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Rationality Quotes: March 2011
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Comments (383)
"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
Jason Zweig
Spinoza
— Randall Munroe, today's xkcd alt text
"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.
It's better to be lucky than smart, but it's easier to be smart twice than lucky twice
Who are you quoting?
-Wilbur Wright
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.
"Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy."
Joseph Campbell
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.
"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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Johan van Benthem - in "Logical Dynamics of Information and interaction"(draft .pdf)
"The only thing I'm addicted to right now is winning." - Charlie Sheen
Sandra Tsing Loh
Not a rationality quote as such, but maybe an anti-hubris caveat for those of us that were never child prodigies.
"Anything you can do, I can do meta" -Rudolf Carnap
I think that should be Terry Prachett's slogan. Or Hofstadter's.
-Irwin Edman
My personal philosophy in a nutshell.
On noticing confusion:
Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Priory School
-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'. :)
-- David Foster Wallace
Reminds me of the first two panels here.
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"?
John Stewart Bell, "Against Measurement" in Physics World, 1990.
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?"
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
"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
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
Like the spirit. Technically disagree with respect to future events. :)
-- 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.
Pragmatic rationality, perhaps? :
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."
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.
-- Alonzo Fyfe
I upvoted this at first but... What about silver clouds?
Perhaps this precedes subsequent rationality:
— Wolof proverb
Alexander Pope
Satchel Paige
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.
Knowing the risk, I quote this (given that I am a utilitarian pragmatist):
Why is there a risk? Is it because of William James' reputation?
"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
Read straight, I'd say it's a contender 'or ultimate irrationality quote about the future of AI. Ya got your generalizing from fictional evidence there, a bit o' inappropriate anthropomorphizing, a dash o' failure to recognize the absurdity of the future...
— Theodore Roethke
I'm not sure how I would distinguish people who specialize in the impossible from people who simply don't accomplish much of anything at all.
I'd look for the explosions.
You would have to notice when they acheive the impossible.
Or that they make visible progress towards the impossible.
Or that they acheive interesting side projects in their down time from working on the impossible.
That is a good one (that applies even under strict definitions of 'the impossible'). Closely related is if they make valuable tangential contributions to the non-impossible while working on the impossible.
That's a tricky thing to specialize in. Got any ideas about how someone would go about it?
If you interpret "impossible" as meaning "things a lot of people call impossible", then the obvious method would be to make a list of such things, research them to see if there are any where you have a plausible chance of making a difference, and figure out which of them you'd prefer to specialize in.
An irrationality quote from Samuel Johnson via Boswell:
I've always been a huge fan of this story.
The Simpsons, "Kidney Trouble"
Daniel Kish (Human Echolocation researcher, advocate and instructor).
I would rather see the pole coming so that I wouldn't run into it. I'm not sure this metaphor succeeded.
I rather suspect you miss the point of the metaphor. Perhaps you also missed the entirely literal meaning as well. Seeing the pole coming is not an option you have available if, as is the case with Kish and many of the people he works with, you do not have retinas.
I definitely missed the literal meaning -- thanks.
-Kaname Madoka, Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Episode #7 of Madoka, and I'm thinking, "It's amazing how many anime problems can be solved by polyamory and the pattern theory of identity."
Neither Google nor LW search is giving me much on "pattern theory of identity". What is it?
"If you ever want to save the universe, call me anytime."
Bruce Gregory "Inventing Reality: Physics as Language" pp.186-187.
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 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.
Out of curiosity, why did you make that change?
The Italian word for "hell" is "inferno." (I don't know Italian, but I knew that word.) That's also the Italian word for "inferno," and that was the choice of the translator in 1974. I suspect that was prudishness about the word "hell" for an American audience, but I don't know. Anyway, the passage is otherwise very much in keeping with the tradition of the French Existentialists. For example, Sartre famously wrote "L'enfer, c'est les autres," which translates as "Hell is other people." The book has other existentialist themes in some of its fables, so I conclude that Calvino was thinking about the existentialists that wrote before he, and that he meant "hell" when he wrote "inferno" in Italian. I could be wrong, but that's why I pointed it out.
"Hell" is the default translation, and definitely the correct one here, in my opinion (just as it is, for example, in Dante).
"Inferno" in English should just be a fancy Italianate way of saying "hell", but seems to have acquired a connotation of literal heat and flames. (That is, it's as if people have forgotten that "the blazing inferno of a burning building" is a metaphor.) In any case, neither cultured fanciness nor literal flames are intended by Calvino in that passage, as far as I can tell.
I'm not sure prudishness is necessarily to blame; it may just be a case of that all-too-common translator syndrome of reaching for a word that looks like the original word, rather than the word that the author would have used if he or she were actually a native speaker of the language you're translating into.
Here's the passage in the original, for those interested (source):
EDMUND
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit
of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star!
