= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Rationality Quotes: March 2011
- 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (383)
Satchel Paige
I would consider this an anti-rationality quote because he's refusing to actually Shut Up and Multiply. If a guy can beat you, you give him a free pass?
EDIT: I claimed that it was obvious that the math indicated that there were too many intentional walks in Major League Baseball. This is clearly non-obvious, I have lowered my estimate for its likelihood to .9, and I apologize for the claim. However, I still dislike the quote strongly.
And on this you are simply mistaken. Many people refuse to shut up and multiply. They are unable to admit that they do have limits and that sometimes losing is the best thing to do.
Apart from not being math, your "math" is just wrong. You ought to be able to see why if you read the surrounding conversation here. You can potentially save multiple runs if you correctly evaluate your ability with regard to one particular conflict and concede.
This isn't "anti-rationality". It is anti conventional wisdom and common enforced exhortation.
What does this mean?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_base_on_balls
Baseball pitchers have the option to 'walk' a batter, giving the other team a slight advantage but denying them the chance to gain a large advantage. Barry Bonds, a batter who holds the Major League Baseball record for home runs (a home run is a coup for the batter's team), also holds the record for intentional walks. By walking Barry Bonds, the pitcher denies him a shot at a home run. In other words, Paige is advising other pitchers to walk a batter when it minimizes expected risk to do so.
Since this denies the batter the opportunity to even try to get a hit, some consider it to be unsportsmanlike, and when overused it makes a baseball game less interesting. A culture of good sportsmanship and interesting games are communal goods in baseball-- the former keeps a spirit of goodwill, and the latter increases profitability-- so at a stretch, you might say Paige advises defecting in Prisoner's Dilemma type problems.
... to some. There are others who enjoy watching games being played strategically. I don't, for example, take basketball seriously unless the teams are using a full court press.
What do you do, for example, if all the bases are loaded and the good hitter comes in? Do you give away the run? It may depend on the score and it would involve some complex mathematical reasoning. That single decision would be more memorable to me than the rest of the entire game of baseball!
The latter wouldn't be a reasonable claim to make, even taking your premises regarding what sportsmanship is and what is good for the game for granted. For Paige to be claimed to be advising defection in the Prisoner's Dilemma Paige would have to be asserting or at least believe that the payoffs are PDlike. Since Paige doesn't give this indication he instead seems to be advocating thinking strategically instead of following your pride.
Curiously, assuming another set of credible beliefs Paige could consider walking the batter to be the cooperation move in the game theoretic situation. Specifically, when there is another pitcher known to walk who cannot be directly influenced. If all the other pitchers publicly declare that the game's rules should be changed in such a way that free walking is less desirable and then free walk hitters whenever it is is strategic to do so they may force the rule-makers' hands. If just one pitcher tried this strategy of influence then he would lose utility, sacrificing his 'good guy' image without even getting all the benefits that the original free-walker got for being the 'lone bad boy strategic prick pitcher'. If all the pitchers except one cooperate then the one pitcher who lets himself be hit out of the park cleans up on the approval-by-simplistic-folks stakes by being the 'boy scout only true sportsman' guy while everyone else does the hard work of looking bad in order to improve the rules, the game in the long term and the ability of pitchers not to be competitively disadvantaged for being 'sportsmanlike'. (All of this is again assuming that no-free-walking is intrinsically good.)
I use an analogous strategy when playing the 500. I like to arrange house rules that put a suitable restriction (or incentive modification) for misere calls. If the opponents have their egos particularly attached to standard misere rules I allow their rules to be used and then bid open misere whenever it is rational to do so. Which is a lot.
The above is not exactly a threat simply for the purpose of enforcing my will. It is to a significant extent a simple warning. Some people sulk if they rarely get the kitty when they have the joker and 4 jacks. At least this way they are forewarned.
I'm sorry but I'm not very familiar with baseball. Does walking a batter mean something like intentionally throwing the ball to third or fourth base so he doesn't get caught out but can't do a home run?
If this is the case then it seems like the advice is more about knowing when to lose.
Basically, when you throw the pitch, there's a "strike zone" in front of the batter where any pitch that isn't hit counts as a strike, but where the batter is most able to hit the ball. If you throw the ball outside the strike zone, it's harder to hit, but if the batter doesn't swing, it doesn't count as a strike - it's a "ball". Four balls means the batter goes to first base.
Thus, if you don't want to risk a home run, just throw the ball where it can't possibly be hit a few times, and give up one base instead of several points.
