= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Rationality Quotes: June 2011
Y'all know the rules:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (470)
Maurog: http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=14222
-- Milton, Paradise Lost: not on Aumann agreement, alas
Yeah, but humans only exist of creatures rational.
We're working on that.
-- Kahlil Gibran
David Bennett
(My presentation of the quote constitutes an assertion that there is an insight here useful for navigating the world of tribal politics, hence the relevance.)
--Bernard Crick
What is a "social demand"? By what method could we determine how much of a good is "socially demanded"?
Justice, for instance. Can one person be reliably counted upon to measure how much justice he or she has received? Probably not. But political processes do work out various means for delivering more or less justice. These means appear to have something to do with the demands of various people. The market analogy is of course not perfect.
Justice, at least the way I've heard it used, is very much revenge without the stigma.
Criminal justice only if you tune out the rehabilitation aspect. Civil justice only if you tune out everything except punitive damages (which don't exist in many jurisdictions).
There is a lot to be gained by delegating to a central authority the responsibility of maintaining a credible threat of retaliation.
Elise E. Morse-Gagné
Seth Godin
Unsourced; attributed to Albert Einstein.
Or, I could work out what I want and achieve that? There is even a time to focus on a goal over another purely because it is easier.
This doesn't seem rational. One must develop an instinct for what one really needs to/wants to/should achieve, and judge whether maximium effort (which I assume would be required to achieve the barely-achievable) is worth the return on that investment.
If you're not putting in maximum effort, you're leaving utility on the table.
But if you put out maximum effort, you can leave longevity and/or quality on the table. Silverbacks, pitchers, office workers, day-to-day-life, running, eating... Short term maximum effort might detract from long-term maximum utility. The cost/benefits analysis is at times subjective. "Utility" can mean different things to different people. "Utility", as I interpret in a Rationalist context has a very specific almost "economic" meaning. But you can choose to reduce effort and not push the envelop, and go home, have dinner, relax, and enjoy your life. Some people might refer to that as utility, others as low hanging fruit, still others as a healthy balance.
Charles Darwin
This quote is from a passage where Darwin is talking about religion:
Source: http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/faith_vs_reason_debate.html
Jamie Hyneman
Of course, that depends on how costly failure is, compared to the up-front analysis that would make failure less likely. I don't know who said "Fail fast, fail cheap," but it's a good counterpoint quote.
A little long, but I don't see the possibility of a good cut:
- George R.R. Martin, "A Game of Thrones"
This is beautiful, and inspiring. In fact, I predict LW will do better if we have an introductory post consisting of this quote and "That's our goal. Come on in and let's work on that." (would probably cause copyrighty troucle).
It's not a pure illustration, though. Maybe the others thought "Huh, that's just a regular cat. But if I say that the king might ordered me killed in the kind of way people die in Martin books. Better kiss some ass.".
I agree that the existence of this factor makes whether someone announces that it's a normal cat a poor indication of whether they actually realized such. However, I think it's reasonable to hypothesize that Syrio was looking for someone who both recognized that he was holding a normal cat and was willing to tell him such.
Hrm. How would one tell it was not female? Was it sitting on the king's lap in a rather unlikely fashion?
Tomcats are usually stouter and more muscular, and have a more robust head shape? Also, they have pretty large and conspicuous balls.
It's a large cat by stipulation.
What, even when sitting nicely on someone's lap?
A large indolent cat is unlikely to actually sit on somebody's lap. In my experience they sprawl.
I think the "plainly" meant that his jewels were in plain sight.
What are the tigers with a pouch for their young? There seem to be no large carnivorous marsupials. A candidate is the marsupial lion (which is also striped), but it's been extinct for a while.
Edit: Ah, the thylacine ("Tasmanian wolf") was also known as the Tasmanian tiger. Yay for learning!
Thylacines, maybe.
The quote is from a fantasy book. There are dragons in it...
Yes, but "striped horses" have an obvious Earthly referent, and so it was not unreasonable to suppose that marsupial tigers might too (as indeed they have).
Yup. I don't know if that's what the terrible walking lizards are, or if they are that other kind of dragon of something in the same family.
