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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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.
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Comments (383)
-- 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.
This in particular is very well put.
Not at all. It is more accurate and clear than the vast majority of quotes in the quotes threads. It does a good job of translating the implied meaning (such as of the word 'hate' in the context) into more tangible descriptions.
Do you perhaps have a particular problem with semicolons? Or consider the status of urban dictionary authors insufficient to permit them the use of words like 'rebuke' and 'participant'?
It is this urban dictionary definition that earned my upvote in this case (even though DHTP;HTG probably would have scraped through on its own).
Well, I deleted my post immediately because I decided I didn't want to defend it, but since you saw it I will.
"Discern" is superfluous. What distinction is intended between "rebuke" and "fault"? Using "rebuke" for a behaviour, as opposed to a person, sounds wrong to my ears -- the opposite of what is intended. What distinction is intended between "system" and "organization"? "Provoked your displeasure" is mealy-mouthed, especially when "hate" is the verb in the original. This type of writing says, I've got a thesaurus and I'm not afraid to use it.
Haha, no, but that's some nice assuming you've got there.
Although it does smack of "I was just following orders".
I know that's not what the original quote is about, not most of the responses in this thread. But it's a "logical" extension of the sentiment.
Don't hate the playa, unless the playa is playing a game that is inherently and obviously worthy of hate ("I was just following orders"), or a game that might allow certain things that are worthy of hate. Exploitation of child labor, for example, is within the rules of the game (just not in certain places), and could allow a player to be more successful than one who didn't go to that extent of the rules. In that circumstance, it seems ok to hate the player.
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. ;-)
I would say that the quote isn't about "I'm a puppet of the system" but more a critique of a particular incentive system, and there's validity to this. If a certain activity is incentivized, then it shouldn't be surprising to expect that someone would eventually engage in that activity. Perverse incentive systems produce truly horrendous results.
Also, up vote for analyzing rap music :)
The scenario I imagined was a wealthy drug dealer justifying his profession. But I'll agree the lyrics allow more benign applications.
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.
I don't intend to defend Richard's comment in its entirety. But words mean what people use them to mean, and the same goes for ambiguous phrases.
I mostly hear people use it to mean "My actions are ethically unimpeachable, because that is the way that people do things.", which is a refinement of "Don't blame me; blame the system.". I gather from your comment that you accept the latter sentence as a legitimate interpretation of the phrase (and it's the first one that Richard offered). If you think that the refinement is illegitimate, perhaps it's not what Ice-T meant, but it's a natural interpretation.
(Actually, Ice-T seems to have meant something very different, since he was addressing fellow players who criticise him out of sheer envy. But if they were to start hating the game, then this would just make them hypocrites, so it doesn't seem to be sound advice. Better to just improve one's game, or quit.)
I certainly agree that it's better to change the system than to change individual players. However, sometimes one has more influence over particular individuals, especially if one of those individuals is oneself. And if, as in the social situations where I have heard the phrase applied, the system emerges from the various players, then changing the players is ultimately the only way to change the game.
To make it clear where I'm coming from, I mostly hear the phrase used by people who've been caught breaking promises of sexual fidelity, or rather by people discussing such.
Not so. At least, not without redefining the game such that the 'players' include all those that would otherwise have been considered the external social environment.
Yes, that depends on how widely you take "the game". Nevertheless, in the contexts where I run across the phrase, changing the players in question would suffice.
There are definitely situations where it goes differently, however. One example that came up in conversation today (without this phrase) is a draftee in a war, who is forced to shoot at people to avoid being shot. Changing all of the players in this position would work, but only if the players on both sides change at once. I would not blame such a person, if they don't actually want to be there.
So I seem to have just come to this conclusion: It's illegitimate to blame (to state the ethical culpability of) any player who doesn't want to play the game but is unable to quit. That includes a lot of examples, just not the ones where I've met this phrase.
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)
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.
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
I definitely didn't consider that my comment was so self-describing :) Clever.