It's sorta about knowing when to lose, but it's more like the old Sun Tzu chestnut: "In war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak."
Thanks
You're welcome :)
It's a baseball thing, I'd assume. It's saying, if you're a pitcher, don't try to strike out a batter who's going to hit a home run - just give up a base and strike out the next guy.
— Chuck Klosterman
You can know you are unjustly negative without being able to change your disposition. Why do you think people choose to take counselling and antidepressants?
I know I am cynical
I read the quote as referring more to people who take pride in their self-image as cynics. I meant no offense to those who correctly and non-paradoxically believe themselves to have unjustly negative aliefs, I know what that's like.
-- Randall Munroe
Bruce Gregory, Inventing Reality: Physics as Language, p.184
This quote seems logically impossible, among other things.
It's hard to define 'real'; it's not clear that it's doing any work. If you're curious, Gary Drescher in Good and Real (who is on good terms with logic) argues in the last chapter that the real/unreal distinction is not meaningful.
If "real" is an honorific, then it can also be used as a descriptive term.
If "Gary Drescher is not real" is false, then clearly we mean something by the word, which makes it a bit tricky to show that it's not meaningful. Maybe you could show that real and unreal things have identical properties, aside from their "honorific?" Monsters under the bed refute that one though...
"Hard to define" and "not clearly doing any work" are distinct properties; I'd agree about the former and not the latter. I do find it difficult to give a definition of "real" that isn't going to break when dealing with unusual border cases; but nevertheless, if I consider the question "Is Harry Potter real?", or "Is Barack Obama real?", or "Are atoms real?", then the two possible answers I could give for each will imply distinct models of reality that anticipate different experiences, and furthermore the word "real" can transfer such a model into someone else's mind pretty successfully. It doesn't particularly seem to have any of the characteristics of a non-descriptive term.
This point was made long ago by J.L. Austin in (I believe) Sense and Sensibilia. Austin points out several things about "real", among them that "real" is substantive-hungry: You can't answer "Is such-and-so real?" without asking first, "Is it a real what?"
A decoy duck is not a real duck, but it is a real decoy -- whereas a rubber duck is not a real decoy; and a decoy coot might be mistaken for a decoy duck if you know little of waterfowl, but isn't a real decoy duck.
There is no sense of "real" that applies to all substantives that we would describe as real. The word makes sense only in contrast to specific ways of being unreal: being a forgery, a toy, an hallucination, a fictional character, an exaggeration, a case of mistaken identity, a doctored picture, etc. It is these negative concepts, and not the concept of "real", that actually do all the explanatory work. "Real" is both ambiguous and negative.
From Lord Of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien:
"He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."
Although I think breaking things actually can be pretty useful if there are more things of that kind. If you're breaking something unique, well, then...
I'm not sure if 'although' is meant to reject this as a rationality quote or deny it entirely. I think the latter might be wise, though. It's essentially an anti-reductionist, anti-analytic quote on similar grounds to Keats' lines on unweaving rainbows. It's also part of a semi-mystical 'magical combat by philosophical debate' sequence, which I really enjoy as literature but which essentially boils down to a series of Mysterious Old Wizard 'insights'. Although, ironically, in LOTR the quote is objecting to Saruman breaking white light into its constituent 'many colours', whereas Keats is objecting to explaining the 'many colours' back to a division of white light. So it seems that the 'holistic' view is objecting to analysis in either direction on this one!
-- Howard Zinn in A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
I'd be more interested to hear how he intends to solve the problem. Hopefully not the same way T-Rex did.
Sigh. Let me quote a part again:
Did you even read that sentence? There is no problem and no attempt at solution, he is just pointing out an important fact that had escaped me(and I guess lots of other folks) until I read the quote.
The book is propaganda. Wikipedia's collection of critical views.
The book is quite clearly propaganda. It sets out to advance a specific thesis, and there is literally no evidence provided against that idea. The bottom line was written at the beginning of the book, and he spent the rest of the book providing arguments for it. That doesn't mean, however, that his positions are necessarily wrong (see the addendum on the link above). Certainly, Zinn's positions have some flaws, but he does raise some issues that haven't been raised with other history texts.
It seems to me that the original quote is an explicit statement that that is what he is going to to. As is, even more explicitly, the mission statement on the top page of that website. An extract:
There's a whole cottage industry arguing over whether Zinn did solve it the way the T-Rex did or not. Although speaking as someone who agrees with some but not most of Zinn's politics, he did in some ways do a decent job focusing on areas of history that had not gotten a lot of attention due to ideological issues.