The bulk of political discourse today is purposefully playing telephone with facts in ways that couldn't be done in the Information Age if people just had the know-how to check for themselves. Comprehending complex sentences is something that can be done by first grade, and comprehending complex concepts and issues is without a doubt something better learned in math than in English, where one learns to obfuscate concepts and issues, and to play to baser emotions. Granted, one also learns to recognize and to defend against these tactics, but it still can't hold a candle to the "mental gymnastics" referenced above. Do you realize what the world looks like if you've got a background in math? Imagine signs reading DANGER: KEEP OUT are planted everywhere, but people purposefully and proudly ignore them, treating it as laughably eccentric to have learned more than half the alphabet, approaching en masse and dragging you with them.
~From the Math It Just Bugs Me page, TV Tropes
Sorry for length, but this a nice sketch on the role of rationality in science :)
C. D. Graham, Jr., Metal. Progress 71, 75 (1957) (actual source)
Funny, but I don't think it is the criticism of science it seems to be. Some items just point out that papers are formal, like
Yeah, that's what it means. What's your point? (Well, it is useful at face value for people who don't understand formal language, but it's not trying to be.)
Others look like criticism but aren't, like
Yes, it's an amusing way of phrasing it, but there's noting wrong with the fact or with the phrasing - the meaning gets across!
Some do show scientists obfuscating problems, like
but none of them are new. It has long been known that scientists tend to ignore negative results and the like. The most reliable values are those of Ben Goldacre.
Also,
Is just plain correct within an order of magnitude. If I compute the mass of the sun from a weight of a rock in my hands and the shadows of two sticks, being correct within an order of magnitude is incredibly precise.
I don't think this was intended as a criticism of science... ;)
Small-s science the process that's in fact implemented, not big-S Science the ideal. Though admittedly formality and obfuscation in journal papers isn't a necessary part of current science (as opposed to publish-or-perish in general).
Or perhaps to make fun of scientists as, for instance, people who drop things on the floor.
My favorite - I do this all the time.
Yeah, this one's familiar too. There's a long-ass section in my thesis that basically ends with this. So much data - so little sense.
K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation Chapter 6
When I read the first sentence quoted above, I assumed it was intended ironically.
Robots, spaceships and computers resemble yesterday's fiction? Hardly, except in so far as their fictional counterparts resemble the robots, spaceships and computers already in existence when the fiction was written. (And, to a lesser extent, in so far as people making new robots, spaceships and computers are inspired by the science fiction they've read.)
Murray Leinster, who had a few patents to his name, anticipated the web and increasingly capable search engines in his visionary story, published in 1946, titled " A Logic Named Joe."
You have to cherry-pick examples to make seeming correlations like that work. If, say, a particular author had several such coincidences, then that might be different, but as far as I can tell, for the most part science fiction predicts science in about the same way that fortune cookies predict lottery numbers.
Jules Verne
Ok... and just to head off the replies... I know there's always likely to be one in such a large field, and he also got tons of stuff wrong (centre of the earth et al) but still... as an example of one author that consistently got a lot of stuff right (mainly through thoroughly understanding science and extrapolating from there) - he's brilliant.
Arthur C. Clarke?
Verne is a fairly strong example. He was reasonably popular in his time, so he didn't become famous only because of correlation-in-hindsight. We might ask whether he's an outlier or just the tail of the bell curve, but I strongly suspect that what actually happened was that later engineers were consciously influenced by his fictional designs, much like with William Gibson and the modern Internet.
This suggests that fiction-future correlation is largely determined by technical plausibility, which in turn suggests that we may be able to predict in advance which science-fiction predictions are most likely to come true. However, it occurs to me that we do a lot of this last already on this website (cryonics, uploading, nanotech, AI, computronium, ...) so I'm not sure if this quite counts as an "advance" strength of the theory.
(Other predicted technologies I don't remember seeing so much around here: Dyson spheres, space elevators, ... hm. Not that many, actually. Augmented reality and bionic implants are likely only transitional, but will probably have at least a few years of massive popularity at some point.)
Dyson spheres are unlikely. They use too much physical matter to create. Ringworlds are slightly more likely.
Space elevators are awesome though. We should do that :)
Still waiting on the ability to grow nanotubes long enough, though... we're getting there. We can build them long enough to turn into thread - but proper long-filament nanotubes are the only thing (that we know of so far) that will be strong enough for the elevator ribbon.
'Dyson sphere' is a very broad term encompassing several distinct types of design, including very light ones.
