Dreaded_Anomaly comments on Rationality Quotes: June 2011 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Oscar_Cunningham 01 June 2011 08:17AM

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Comment author: Dreaded_Anomaly 02 June 2011 09:27:21PM 26 points [-]

If you want to know the way nature works, we looked at it, carefully... that's the way it looks! You don't like it... go somewhere else! To another universe! Where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can't help it! OK! If I'm going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to the human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like. And I cannot make it any simpler, I'm not going to do this, I'm not going to simplify it, and I'm not going to fake it. I'm not going to tell you it's something like a ball bearing inside a spring, it isn't. So I'm going to tell you what it really is like, and if you don't like it, that's too bad.

— Richard Feynman, the QED Lectures at the University of Auckland

Comment author: gwern 07 June 2011 04:01:26PM 25 points [-]

Reminds me of a Schneier quote that I like:

'Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright.

"How will authors and artists get paid for their work?" they ask me.

Truth be told, I don't know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: "How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?"

I'm sorry, but I don't know that, either.'

"Protecting Copyright in the Digital World", Bruce Schneier http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0108.html#7