"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...)

"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.)

"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

"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)

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

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

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

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

-- Robert A Heinlein, Lost Legacy

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

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

--Arthur Guiterman

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.

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.

• ???

Religious war - is fighting over who has the better imaginery friend.

Statistics is applied philosophy of science.

A. P. Dawid

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"

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

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.

Things are only impossible until they're not.

-- Jean-Luc Picard

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

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

-- Aristotle

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

-- Douglas Hofstadter

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

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

I will not procrastinate regarding any ritual granting immortality.

--Evil Overlord List #230

"Everything works by magick; science represents a small domain of magick where coincidences have a relatively high probability of occurrence."

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.

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).

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.

[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

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

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

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

Robert Heinlein

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

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

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

-- Paul Krugman

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

"A witty saying proves nothing" --Voltaire

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)

If this isn't what you see
It doesn't make you blind
If this doesn't make you feel
It doesn't mean you've died Where the river's high
Where the river's high

If you don't want to be seen
You don't have to hide
If you don't want to believe
You don't have to try
To feel alive

If this doesn't make you free
It doesn't mean you're tied
If this doesn't take you down
It doesn't mean you're high
If this doesn't make you smile
You don't have to cry
If this isn't making sense
It doesn't make it lies

Alive in the superunknown
First it steals your mind
And then it steals your soul

Get yourself afraid
Get yourself alone
Get yourself contained
Get yourself control

• Soundgarden, "Superunknown"

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