There is some value in criticizing that which has been improperly popularly lionized, but this introduces its own skew. Zinn managed to truly piss me off because in his chapter on WWII he either did not mention or mentioned only in passing the rape of Nanking and similar Japanese atrocities, spent a few paragraphs on the Holocaust, surprisingly didn't particularly mention the firebombings of Dresden or Tokyo, but harped for several pages on the atomic bombs. Perhaps they needed examination, but incessantly and loudly examining them at the expense of everything else leaves the reader with a distinct impression of Zinn's own political beliefs.
I think this might be behind much of (American) conservatives' anger with liberals in the foreign policy domain, as exemplified by the insult "blame-America-first". Liberals are questioning America's policies, which is well and good, while leaving it as read that the actions of their adversaries (since the dynamic evolved, usually USSR or terrorists) are much worse. Conservatives see that apparent bias and gain the impression that all liberals hate America in particular. The situation is not improved by much political mind-death on all sides. This is probably going off on a bit of a tangent, but it's at least marginally relevant.
Zinn assumed familiarity with those though! He didn't have anything novel to say about them, why simply regurgitate what's known so idiots won't misinterpret you?
I don't believe that that's what was really going on.
Diane Duane, The Wounded Sky
Emacs is the tool that builds the tools.
-Andrew Hussie
In what sense does this represent or touch on rationality?
Perhaps it will help to know that Andrew Hussie is a webcomic artist, and his webcomic is the golden egg in question?
It's a newcomb-like problem faced by anyone who wants to enjoy anyone else's creative output. People fear creating good things for fear that they will be expected to go on creating them.
"Once we are all working in the slave-pits together, I will try to put in a good word for you all. I will be like the old Barnard Hughes character in Tron, who remembers the Master Control Program when it was just accounting software."
-- Ken Jennings
— G. K. Chesterson
Wrong on both counts. Impartiality is a necessary and desirable trait for umpires (and similar roles). I want umpires, judges and escrow agents to be impartial even when they care about one of the parties.
Indifference is a valid preference to have for events that don't concern you. I'm indifferent to who wins the Super Bowl. That doesn't mean I know nothing about it. I simply have no reason whatsoever to care.
The Chesterson's quote is a pompous and elegant way of whining that people don't want to help you.
I'm afraid that this isn't a quote, but it seems like the best place to put it.
Earlier today, I had a discussion with my girlfriend about Santa Claus etc. She opined that it was worthwhile to believe in ‘impossible things’ (her words) because belief is in itself valuable. I didn't know where to begin disagreeing with that. (There was also something about the ‘magic of childhood’.)
This evening, we saw Rango. She squeezed my hand when the characters started talking about how it was important to have something to believe in, it gives people hope, etc. I wasn't even inclined to disagree, only to point out that one should find something true to serve as the basis for one's hopes (not that we actually got into a discussion in the movie theatre).
But then I was delighted to find that the character most pushing this point of view jnf gur znva ivyynva. And not just that; by the lights of this movie, that attitude (belief without regard to truth) is simply wrong.
"Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought" Henri Bergson
When I first read this, I thought it was just applause lights. But I actually think it's highly applicable to rationalist standards of belief and practice.
-- Paul Krugman
(Not that this is necessarily a rationality quote, I just think it's cute.)
Should we open alternative Quotes Theeads for quotes which aren't Rationality Quotes, but which we want to share anyway?
Put 'em in the Open Thread and see who goes for it.
Is this too cryptic? :
Throw strikes. Home plate don't move. Satchel Paige
-Wilbur Wright
The Simpsons, "Kidney Trouble"
Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, "Introduction aux études historiques" (1898), via LanguageHat (http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001685.php).
And is that laziness so bad? If extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, presumably ordinary claims require merely ordinary evidence...
"Ordinary claims require merely ordinary evidence" is an overlooked and tremendously important corollary.
I'm going to quote you on this in the rationality book. Email me with who you want credited if it's not "gwern on LessWrong.com".
Email sent. (Gosh, I think this will be the second book I'll be mentioned in. How thrilling.)
"The hell of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the hell where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the hell and become such a part of it that you can never see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the hell, are not hell, then make them endure, give them space." -- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
This is the last paragraph of the book. I should note that I changed the translation here from the Harcourt & Brace translation I have, substituting "hell" for "inferno." I recommend the book to any rationalist with a taste for fables.