Space elevator is awesome, but there exist much more clever alternative designs that have substantially lower requirements for material strength, as well as geographical positioning - this is also a huge issue with the original space elevator design. It is a beautiful idea, but that doesn't mean we should cling to it and ignore all other proposals :)
Any links to the research? I'd be interested in having a look :)
I started assembling links but then realized that Wikipedia is a good starting point, it has provides a nice summary of all the most notable designs: tethers, bolas, orbital rings, pneumatic towers, the Lofstrom Loop... Each has its own drawbacks, but the important thing is that they do not require nonexistent (even if theoretically possible) materials.
Clever ways to get to space are often covered at Next Big Future, including the author's own nuclear cannon proposal - this one actually literally follows Jules Verne :-)
Actually, +1 for William Gibson!
Heinlein's spaceships relied on human beings doing orbital calculations on slide-rules and calling out orders to one another to direct the ship — "Brennschluss!" — to avoid disaster. Today, there are serious projects to move ground automobiles out of direct human control as a safety measure.
Asimov's robots, and the renegade computers on Star Trek, dealt with conflicting evidence so poorly that they could be permanently broken by receiving malicious data. Today's software engineers would call that a denial-of-service attack or "query of death", and fix it.
The real world has much higher standards for safety and reliability than fiction does!
Or, to look at it less derisively, fiction needs its computer bugs and exploits to have simple narrative explanations.
Frank Herbert, "Dune"
Jewish Atheist, in reply to Mencius Moldbug
I would think this an irrationality quote? "Fuzzy" thinking skills are ridiculously important. "Intuition" may be somewhat unreliable, but in certain domains and under certain conditions, it can be - verifiably - a very powerful method.
I took as being rationality in the sense that it follows the form: "just because you want to action x does not mean that action x is possible", which is always a good reminder.
Maybe it would be best to shorten it?
That's so, but it's also true that just because you're personally not good at X, that does not mean that X is impossible or worthless.
Intuition is extremely powerful when correctly trained. Just because you want to have powerful intuitions about something doesn't mean it's possible to correctly train them.
-hilzoy
That lesson is pretty frequently homeschooled, sad to say.
Including such destinations as "Not being the unwilling sex toy of the big bald guy while in prison". Although if you also don't use 'fraud' you may find yourself not in jail in the first place - but it's not always so simple. It also leads you to the destination "still having your food, possessions, dignity and social status in your schoolyard despite having no control of whether you wish to be subject to that environment".
Of course, sometimes one is prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to. The quote seems to already acknowledge this possibility.
It does, hence allowing for me to phrase the counterpoint within the quote's own framework.
I didn't read the quote as a blanket opposition to violence. It's a warning about one thing to consider before you choose violence.
I also didn't read the quote as only being about violence. It also makes a more general point about means and ends. When you're considering an action in pursuit of a goal, you should consider the action in its own right and try to predict where it is likely to lead. Don't settle on an action just because it seems to fit with the goal. This is especially relevant when you consider using violence, coercion, manipulation, or dishonesty for a noble purpose, but it also applies more generally.
This is confusing. Does your use of violence change your intended destination, or does it just exert certain optimization pressures on future world-states, as do all of your other actions?
I'm not sure there's a useful distinction between those two options. Your future selves are part of the future world-states that it's exerting pressure on, and not exempt from that pressure.
Read the (long) linked-to article from which the quote stems. Basically the point is that using violence to achieve a goal teaches the people involved that violence is an effective, legitimate way to achieve goals - and at some later point they will invariably have conflicting goals.
See also: Live by the sword, die by the sword.
From Space Viking, by H. Beam Piper:
Source:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20728/20728-h/20728-h.htm
From Countdown to Immortality, by FM-2030:
If Simon Baron-Cohen gets his way, a future society could make a certain high level of empathy the norm, with potentially interesting consequences for revived cryonauts.
(Perhaps a little large for a quote? If it's an inspiring excerpt consider a discussion post including a bit on why you like it!)
Loā Hô, a Taiwanese physician and poet.
I care. If illness is abolished and a doctor of any age is starving, they can stay at my place and I'll feed them. Alternately, we could raise taxes slightly to finance government-mandated programs for training and reconversion of young doctors and early retirement for old doctors.
In other words: beware of though-mindedly accepting bad consequences of overall good policies. Look for a superior alternative first.
That can be a danger, but I think starvation is an obvious enough problem that people won't take this literally.
I agree. Unfortunately, the way it actually works is, "No, we can't allow your universal cure -- the AMA/[your country's MD association] is upset."
"No, we can't accept your free widgets -- that would cost our widgetmakers major sales."
"No, I don't want you to work for me for free -- that would put domestic servants out of jobs."
