argument or set of ideas is not worth thinking about to actively refuse to discuss those ideas, even if one thinks that the ideas aren't worth considering. The first part of the quote is marginally defensible if Popper is very sure that Heidegger's ideas are a waste of time. The second part of the quote, about refusing to talk to people who defend Heidegger makes about as much sense as a religion telling its adherents not to listen to some specific critic.
(That said, while I'm by no means an expert on this matter, my general opinion is that Heidegger is a waste of time.)
In academic philosophy there is a tendency to refer to "Heidegger's arguments and positions" as simply "Heidegger". (This is true of all philosophers, not just Heidegger). Popper, of course, would have been familiar with this; when I read that quote I got the distinct impression of "Heidegger's arguments are hollow and his positions are indefensible; please can we agree on this and stop discussing them?"
Relevant old LW post: Tolerate tolerance.
Is his philosophy rubbish (even relative to other philosophy) or is it just a problem with him being a Nazi?
Heidegger's theme from beginning to end was "Being". Why is there something rather than nothing, and what is existence anyway? In practice, it was the second question that dominated his life. He started out in phenomenology, so he was initially interested in being as appearance. We get this idea of existence from somewhere, but where exactly? How does it emerge from appearance? Another theme was the forgetting of Being in favor of beings. The modern mind, with its busyness and technological power, is usually engaged in interaction with one particular thing or another particular thing, and loses sight of the fact of existence as such. This theme led him to a historical examination of the concept of Being in different ages. A distinction between existence and essence - thatness and whatness - develops in Greek philosophy, and persists through the centuries despite many transformations, such as the emphasis on subjectivity and consciousness which characterizes the epistemology-dominated era since Descartes. By the end of his life, Heidegger considered that technology and especially "cybernetics" (computer science and information technology) were the start of a whole new epoch in humanity's relationship to Being; initially one in which the obliviousness to Being itself would persist - the metaphysical oblivion created by the focus on essence having been joined by a daily sensibility which was all about action rather than thought - but also a circumstance in which there could be a "second beginning", in which Being might be encountered anew again.
So Heidegger deserves his place in the history of philosophy, and he's not obsolete yet, even if so much about him and his work belongs to a vanished culture and politics.
If I recall he convinced his son to become a computer scientist on these grounds.
I think both. But mostly I like this quote because it's hilarious.
That it is. :D
I'm not sure what Popper's motivation for saying that was, but I've read a bit of Heidegger and I felt the same way afterward.
Here's another Popper quote on Heidegger. No points for guessing how Popper took this (as is clear from the surrounding context):
--"The Unknown Xenophanes", The World of Parmenides, Karl Popper
I once told a university friend of mine, who was majoring in modern philosophy, that Heidegger was the most empty and nonsensical philosopher I had encountered in high school. He blamed this on translation difficulties and my Marxist teacher, and offered to guide me through a selected reading of Sein und Zeit; an offer on which I took him up.
We called it quits (in a friendly manner) after five evenings of heated arguing over whether it was even intellectually permissible to use half of the words Heidegger was using, and I left with the judgment that Heidegger was raping the German language.
I don't know about raping the German language but your friend is right in that a) Heideggerr, more than maybe any other philosopher ever, is harder to understand in translation and b) a Marxist might have a lot of trouble explaining Heidegger.
He definitely is not an author one should take on by oneself and I definitely can't explain much of anything he's said. I do lean toward the position that he said meaningful, even important things but thats totally based on people whose rationality and intelligence I trust regarding other philosophy telling me so. His obscurity is definitely the cause of a ton of bad philosophy.
dupe (which includes citation and larger context.)
-- Paul Krugman
Speaking of peculiarly boring sub-genres of science fiction, I am told that Paul Krugman was once the best and most promising of the Jedi Masters of Economics. But somehow, the forces of the Sith seduced him to the dark side, and he has since become Darth Pundit the Mindkillingly Political.
In any case, if economic statistics are bad, let them be made better. For that matter, if they're very, very good, let them be made better still, and even then nobody should treat them as the absolute truth.
He has certainly become political. It might be worth asking: Has he become any less accurate in the process? Another possibility would be that the positions taken up by the major political parties in the US at present are such that it's impossible to tell the truth about some subjects without being (perceived as) highly political.
(That's certainly happened often before. For extreme examples, consider cases where an important political movement is based on badly broken racial theories or on a specific religion.)