Bertrand Russell
— Randall Munroe, today's xkcd alt text
-- Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA
Crowley's writings are an odd mixture of utter raving, self-conscious mysticism, and surprising introspective clarity. The above refers to his concept of True Will, which reads at times like an occultist's parameterization of epistemic rationality; some of his writings on meditation, too, wouldn't look too far out of place as top-level posts here.
I am wary of the fact that this quote feels like something that one might enjoy reading, but find that when he lays the book down (if he's being properly cautious in believing claims), he's learned nothing, at best. At worst, he may be on his way to becoming a sort of Randroid.
I could be wrong, but I think that people would start reading this sort of thing out of an expectation of mixed catharsis/usefulness, only to find that they've just wasted their time.
"The only thing I'm addicted to right now is winning." - Charlie Sheen
David Templer
Daniel Kish (Human Echolocation researcher, advocate and instructor).
A truly elegant argument in favour of getting hit with a baseball bat every week.
There is an important distinction between 'not being allowed to run into a pole' and just 'not running into poles because you look where you're going'.
I would rather see the pole coming so that I wouldn't run into it. I'm not sure this metaphor succeeded.
Agent Orange - Too Young To Die
-- Clifford, The Ethics of Belief
John Stewart Bell, "Against Measurement" in Physics World, 1990.
That's pretty much the plot of Quarantine, isn't it?
Having trouble googling that. Could you provide a link? Or an explanation, I guess.
ETA: actually, I think I found it.
Google suggestions: "quarantine fiction", "quarantine wavefunction".
This comment led to my discovery that the Google settings on this computer were screwy. I think I found it now. Thank you!
This quote does not argue against some major position of modern physicists, but is instead arguing (probably ineffectively) against self-help woo.
Bell made the comment in an article that examined major position of modern phycisists -- or at least, positions of some authors of physics textbooks. Woo was not his topic.
None of the physics textbooks I have ever read have required any special qualifications for a system to play the role of measurer, and in many cases use elementary particles as the measurers. There are only three places I recall hearing that claim: Werner Heisenberg, confused non-physicists, and advertising for quantum woo.
-- Alonzo Fyfe
I upvoted this at first but... What about silver clouds?
-- Ice-T
Or, as the Urban Dictionary puts it:
A meta-comment: It's always good to have an arsenal of mainstream-accessible quotes to use for those times when explaining game theory is just loo much of an inferential leap. I'd like to find more of these.
I think that this is the more general form:
"Realize that all actions are context-dependent, and all utility functions depend on the context in which they are written. If you want to change either one, think about changing the context as an alternative to more direct means."
However, I've probably managed to maximize the inferential distance between writer and reader here, since many people go from concrete-->abstract more easily than the reverse.
Honestly, reading that quote brought to mind this one:
"One bleeding-heart type asked me in a recent interview if I did not agree that 'violence begets violence.' I told him that it is my earnest endeavor to see that it does. I would like very much to ensure — and in some cases I have — that any man who offers violence to his fellow citizen begets a whole lot more in return than he can enjoy." -Jeff Cooper, "Cooper vs. Terrorism", Guns & Ammo Annual, 1975
Disagree. This is just a get out of jail free card, a universal excuse. Don't blame me, blame the system / my genes / my memes / my parents / determinism / indeterminism...
Regardless of the normative value of the quote your description of the meaning, purpose and implication is flawed. That just is not what the statement means.
Given the context, I stand by my interpretation.
Er, that context doesn't sound like "I'm a puppet of the system" to me at all. It sounds more like, "don't be mad at me because I'm successful and you're not ("Actin' like a brother done did somethin' wrong cause he got his game tight"); if you have to be mad at something, be mad at the rules which elevate some and lower others ("some come up and some get done up"), by requiring us to risk much to gain great rewards ("If you out for mega cheddar, you got to go high risk"). Otherwise, work on improving your own performance ("tighten your aim"), rather than envying my success ("act like you don't see me / You wanna be me")."
Given that most of the song is bragging about his past actions and willingness to take more such actions in the future, it certainly doesn't sound like a declaration of helplessness. Heck, for a rap song, it's practically self-improvement advice. ;-)
That may not be what it's supposed to mean, but I've heard people use it that way.
If there were no players, then there would be no game.