Wm. Shakspere King Lear
[ In The Intelligent Investor, Benjamin Graham, who was Warren Buffett's mentor, shares his views on investing for a wider audience. I like the rationalist, no-nonsense approach he takes (as seen in this quote) esp. in a field like this ]
-- Clifford, The Ethics of Belief
-John Maynard Keynes, on models of unemployment that seemed nice on paper but did not measure up to the real world.
-- 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.
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.
"An accumulation of facts, however large, is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house."
-Clyde Kluckhohn
Slightly harsher on the fact-collecting disciplines than Ernest Rutherford: "All science is either physics or stamp-collecting"
I think we can consider chemistry a branch of physics as far as this quote is concerned...
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.
Helmholtz
-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.
More generally, it's an extension of the original moral-- have respect for how things actually work instead of trying to force them to be what you want.
Roger Peters, Practical Intelligence
It also allows us to anticipate ill consequences which don't happen, and suffer them in advance. Sometimes repeatedly.
(And by "allows us to", I also mean "it often does so automatically").
It also allows us to weight the consequences in order to, in fact, suffer them by choice, with the notion that suffering of certain consequences has other payoffs.
It also lets us take enormous inferential leaps to good consequences, without needing to muddle through intermediate steps empirically. Without such great leaps of prediction, what are the odds that we would discover, say, controlled nuclear fission? Or the precise sequence of burns needed to take a rocket to the moon?
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." -Daniel J. Boorstin
This reminds me of "It ain't what we don't know that hurts us, it's what we know that ain't so."
Which I have seen attributed to at least half a dozen different people over the years.
Enrico Bombieri
A good follow up question is "Who else can I convince to handle all these fiddly details?"
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.
On the living/non-living part, yeah. (They're all dead.)
On the brains remaining recognizable and intact, I suspect they're doing better than even professionally embalmed and maintained corpses like Lenin or Mao are.
For a certain value of 'dead'.
More precisely, an uncertain value of 'dead'.
Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.
Inigo Montoya: What's that?
Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
I personally added "Cryonics patients" to the Only Mostly Dead TV Tropes Wiki page. (I am not responsible for the current wording.)
Holy shit, I just went to TV Tropes, read one page, and came back. How did that just happen, exactly?
Possibly the best test of willpower known to humanity.
It would be a miracle.
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
I wasn't sure who this was referring to (I thought it was about Socrates), so I looked it up. It's about Epicurus.
Whoa, great call! Didn't know that.
This guy was really not a fan of superstition. In the next paragraph he mentions the case of a girl that the people forced to be sacrificed by her father:
"It was her fate in the very hour of marriage to fall a sinless victim to a sinful rite, slaughtered to her greater grief by a father’s hand, so that a fleet might sail under happy auspices. Such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven by superstition."
It is hardly a coincidence that Epicureans (with Lucretius as their most prestigious Latin representative) became the subjects of a massive smear campaign by the early Christian Church.
Religious Jews are apparently not too fond of the Epicureans too. At least, if the origin of the term Apikorus = Epicurus.
That's either Iphigenia or just possibly some poor nameless girl who was killed so that a local fishing fleet would have a good catch.
Sadly superstition isn't quite dead yet; it's just taken on a different form.
Winston Churchill
This interestingly seems to parallel a comment by the current British Prime Minister David Cameron, when he first entered office.
"We're all going to have things thrown back at us. We're looking at the bigger picture. ... And if it means swallowing some humble pie, and if it means eating some of your words, I cannot think of a more excellent diet."
This was in response to a reporter who asked him why he was working with Nick Clegg, a man he had once described as a "joke". At the time I thought it was a spontaneous remark, but after seeing the above, it looks like he may have been quoting.
I love that evergreen politician's trick of using "we" and "you" to mean "I".
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!
There is nothing to be disciplined or rigorous about when doing such a quote. What you see here is all there is to it. However, scholars might want you to think otherwise, by obfuscating their work, they can make it seem more impressive.
G. K. Chesterton, article in the Illustrated London News, 1907, collected in "The Man Who Was Orthodox", p.96.
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
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.)
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.
Rich may well be generalizing from one example. On the other hand, people do affect each other quite a bit.
As I read this quote, I was reminded of what it felt like to be (repressed) homosexual in a strongly heteronormative culture. The act of claiming my sexuality could only happen outside of that culture (in Europe, for me), and when I came back home, I became profoundly depressed, convinced I would never amount to anything.
Gay people are often surprised at how their internal turmoil, which seems so particular and special, turns out to be the usual result of growing up queer in a straight society. We're surprised because our experience is so different from what most people around us seem to be feeling.
So, I would say Rich was not generalizing from one example, but was talking about the generality of the experience of the ignored minority, and trying to convey that experience to an audience who would be largely ignorant of that feeling of psychic non-existence. They have been affirmed by whatever presumptions are prevalent in their society, be they heteronormative, ethnic, racial, religious or whatever.
So, this is a great rationality quote, because it reminds us all (gay people included) to challenge ourselves constantly to recognize the lenses through which we understand reality, and to try to sort out what is real from what is cultural. People, especially young people, kill themselves because of this. Challenging our cultural assumptions can save lives.