"No, I don't want to marry you -- that would hurt the income of local prostitutes."
"No, I don't want your solar radiation -- that would put our light and heat industries out of business."
Edit: Even better: "No, I don't want you to be my friend -- what about my therapist's loss of revenue?"
IRL it's the pharmaceutic labs that block it, not the docs.
That's one of the reasons why you try to mitigate bad side effects: so that people who'll suffer on net from the efffects will STFU.
In theory, yes. And I'd much prefer a one-time ("extortion") payment to a domestic industry to allow cheaper imports, than allow the global economy to remain in a perpetual rut just so a few people don't have to change jobs.
But the fact that this alternative is Pareto-efficient doesn't mean the potential sufferers will STFU -- rather, it costs the alternative its public support, probably because the average person, sympathetic to the domestic industry, still sees it as extortion. And the people in the domestic industry don't want to see themselves as extortioners either! (Relevant Landsburg post.)
That is a brilliant line. Now I'm trying to work out how to create a circumstance in which to use it.
The worst thing about how frequenting prostitutes is no longer socially acceptable, even for males, is that there are so many quips and jokes that just don't work any more.
IAWYC. One quibble:
If illness is abolished, what's the point of retirement?
To keep dusky sports pubs in business, of course.
Starvation is an illness. (Or food dependency if you prefer.)
It is the curse of thermodynamic jurisdiction.
What I really like about this quote is that I'm fairly sure the 'old doctor' is himself.
The great thing about this quote for me is that when I read it I can hear Pinker's voice saying it in my mind.
I'm new to LW (Well, I've been reading Eliezer's posts in order, and am somewhere in 2008 right now, but I haven't read many of the recent posts) so these may have been posted before. But quote collecting is a hobby of mine and I couldn't pass it up.
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." – Albert Einstein
I very much dislike Einstein quotes that have nothing to do with physics or mathematics. You don't have to be an Einstein to know a false dichotomy when you see one. What about living your life as if some things are miracles and some things aren't like most people who have ever lived? Surely, if most people have done it, then it is possible.
Also, welcome to Less Wrong.
Well for what it's worth, I don't think he means it literally. Or at least so exactly. My interpretation is that he is saying that you must accept a rational basis and explanation for everything, or believe that nothing can be explained - you must accept that the laws of physics apply to every one and everything, and that there are no mysterious phenomena, or you must deny the laws of physics and believe everything is mystical.
And thanks, it's a great blog. I've learned so much reading Eliezer's work. Well, perhaps learned isn't the best word. Realized may be more appropriate.
Many, perhaps most people, appear to believe in separate magisteria of ordinary, explainable things, and unassailable supernatural mysteries.
But that doesn't make it rational to live that way...
True, but he didn't say there were only two rational ways of looking at the world.
I don't think the interpretation you gave is what he meant, anyway. Based on his writings about his own religious beliefs, Einstein would almost certainly have categorized himself as being one who saw everything as miraculous. Just because we accept that something is real and follows the same rules as all other known real things doesn't mean we can't have a sense of wonder over it.
Thank you for laying out that interpretation. I thought for years (perhaps because of the first context I saw it in) that it presented a choice between seeing the beauty in everything or not seeing it anywhere. Your interpretation makes much more sense.
You can check on whether quotes have been posted already by using search for the site.
"There always comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two plus two equals four is punished with death … And the issue is not a matter of what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not two plus two equals four." – Albert Camus, The Plague
“Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.” – Jean de la Bruyère
"If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics." – Roger Bacon
It's even better when said by Leonard Nimoy.
Ah, so someone knows where I found this quote. :-)
"We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself." --Chris Mooney
Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense
Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality
If you haven't read this book yet, do so. It is basically LessWrongism circa 1993.
This strikes me as wrong. The proper work of philosophers and computer scientists seem like they have very little overlap. Yes, philosophers often mistakenly do computer science work, but that is irrelevant.
is there a reason I should want to read an earlier, less developed version of LessWrong, by someone who is not a consequentialist, when I could just read LessWrong?
What are you comparing Less Wrong to?
Who proved consequentialism?
He was comparing Less Wrong to a book I was quoting from.
No one did, but proof is much too high a requirement anyway. Although, I don't think I am alone in recognizing the theories put forward in the The Metaethics Sequence as the least defensible part of Less Wrong doctrine.