If you have, in fact, heard people use the statement to mean "Don't blame me, blame" any of "my genes / my memes / my parents / determinism / indeterminism" (everything except 'the system') then you have heard people calling a tail a leg. There is a world of difference between 'just a universal excuse' and something that is sometimes used as an excuse combined with a list of half a dozen unrelated excuses.
This isn't a matter of normative judgement, it is a matter of basic comprehension. And in this case a matter of thinking a negative opinion of something is a justification for misrepresentation.
If the phrase is being used sometimes (or even often) as an excuse then that objection can be expressed explicitly, without abusing the language for rhetorical effect. That's the difference between prompting my agreement and eliciting disgust.
That doesn't appear true either. Alexandros' meta comment becomes relevant here, regarding descriptions "for those times when explaining game theory is just loo much of an inferential leap". The 'game' is set up, to a significant extent, by the external (social) environment. By people who are not themselves the relevant players. Without players you just have a game that is not at a Nash equilibrium... yet.
When said in first person, it can feel like a dodge.
However, when used as a third-person response to retorts like "politicians have got to stop being so corrupt!", I find it fits just fine, and it is in this context that I posted it. (also, notice that the elaboration is in third person)
Every "playa" has three options[1]:
In most games there is no ethical choice involved. In the type of game Tracy Marrow [2] is playing #3 is the appropriate choice (at least in the early stages of his career). For a real kid born in the lower class ghettos, #2 transitioning to #3 is the appropriate choice. "The Game" Ice-T was talking about was either the Gansta-Rap game, or the urban gang banger game. To succeed in the Gangsta Rap game one has to present a certain type of lifestyle and moral choices as appealing and appropriate. Those sorts of moral choices (drug dealing, prostitution, handling interpersonal differences with extreme violence etc.) are neither successful strategies long term, nor do they increase the amount of rationality. To be a playa in the gang banging game you have to be good at those same things, and be absolutely ruthless. This has possible secondary effects of increasing the level of psychopathy in a population group (http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jim_fallon_exploring_the_mind_of_a_killer.html).
Or to shorten it, doing large amounts of crack and running around with automatic weapons, while a fun way to waste a sunday afternoon, is not exactly a rational thing to do.
p.s. I actually like a lot of his music. He was a talented recording artist. It's just a shame he couldn't see how his actions would impact and influence a community that really could have used better role models.
This in particular is very well put.
It's good to understand the player's actions as being part of a particular game. But it's okay to punish the player, if you're feeling altruistic or vengeful enough (that is, you want to do your part to discourage people from playing that game).
When you're not prepared to anger the player, the game is indeed a safe target for your ineffectual outrage.
It is similarly okay for the player or, indeed, a third party to consider your 'altruistic' punishment to be itself blameworthy or anti-social and subject it to punishment. After all, encouraging 'altruists' to punish the kind of player who is not powerful enough to deter punishment is typically just another part of the game, one step up in sophistication.
This reminds me: every year, more and more people complain that Burning Man has lost some essential part of its appeal– but of course, that very attitude is part of Burning Man's original appeal, and those who don't wish to be hipsters themselves need to step back one level farther.
That is, don't hate the playa, hate the game.
Dr. Ralph Merkle (quoted on the Alcor website - I'm surprised this hasn't been posted before, but I can't find it in the past pages)
Well, to be fair, the experimental group isn't doing a lot better either, just yet.
They are in terms of expected value.
"If you want truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease." — Sent-ts'an
Pragmatic rationality, perhaps? :
Grrr... At least with normal 'theory vs practice' quotes they stick to one (slightly broken) definition of theory in which 'theory' is (evidently) limited to oversimplified theories that don't fully account for specific details of practical execution. In this quote it conflates an encompassing definition of theory with the limited, specific caricature of the more typical theory/practice dichotomy presentations. Which is just all sorts of wrong.
Stick to your colloquialisms Yogi Berra! Don't get stuck half way to technical clarity. It's just an insult to all sides!
I've heard it said differently.
Reminds me of Sidney Morgenbesser's response when he was asked his opinion of pragmatism: "It's all very well in theory, but it doesn't work in practice."
-John Maynard Keynes, on models of unemployment that seemed nice on paper but did not measure up to the real world.