I guess I could stand to implement a final "how will this be perceived" habit (pretend I'm the observer reading what some other man has written).
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.
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.
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 have you to thank for that insight, actually.
If I hadn't read "Conservation of Expected Evidence" , it would never have occurred to me to think of truth-seeking as a zero-sum game and ask, if we have something extraordinary over here, then what is forced to be ordinary to compensate?
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.
I'm not sure if I understand this, but at face value I disagree with this. For example, there is evidence that infants start learning gender roles as soon as their eyes can focus far enough away to be able to see what all is going on. This is a great example of "the things you assume which really sink into them", and I'm not sure what the understood prerequisite would be.
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.
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.
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.)
David Templer
G. K. Chesterton (unsourced)
If only people believed that this could happen in philosophy.
People seem to believe it could happen in theology - does it help?
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.
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.
In fact, losers tend to buy it more literally than most.
If only this happened in 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
Unless the tiger actually is an optical illusion, in which case it's usually worthwhile to be convinced of this.
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)
Reminds me of the proposed double blind studies about the effectiveness of parachutes in preventing injuries while falling from great heights.
I thought it was trite, but here it is.
ETA: Posted this from work, didn't realize it was paywalled. Here's a pdf
Oh boy.
They're technically not incorrect, but they are on the wrong side of the debate. It's true that we can occasionally understand things without directly experimenting on them, but we could use more experiment, not less.
If you say that all experiments have to be placebo controlled double blind experiments you aren't advocating more experiments.
You are advocating that the resources get spread about over less experiments but that those experiments that are done have a higher standard. http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/2011/01/25/monocultures-of-evidence/
The interesting thing is often not if a treatment method works but how it compares to other methods. Afaik in cancer research often groups get different treatment that then gets compared. Sadly it seems that correct statistical knowledge is not too widely spread in all places where needed. I read a book of german medical professors who dearly complained about that. There is no need to slavishly follow one standard of testing. What would be awesome were a better understanding on how to get good results with the least effort (in case of medics: least ppl. treated ineffectively).
While more controlled experiments are undoubtedly a good thing, observational studies are often not useless, since one can often make a plausible argument for extracting causation from them. Sadly, the default state of causal analysis in medicine remains "use regression."
Brilliantly done, no matter the point they were trying to make. The headings say it all...
Evidence based pride and observational prejudice
Natural history of gravitational challenge
The parachute and the healthy cohort effect
The medicalisation of free fall
Parachutes and the military industrial complex
A call to (broken) arms
Which in turn reminds me of The Onion news piece 'Multiple Stab Wounds May Be Harmful To Monkeys'. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ7J7UjsRqg
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?
They are in terms of expected value.
Agent Orange - Too Young To Die
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".
To be fair, I think he was using "we" to refer to the Conservative party.
Enrico Bombieri
A good follow up question is "Who else can I convince to handle all these fiddly details?"
"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.
Bertrand Russell
In order of decreasing priority?
I honestly don't know.
If I had to guess though, I'd say he was responding to a question in a larger discussion about what he believed in, and moving from expected (or at least inferentially closer) answers to more unexpected ones.
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.
The alleged ironic lack of discipline or rigour occurred when reading the book, not when posting the quote. But also, it looks like it was just a joke.
Diane Duane, The Wounded Sky
That sounds pretty. But not especially accurate. You can build tools with opposable thumbs, a long stick and the optional ability to say "Oook!"
It becomes accurate if you change one word and say that language is a tool that builds the tools.
Heck, you could wind up a librarian in a university.
Regarding tools (for building tools)* check out the flying sorcerers by Nieven and Pournelle.
Helmholtz
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.
Err no! He says that 'real' means something like causally accessible from where we are. It's something like "from my perspective I am real, but from the perspective of a fictional-me in a fictional-universe, I am not, while the fictional me is real". Except this is not a very helpful way to define 'real'. There is no meta-realness, but relativistic-realness is quite as useless. Drescher dissolves the issue, by reducing 'real' to something like "whatever we can possibly get at from where we are in this universe".