I think it's quite rational to point out that people have psychological and physiological reaction to "inclusion" and attention. The reaction that people have may not be inherently rational, but identifying it seems quite rational to me.
Now, the way that quote is phrased is not in a rationalist manner, and Rich may not be entirely rational about it: she seems to be saying "this is what it is" without analysis or potential solution. It would take a good strong rationalist to be able to be in the situation Rich describes and not feel marginalized, since the reaction is probably an instinctual one.
Sorry for the ambiguity-- Adrienne Rich is a woman.
I shouldn't have assumed otherwise! Previous post edited.
Bertrand Russell
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.
If only this happened in philosophy.
It does on rare occasion. And then that particular subfield is no longer called philosophy.
I think that would result in lots of maimed philosophers -- while it would serve as example for future generations, I'm not sure it would be a net positive. :D
People seem to believe it could happen in theology - does it help?
Chesterton believed so, but he was an apologist rather than a theologian. Theologians of the older Christian denominations have been increasingly resistant to this sentiment, in general. (Theologians of the newer Protestant denominations are better described as apologists, anyhow.)
I wasn't aware that there was a clear distinction between theology and apologia - what difference are you highlighting by using different words?
Apologetics is a subset of theology, concerned strictly with justifying the tenets of the faith to doubters and nonbelievers.
Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, argued for the existence of God only briefly at the very beginning of the Summa Theologica, and devoted the rest to elucidating the properties of God, the other supernatural beings, and humanity. Much of theology is philosophy done with some particular background assumptions; apologetics is argument and rhetoric in defense of those assumptions.
ETA: In the modern world, most of the positive arguments for the existence of God are (of course) fatally flawed. The older "mainline" denominations realize this on some level and have essentially fallen back to the position "You can't know that there's not a God", which is something of a defense against losing one's own faith but not a great opening gambit for winning converts. The newer Protestant denominations aren't generally aware of the flaws in their arguments, and so use them to win converts.
In particular, the mainline denominations (and their theologians) shy away from empirical tests, while the newer denominations (and their apologists) embrace bad empirical tests. This is of course an oversimplification, but it's generally true.
They don't really. Or if they do, with very much less urgency than when confronted with the possibility of being eaten by a tiger.
I'm reminded of movies where people in impossibly tough situations stick to impossibly idealistic principles. The producers of the movie want to hoodwink you into thinking they would stand by their luxurious morality even when the going gets tough. When the truth is, their adherence to such absurdly costly principles is precisely to signal that, compared to those who cannot afford their morality, they have it easy.
Pascal's wager was a very detached and abstract theological argument. If Pascal's heart rate did increase from considering the argument, it was from being excited about showing off his clever new argument, than from the sense of urgency the expected utility calculation was supposed to convey, and which he insincerely sold the argument with.
Strangely, most of the recent movies and TV series I saw pretty much invert this. Protagonists tend to make arguably insanely bad moral choices (like choosing a course of action that will preserve hero's relative at the cost of killing thousands of people). Sometimes this gets unbearable to watch.
"When the truth is, their adherence to such absurdly costly principles is precisely to signal that, compared to those who cannot afford their morality, they have it easy."
I think the idea that "morality is a form of signalling" is inaccurate. I agree that moral principles have an evolutionary explanation, but I think that standard game theory provides the best explanation. Generally, it's better to cooperate than to defect in the iterated prisoner's dilemma; and the best way to convince others you're a cooperator is to be, truly, madly and deeply, a cooperator.
Cf. Elizier's claim that he wouldn't break a promise, even if the whole of humanity was at stake. It certainly makes him seem more trustworthy, right?
I don't think it's the producers trying to hoodwink you. I think the audiences want to identify with people who can afford costly but dramatic morality.
Even losers buy morality. This is OK since they are usually hypocritical enough not to employ it in important Near mode decisions. Costly morality is a true signal, not playing along with the signaling game signals... you are a loser. None of this is conscious of course, the directors weren't deliberately trying to deceive the audience. But what they subconsciously end up doing benefits those who can afford the costly morality more than those who cannot.
-- 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.
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
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.
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.
I think this quote is especially apposite when your looking at ways of reforming a system. Attributing bad policy outcomes to the perfidy of individuals is generally unhelpful in designing a solution.
Depends.
If the potential perfidy of humans is not counted for in your solution, then it's a fail.
Humans lie, cheat, and steal. Especially when the system is policy is designed to encourage that behavior.
Yes, blaming the failure on self-serving behaviour is futile, but its imperative that you account for people's tendency to do this when you design a system.
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.
You're right. We punish the weak. The piling-on effect I see sometimes sickens me; once someone is already roundly criticized, all sorts of cheap moral-enforcement-altruism-signalers latch on.
Just like how wedrifid begin criticising people like that, and then you joined in. :P
Bruce Gregory, Inventing Reality: Physics as Language, p.184