Here's a long one:
"When humanity lay grovelling in all men's sight, crushed to the earth under the dead weight of superstition whose grim features loured menacingly upon mortals from the four quarters of the sky, a man of Greece was first to raise mortal eyes in defiance, first to stand erect and brave the challenge. Fables of the gods did not crush him, nor the lightning flash and the growling menace of the sky. Rather, they quickened his manhood, so that he, first of all men, longed to smash the constraining locks of nature's doors. The vital vigour of his mind prevailed. He ventured far out beyond the flaming ramparts of the world and voyaged in mind throughout infinity. Returning victorious, he proclaimed to us what can be and what cannot: how a limit is fixed to the power of everything and an immovable frontier post. Therefore superstition in its turn lies crushed beneath his feet, and we by his triumph are lifted level with the skies."
-Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe
Sadly superstition isn't quite dead yet; it's just taken on a different form.
Bruce Gregory "Inventing Reality: Physics as Language" pp.186-187.
I would give this five votes up if I could.
It might be more accurate to substitute "rules" for "procedures".
Unfortunately in Medicine at least, there seems to be a substantial degree of sloppiness in applying the rules, particularly in the use of metastudies.
I'm having trouble thinking of even a single decade in which all or even most scientists have agreed on what procedures should be followed in theory testing (let alone throughout the history of science). Can you?
That depends on the distance you view them from. Look at any two things closely enough, and you will see differences. Look at them from far enough away, and they will seem identical.
One major difference in evidential standards I can think of is the use of statistics. No-one collects statistics on how often an unsupported body will fall. I doubt the early chemists, at the stage when they didn't really know what substances they were working with, would have benefitted from statistical analyses of their results. Instead, they worked to find experiments that produced the same result every single time. In other areas, especially psychology, people gather statistics that are sometimes completely meaningless.
That's the only substantial variation I have thought of so far. What counterexamples are you thinking of?
Unfortunately that seems to be changing.
Do you have specific examples in mind?
The whole "science is settled" debacle in climate change? I'm not going to take a position on it, but it certainly seems to have become about that particular theory rather than the scientific method.
Scientists in general do not agree on all the same theories, but that doesn't mean that some theories aren't so well supported that nearly all scientists accept them. Anthropogenic climate change is not as well supported as the atomic theory of chemistry, but it's sufficiently well evidenced that there's no reason why it should continue to be controversial among people acquainted with the data. It's in no way a failing of the scientific method if scientists are able to reach strong consensuses.
I don't see what you mean. Is there some specific evidence you have regarding the breakdown of scientific principles in the context of climatology?
I don't have any specific evidence--but even "scientific" debate on the topic, between scientists, tends to largely ignore the merits of the science and become a political affair a la Green Vs. Blue, centered entirely on whether or not the participants accept the prevailing theory.
I wasn't under the impression that climate science journals had degraded to that level - could you elaborate on what convinced you of this?
I've not read the science journals, and so cannot comment on them. I'm referring to informal debate (as in blogs and so forth) by climate scientists.
I don't think informal discussions are a good barometer for the health of a scientific field.
G. K. Chesterton, article in the Illustrated London News, 1907, collected in "The Man Who Was Orthodox", p.96.
And what exactly does sink into them? What do they really learn? Would Chesterton agree with Robin Hanson that the explicit curricula is just subterfuge for ingraining in students obedience to authority?
And from a non cynical angle, this can be said of all learning. To be able to learn something, you have to have reasonably understood its prerequisites. So naturally, if you look at something you have just taught someone, it would seem like all you have managed to teach them was the assumptions.
Your post reminds me of this quote about how a teacher's assumptions affect identity:
"When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you ... when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing." —Adrienne Rich, 1984
Insofar as that quote touches me, it mainly gives me the vaguely oily feeling of ingratiation that I've come to associate with the Dark Arts. It stops short of making any explicit prescriptions, but its framing is very carefully tailored: authority, identity, implications of threat and powerlessness.
Long story short, I'd be very careful about holding statements like that one up as inspiringly rational.
I read this and connected it to the horrible feeling I got from trying to look at myself during my first attempts to grok the world from a stereotypical bible-belt perspective. I got an Error Message: People who have yet to hear god's word, and satan-lovers who willfully defy or ignore god, sure, but to simply not believe any of it just wasn't in the domain. I can't think of non-computer/mathematic terms to describe looking at the blank spot, and those don't capture the psychological horror of finding yourself in it. (Or rather, not finding.)
"If the wonder's gone when the truth is known, there never was any wonder." — Gregory House, M.D. ("House" Season 4, Episode 8 "You Don't Want to Know," written by Sara Hess)
Why not?
The context of the quote is available here.