Yes. He has several paragraphs where he points out that the usual understandings of 'real' are incoherent in his 'equations' framework, and only then goes on to suggest a new and entirely different sort of 'real', which isn't quite causally accessible (since remember, he's previously arguing for a Parmenidean 4D block-universe) but more one of definition:
Roger Peters, Practical Intelligence
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?
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 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").
Dilbert creator Scott Adams discussing Charlie Sheen.
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.
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."
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.
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.
"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...
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.
Or alternatively, there's something intelligent that works much better.
Do we have a source for that? (It's all over the Internet, with varied phrasing.)
-- 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.
-John Maynard Keynes, on models of unemployment that seemed nice on paper but did not measure up to the real world.
-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.
[ 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
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
"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):
Bruce Gregory "Inventing Reality: Physics as Language" pp.186-187.
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.
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 would give this five votes up if I could.
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?
-Kaname Madoka, Puella Magi Madoka Magica
"If you ever want to save the universe, call me anytime."
Daniel Kish (Human Echolocation researcher, advocate and instructor).
A truly elegant argument in favour of getting hit with a baseball bat every week.
I saw it more as opposing restrictions on one's ability to hit oneself in the head with a baseball bat every week. I'm not saying anyone should do it, but if they really want to I don't feel I have the right to stop them.
It seems to be an argument against restrictive paternalism, enforced dependence and misguided risk aversion.
The implied game analysis is something along the lines of the following:
Within that framework he would consider anyone who limits themselves unnecessarily to be crazy (irrationally risk averse or suffering from learned helplessness) and anyone who restricts the options available to blind people under their control to be perpetrating a serious harm (through misguided but possibly well meaning paternalism).
Consider the following similar declaration:
Falling off a bike is a drag. When learning to ride children will inevitably fall off their bikes. A child never being allowing to ride is far worse than falling off a bike sometimes. Pain is part of the price of freedom.
Most people can acknowledge the deleterious effects of too much coddling of that kind and Kish emphasises that it applies in exactly the same way to blind people as well. And not just because they are deprived of the experience of mountain biking by echolocation but more importantly because it trains the coddlee to rely on caretakers rather than themselves, stifling initiative and capability in a way similar to that which Eliezer recently discussed.
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.
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZUwdQA6KQ0
Start watching about 6:55 in.
Sometimes the there are bigger problems you have to get through, and then the pole is just there.
An irrationality quote from Samuel Johnson via Boswell:
I've always been a huge fan of this story.
The Simpsons, "Kidney Trouble"
— Theodore Roethke
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.
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.
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.
I'd look for the explosions.
"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...
— Wolof proverb
-- Alonzo Fyfe
Alexander Pope
William James
Like the spirit. Technically disagree with respect to future events. :)
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?
Perhaps this precedes subsequent rationality:
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!
Is this too cryptic? :
Throw strikes. Home plate don't move. Satchel Paige
Yes. I'm familiar enough with the rules of baseball that I can infer the sport and affirm that throwing strikes is a Good Thing for a pitcher to do and acknowledge that the home plate does, in fact, stay put. I am not sufficiently familiar with Satchel Paige or enamoured of the sport that I can guess why I am supposed to be inspired.
Google helped to clarify. It gave the full quote and put it in the context of what seems to be, shall we say, a KISS philosophy.
-- Satchel Paige
(Google also gives a Paige quote that is a real gem of a rationality insight. Thanks for the indirect link!)
(Additional note)
It would have seemed less cryptic to me if the quote was formatted in a way that distinguished between your commentary, the quote itself and the quote author. I hadn't read your other contributions at the time so didn't realise that you didn't use a standard form. I did not realise that "Throw strikes. Home plate don't move." was the actual literal quote, as opposed to a cryptic reference in your own words to a quote that I was supposed to be familiar with.
Also:
-- wedrifid
Satchel Paige
What does this mean?
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.
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.
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
... 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.
-- 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.
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.
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:
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.
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