The quote isn't talking about philosophy in general, but epistemology specifically. If you take naturalized epistemology seriously (which LessWrongers do), then it seems to follow quite easily that neuroscientists and AI researchers are relatively more important to the future of epistemology than philosophers (remember that most branches of modern science were once a part of philosophy, but later broke off and developed their own class of domain specialists).
One reason to read it would be to provide ourselves with some perspective on how LessWrongism fits into the larger Western intellectual tradition. Nozick is much better about showing how his ideas are related to those of other thinkers than the contributors to Less Wrong are (we share much more in common with Wittgenstein, Quine, Hempel, and Bridgeman than the impression you would get from reading the Sequences). Having this perspective should increase our ability to communicate effectively with other intellectual communities.
His being or not being a consequentialist doesn't seem to have very much to do with the validity of his work in epistemology, decision theory, philosophy of science, or metaphysics. Also, his ethical theory doesn't really fit neatly into the deontological/consequentialism dichotomy anyway. Arguably his ethics/political theory amounts to consequentialism with "side-constraints" (that can even be violated in extreme circumstances). It doesn't seem to be any less consequentislist than, say, rule-utilitarianism.
An idea I've been kicking around -- and am tempted to pull into a coherent form -- is that actually there is a close connection between philosophy and computer science.
Much of philosophy is arguments about various abstractions. Computer science is about using abstractions to engineer software and about proofs about software-related abstractions.
To give one example: I think of the philosophical debate about the semantics of proper nouns as coupled to the notions of reference vs value equality in programming language design.
What do you mean by Philosophy in that quote? Contemporary philosophy already incorporates knowledge from other fields including computer science, and this is an ongoing process of adaption.
If it refers to 'philosophy' as some static corpus of knowledge from before a certain point then yes it is trivially true.
When they start making real, mathy progress, they'll stop calling themselves philosophers, like natural philosophers are now called physicists.
If we are arguing from the common uses of the term 'philosophers' then that isn't the case. Logicians make progress in the same manner as mathematics, and are sill classed as philosophers. (They also have strong links with computer scientists professionally but thats a side point.)
If your definition is that Philosopher = person who does not make "real, mathy progress" then its just a tautology. All members of this set, who don't make progress, will not make progress, become obsolescent and be replaced.
Sorry if I sound confrontational. But I am unsure what the larger point that is being made about the methods/knowledge of philosophers. It seems to primarily be a tribal "computer scientists good, philosophers bad" statement, unless something precise and meaningful is meant by "philosophers."
Yeah, common usage. Things like "Are they on the payroll of the Philosophy Department?", and "Do students study it to avoid getting into hard sciences?". (I acknowledge that the philosophy I was taught covers long-dead white guys, not modern breakthroughs - the sorry state of philosophy classes is only a weak point against philosophy, like the sorry state of science journalism.)
I got the impression that people who actually invent logic (like Boole or Gödel) were either classified as mathematicians in their time, or classified such nowadays even though they called themselves philosophers. (Like we call early physicists physicists, not philosophers.) Counterexample?
I agree, the long dead white guys approach to Philosophy is far too prominent particularly in introductory courses, which of course attracts all the wrong sort of people into it. [The stereotype of the pretentious freshman relativist is sadly far too common.]
At least my own experience includes studying Godel, Russell etc in the context of philosophy, and there are a great many logic postgrads (on the payroll as you said) whose papers are highly technical and mathematical, and have direct applications in computing and other practical sciences.
On a wider note, the best 'principled' division between philosophy and hard science in my opinion is between the methodology of induction vs deduction. Not sure where that would put computer science.
But in the context of the original quote, if thats the division then I'd disagree that philosophers are obsolete, as most of the techniques we use for considering the meaning, interactions and validity of beliefs originated and is developed on in philosophy.
Where can I read badass philosophy? (There's some incredulity here. It's sad that the opinion of a domain expert isn't enough to convince me philosophy isn't a rotten field.) Note that I don't doubt that philosophers have said stuff about Gödel, but I want the Gödel-equivalent work.
That would mostly be probability theory, right? That left the philosophy-cradle long ago - or can you show me the modern developments?
Look at Philpapers.org, and search for recent papers in whatever you're interested in I guess.
Theres a lot of stuff about the recent (last decade) experimental philosophy (X-Phi) movement available online which may allay some of your concerns about Philosophical Methodology.
For a more informal look at how professional philosophers behave http://philosiology.blogspot.com/ is quite amusing.