Thanks. I watched the episode and remember the context, but I still want to know why wonder that depends on ignorance is literally illusory.
Is this quote just a motivational tool designed to help us seek truth, or is there some true propositional content to it? If the latter, what are some situations where there was in fact some wonder? Also, what is or might be the causal mechanism by which dependence on ignorance leads to the no-wonder state?
I ask because when I am amazed by a magic trick or by a feat of practical engineering whose exact principles are unknown to me, and say "Wow!" and experience what I usually describe as "wonder," and then someone explains it and it seems relatively less wondrous, I do not usually retroactively downgrade my (temporary) experience of wonder -- rather, I note that at the time it seemed particularly wonderful and that now it seems less so.
For all that, I value truth much higher than wonder, and people are perfectly welcome to explain things to me -- but I doubt that House's quote is literally correct.
Things should not seem more wonderful when you don't understand them. Rationalists take joy in the merely real.
So I went back and re-read that article, and I still think that House's claim is (a) much stronger, and (b) wrong.
It's certainly important to allow yourself to gape in wonder at things that follow orderly rules; most likely all things do that, and I agree that it's foolish to give up wonder just because we live in an orderly universe.
But, for me, the sense of wonder is not about worshiping ignorance; it's about humility and curiosity. Here, I say to myself when I see a rainbow, is something worth knowing about and yet I do not understand it at all. The wonder is the fuel that leads to curiosity, which leads to knowledge. Or, at the very least, the wonder helps me keep up a grateful, open attitude toward my environment.
If you explained exactly how the rainbow worked, it would be an object of somewhat less wonder -- I would still find it pretty, but I wouldn't get quite the same emotional high. I might be able to find a similar sense of wonder in, e.g., the composition of the atmosphere (this usually works for me), or the behavior of photons (this usually does not work for me), and so there might be no net loss of wonder, and yet, nevertheless, explaining how the rainbow works tends to diminish the wondrousness of the rainbow without thereby providing any support for the conclusion that there was never any wonder there in the first place.
Basically, I disagree with you and with House. I take joy in the merely real, and things seem more wonderful to me when I don't (yet) understand them.
If "wonder" is being used to denote a reaction in an observer's mind, then you're of course right... there was wonder, and now there isn't, and House is simply wrong.
If "wonder" is being used metonomicly to refer to something in the world that merits being reacted to in that way -- the way people use it, for example, in phrases like "the seven wonders of the ancient world" -- then it's not so clearcut.
That made me notice that the whole "persistent failure to understand some phenomenon makes it awesome" idea is baked directly into words like "wonder" and "wonderful". What do you do when you don't understand something? You wonder about it. And so if something is wonderful, then clearly you can't allow yourself to understand it, because then there'd be nothing to wonder about. (In that sense, of course "wonder" is gone when the truth is known!) I know the dictionary would likely consider those to be separate senses of the words, but the connotations probably leak over.
Unfortunately I lost the source for this - anybody recognize it? It was from a book I read 12 to 15 years ago, I can't remember any more than that.
Thanks for the irony!
-- David Foster Wallace
Reminds me of the first two panels here.
Dr. Cuddy: "And you're always right. And I don't mean you always think you're right. But y--you are actually always right, because that's all that matters."
House: "That doesn't even make sense. What, you want me to be wrong?"
I got your Friendly AI problem right here...
"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
Theodore Roosevelt
Can't help but twist that into "To educate a society in morals and not in mind is to educate a menace to humanity..."
William James
William T. Powers
Dilbert creator Scott Adams discussing Charlie Sheen.
Some people practice "Radical Honesty" which seems much like that. Seems to me you'd need to start young, before you've got too many skeletons in the closet, before you've got too much to lose, and whilst you have time to recover. Probably also need an honesty-proof career.
As for sounding crazy, I'm already crazy and readily admit it.
Well, even if you don't have those things (a skeleton-less life, an honesty-proof career, etc.) you might still find that the you value the costs of honesty, however substantial they might be, less than the costs of continued deception.
Of course, I agree with you that the costs are lower when you have less invested in deception.
"Anything you can do, I can do meta" -Rudolf Carnap
I think that should be Terry Prachett's slogan. Or Hofstadter's.
An irrationality quote from Samuel Johnson via Boswell:
This is an old saying, which I learnt from the 1994 movie Forrest Gump (not otherwise a bastion of rationalism).
While we may judge people as irrational ("stupid") based on what they know (epistemic rationality, roughly), it's instrumental rationality that matters in the end.