According to this study, he does okay, but I'm not impressed with their methodology. For some reason I can't copy/paste the relevant section of the PDF, but they discuss him explicitly on page 15. They looked at "a random sample" of his columns and television appearances (whatever that means) and found 17 predictions, of which 14 were right, 1 was wrong, and 1 was hedged.
Only 17 predictions? I thought we did science.
"He is, after all, a Nobel-prize winning economist."
I agree that that study is unimpressive, in a number of ways. (And it's comparing his accuracy with that of other pundits, rather than with that of past-Krugman.)
-Charles Babbage
Dupe
Upvoted. I didn't know it was already posted, I've read quite a few of these quote threads but never commented before or noticed that one.
What's the protocol for this? Should I delete the post?
I think you just accept quietly your downvotes or lack of upvotes, and remember to search next time.
(Also, Clippy - nice try.)
I did search but rather lazily (just entered the text and logically nothing came up). But that was very sloppy, I should have searched for "Charles Babbage" and skimmed the quotes that came up.
--Paul Graham
Well, the time Steve Ballmer announced he was to quit the Microsoft, Microsoft's stock jumped quite a bit, clearly because Ballmer quit, even though one could perhaps explain either a raise or a fall with Ballmer quitting. Expected square of a change was big from Ballmer quitting, that's for sure. Same goes for any dramatic news, such as the recent gas attack in Syria.
And yes, over the time one could tell that something is up if the stock market graph is uneventful while there's dramatic news.
Bottom line is, a causal link can exist and be inferred even when there is no correlation.
An interesting concept...but I wonder. I bet at least some people would actually notice that. They'd see unrest in the middle east and say "hmm...oil prices didn't change the way I expected them to" or something. Sometimes you see things like "_ index rises in spite of _".
I think Graham's inference has merit: these people don't really know what's happening...but I think some people at least would notice the anomoly.
Well now I want to test this. Do we have anyone here who thinks they know a thing or two about the stock market? If so would they be amenable to an experiment?
I'm thinking that they would agree not to look at any stock price information for a day (viewing all the other news they want). At the end of the day they are presented with some possible sets of market closes, all but one of which of which are fake, and we see if they can reliably find the right one.
Finding the most probable market outcome given a few possibilities and a day's news is easier than noticing by yourself that the news and the market don't fit.
I will participate if you'd like to try, there are some problems with the experiment though
I'm still interested, what changes would you suggest?
Sorry for the slow reply, want to do this over email? im gbasin at gmail
I'm benelliott3 at gmail. To be honest I'm not very familiar with the stock-market so if you could suggest a procedure for the experiment, including such things as where to get the information that would be appreciated.
Care to precommit to a discussion post about the experiment regardless of the result?
Robert Heinlein
At one point, he quite audaciously predicted that the Soviet Union was headed for collapse. If he'd lived longer, he would have seen that his prediction should have been even crazier: not only did the Soviet Union fall apart, but it did so without starting a major war, or nuking any cities.
And don't even get me started on his books where we've got interstellar travel, guided by computers that are the size of a room but barely faster than someone with a slide rule.
"Paper clips are gregarious by nature, and solitary ones tend to look very, very depressed." - dwardu
"Please don't hold anything back, and give me the facts" – Wen Jiabao, Chinese Premier (when meeting disgruntled people at the central complaints offices).
-- Mary Shelley, The Last Man
-- 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.
Another good one:
"If it's bright and clear on New Year's Eve, the next day will be New Year's."
Als het regent in mei, is april al voorbij. (If it rains in May, April is already past)
I'll chip in with this Russian saying:
"It is better to be rich and healthy than to be poor and sick!"
Woody Allen had a take on it too:
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but yourself can free your mind.
An upvote to the first person to correctly identify the first person to say that (the quote is often misattributed, you'll get a downvote if you identify the wrong author).
Reminded me of...
Roy Harper
Marcus Garvey. I think it works better in this longer form.
Bob Marley, although before I checked Google search, Books, and Scholar, I had expected to find it was by Epictetus. Oh well.
EDIT: In my defense, Garvey's original is not the same as the Bob Marley version which Robin presented. I think it's a little disingenuous to consider the Bob Marley version 'misattributed'.
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.
Dude, SRSLY, 30 seconds with google.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ronald_DeWolf
Ronald DeWolf. The son of L. Ron Hubbard.