While there are predictable (and accurate) objections to this quote as such, at heart it's good sense. On the one hand, it can mean the same thing as "the rational thing is the thing that wins", and on the other it can mean something like "if you predict that it has a low probability of working, but it works, then that is evidence that should raise your estimate of its likelihood of working," both of which are, I'd imagine, lesswrong-approved sentiments.
Do we have a source for that? (It's all over the Internet, with varied phrasing.)
I looked and couldn't find a definitive source, and really only posted it as sort of a neuron-jerk response.
I first heard it from some old Cajun sounding general talking about something to do with (IIRC) the Katrina response.
No, that was a different stupidity quote. "Don't get stuck on stupid".
Or alternatively, there's something intelligent that works much better.
Peanuts, 1961 April 26&27:
I just looked this up. It seems the text has been altered, and in the original, Linus said "Are there any openings in the Lunatic Fringe?" http://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1961/04/26
G. K. Chesterton (unsourced)
Unless the tiger actually is an optical illusion, in which case it's usually worthwhile to be convinced of this.
If only people believed that this could happen in philosophy.
It's better to be lucky than smart, but it's easier to be smart twice than lucky twice
Who are you quoting?
— Wolof proverb
"An accumulation of facts, however large, is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house."
-Clyde Kluckhohn
-Irwin Edman
My personal philosophy in a nutshell.
"It’s fascinating to me that we live in a world where some intelligent people think we need to put more effort into sophisticated artificial intelligence, while others think tractors powered by methane from manure are more important, and each thinks the other is being unrealistic."
John Baez
On Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
Context: The main character has been talking about the wonderful mysteriousness that makes another character so interesting. His companion (a self described humanist), tries to correct him, saying:
-Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Spinoza
Jason Zweig
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Demosthenes (384–322 BCE)
Samuel Butler
Quoted in the chapter on bounded rationality and the Revelation Principle in "Computational Aspects of Preference Aggregation" (.pdf) - an award winning 2006 PhD. Dissertation in AI by Vincent Conitzer.
Ben Goldacre keeps up a façade of being sympathetic to the Dark Side so that they look worse when they argue with him. Of course, taking it literally, it would be nice if I could decide what was true.
"Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy."
Joseph Campbell
...at least the rules are consistent and correspond to reality...
Not all of them. Which applies to Old Testament gods too, I guess: the Bible is pretty consistent with that "no killing" thing.
Except for the countless times when killing is outright mandated on, well, pain of death.
And the times when killing is praised, and the times when killing is completely unremarked upon.
The Bible approaches consistency much more closely with "no murder." That said, if "murder" roughly boils down to unendorsed killing, that's not too surprising.
The bible doesn't say "don't kill". In KJV times, "kill" meant what we mean by "murder", and "slay" was the neutral form (what we now mean by "kill"). (This, by the way, actually corresponds to the Hebrew version)
This post brought to you by the vast inferential distance you have from the people who wrote KJV
Johan van Benthem - in "Logical Dynamics of Information and interaction"(draft .pdf)
Sandra Tsing Loh
Not a rationality quote as such, but maybe an anti-hubris caveat for those of us that were never child prodigies.
-Bertrand Russell
The great ethicists of history share essentially the same goal: get strangers to always pick D. ...
I didn't like that comic because `D' can be achieved through a combination of egoism and UDT just as easily as through altruism. I assume that Weiner would not judge an egoist to be ethically perfect in the least convenient world, one where they were always forced to cooperate in prisoner's dilemma-type situations but could be entirely egoistic whenever they could get away with it, without even acausal consequences.
That would sound strange if I didn't remember the reference. Not 'D' for defect. 'D' for zero based alphabetized listing of boolean 11 where 1 is 'C'. :)
On noticing confusion:
Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Priory School
I am taking a first-aid class at my local community college. Our instructor, a paramedic, after telling us about the importance of blood flow to the brain, and the poor prognosis for someone who is left comatose from oxygen deprivation, says:
"There are some people who say, 'But miracles can happen!' Yeah, miracles are one in a million. What number are you?"
The reason it's a social and political question is that if you aren't in an emergency situation, it's much harder to tell what your capacity for help is. It isn't infinite, but it could probably be more than you're unthinkingly willing to allocate. It's plausible that people are being neglected for no good reason.
I'm not saying it makes sense to plan as though resources are infinite, but but it can also be a good heuristic to ask "what would we be doing if we cared more"?