So, wait, was it that:
a) Most men worth influencing in the 50s had a mistress his wife didn't know about?
or that:
b) Most men worth influencing in the 50s understood that the guy calling him could persuade the wife that there was a mistress irrespective of whether there was really a mistress?
I don't know which it was.
But I'd say that you're seeing the trees, not the forest.
The major point of the quote was that there's a lack of courage in the world, the rest of the quote is just examples.
The courage to allow one's infidelity to be exposed (let alone falsely exposed) isn't what most people have in mind when they think of courage.
b) fits in better with the reign of terror metaphor.
Or perhaps that they believed they had a mistress, whether they did or didn't?
</joke>
I like the quote, but I downvoted. An upvote to the first person to identify why.
The comma splice? Please tell us...
Oh, I assumed the answer was inherent in the question. :) As Sniffnoy said, because of the "an upvote to whoever can identify the author"
Why would that cause a downvote?
Because Robin can identify the author and a downvote is needed to balance that.
It's wrong.
It's not about rationality?
Because of the "an upvote to whoever can identify the author"?
The fact that it wasn't formatted as a
?
Godwin's Law violation?
"Everything works by magick; science represents a small domain of magick where coincidences have a relatively high probability of occurrence."
I totally knew who said that. Does that make me a bad rationalist?
Does this merely call attention to the high probability of the existence of unknown unknowns, or does it promote map-territory confusion?
--Evil Overlord List #230
-- George Orwell, 1984
Well, I don't know. The sort of gun you had before modern precision machining, 4.2 would be good enough, maybe 4.3 at a pinch.
--The French Revolution: a history, by Thomas Carlyle; as quoted by Mencius Moldbug
But ... but ... what about bankruptcies induced by a liquidity crunch -- the kind the political elite's propagandists have have been telling me entitle a "too big to fail" company to receive perpetual government assistance?
In those cases, bankruptcy wouldn't suck up falsehoods, would it?
If your business is structured such that a liquidity crunch will drive you bankrupt then some restructuring might be in order.
Now one can (and I certainly would be willing) to make the argument that it is almost impossible for a small to medium sized business to structure itself such that a liquidity crunch exacerbated by an inept political class and a rapacious bureaucracy (or a rapacious political class and an inept bureaucracy, whatever).
In that case it's best to take your ball and go home leaving the enlightened revolutionaries with the society they voted for.
Eh, that's what I thought do, but the very idea looks to be beyond the pale. They tell me that we needed to make huge loans on terms no one else could get to prop up some large banks, and it's "only" to provide "liquidity". But my thought is: I find it extremely unsettling to be in an economy where such a huge fraction of it is based on business plans this brittle; and the sooner and more spectacularly they die off, the better a foundation future growth will be built on.
But current mainstream thinking doesn't even allow such a thought.
I also saw people present, as "evidence" of a liquidity crunch, the fact that overnight lending rights spiked from 4% to 6% annualized. Considering that these are the annualized rates for loans with a life of a few weeks at most, this is a trivial increase in borrowing costs. A business so fragile that it can't withstand paying a few extra pennies for ultra-cheap loans every once in a while ... well, any economy dependent on such brittle business plans is living on borrowed time anyway.
No. But I think you* are guilty of affirming the consequent. If something is false, then it will end in bankruptcy - but that does not logically imply that everything ending in bankruptcy was false. So something true could still end in bankruptcy (for whatever reason, like a liquidity crunch).
* Or Carlyle, I suppose, but given the choice between accusing a famous thinker of an elementary fallacy and a quick off-the-cuff Internet comment, I'd rather accuse the latter.
There is no greater joy than riding the words of Thomas Carlyle.
He may not always be correct (although his point above is a blow of hard-hitting truth as great as any ever written) but his phrasing, his metaphors, his analogy, are all magnificent.
-- Douglas Hofstadter
Not when apathy and insanity are correlated. See, e.g., The Myth of the Rational Voter
Insanity will prevail when sane men do nothing? (Apologies to Edmund Burke)
I think this adaptation is much more precise than the original.
-- Aristotle
I don't understand this one.
The way I read it was that he's using "impossibilities" to mean things that you don't think are possible, don't understand, or find inconceivable rather than things which can't actually happen.
A probable impossibility is something that will probably happen that a given person doesn't think is possible. An improbable possibility is something that that same person understands, but (whether you know it or not) isn't probable.
I read 'probable impossibility' as 'something that is probably impossible'. It's a poor translation if it means something else; but your version at least makes some kind of sense.