Lukeprog did a set of articles not long ago about the relationship between philosophy and less wrong rationality which can probably give you more than I can off the top of my head.
"Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness."
--George Santayana, Quoted by Carl Sagan in Contact, Chapter 14 "Harmonic Oscillator", page 231
Interestingly, I really like this quote about skepticism, even though I strongly dislike its fetishization of sexual inexperience.
How is it a fetish and not a legitimate personal value? And the part relevant to skepticism seems totally off to me. We should never sacrifice skepticism for "fidelity" to an idea.
To reply in reverse order - I see how it's relevant to skepticism because people are quick to believe any old thing that feels truthy to them. But there are some things you actually can put your trust in. Things that have been born out over centuries to get us closer and closer to true knowledge, things that produce real results. Things such as empiricism. You can eventually come to trust empiricism, rationality, the experimental method. You don't have to remain forever entirely skeptical of everything. In that sense it's a decent metaphor to compare it to a (good) long-term relationship - that building of trust by experience until it is simply natural and implicit.
I would consider it a fetish because it will make anyone out of their teens seek age-inappropriate partners. If you're in your thirties or later and you are seeking sexual congress with a virgin then you are looking for someone with the sexual maturity of someone a lot younger than you, regardless of that person's chronological age. Fetishes aren't inherently bad of course, there's lots of great ones out there. :) But this one often serves to either A) degrade non-teen women who aren't emotionally stunted, or B) cause people to severely stunt their own emotional growth to fulfill some future partner's fetish. Both of those seem to be bad things to me, and thus my disapproving words.
But he isn't recommending preferring chastity in others, but rather being chaste ourselves until we have a "ripeness of instinct and discretion" (i.e. have attained maturity).
This definition of chastity includes not just virgins but everyone who shows discretion in choosing sex partners, and doesn't accept the "first comer".
I wouldn't have any problem with the quote if that's the case, discretion is good. However I've never seen chastity used in a way that didn't mean virgin. Actually, come to think of it, the English language could really use a word for "discerning but liberated person".
Ick.
What, in this metaphor, corresponds to fidelity and happiness in the way that skepticism corresponds to chastity? Is Santayana's idea that we should search long for The Answer, but having found it, we should turn off our skepticism, stop thinking, and sink into the warm fuzzies of faith? It reminds me of the sea squirt that eats its own brain when it has found a comfortable spot to live and no longer needs it.
-Seth Klarman, letter to shareholders
--WSJ article about Navy SEALs
I wonder how many other people on LW heard this quote first while in the process of sweating in training; and how many other military aphorisms could be repurposed this way.
It's an interesting point but exceedingly simplistic, more so these days than ever before.
What about "the more you think in training", or "the more you learn in training"? Don't get me wrong, I'm not denying the value of sweat (excerise, fitness, etc), I'm just saying it's not even close to the whole equation.
Actually I think the full formula is "sweat saves blood, but brains save both". That's as rlevant today as when it was first used, which was in the British Army, around the time of the Crimean War. I think. I wasn't there.
"Sweat" here is a standin for generic effort, whether it's actual physical sweat or not depends on what exactly you're training for.
-Milton Friedman story
For the record, I'm pretty sure this story is apocryphal, though that doesn't take away from it's value as a rationality quote.
A few points come to mind:
"They" is the tricky bit there. Presumably some people wanted a canal, and some people other people wanted jobs, and for that matter presumably some people wanted money to go to the construction company who've got an opening for a government liaison consultant coming up in five years time. There's little reason to think the equilibrium is welfare maximising.
Seems like more of a libertarianism quote to me.
It can be that, but I think it also illustrate the importance of understanding people's real goals and intentions and not assuming that they are what they appear to be at first glance.
— Richard Feynman, the QED Lectures at the University of Auckland
Reminds me of a Schneier quote that I like:
"Protecting Copyright in the Digital World", Bruce Schneier http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0108.html#7
Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier, Rapport des commissaires chargés par le roi de l'examen du magnétisme animal (1784), as translated in "The Chain of Reason versus the Chain of Thumbs", Bully for Brontosaurus (1991) by Stephen Jay Gould, p. 195, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
-- QDB, on immortalism
Man, that site is a funny time sink. Not the best source of rationality quotes, but there are a few that sort of count.
-- Phil Plait
I see that I've quoted the following twice before within other comment threads, so I think it deserves a place here:
Usually cited as a Spanish proverb.
Katawa Shoujo
For those who are interested: Katawa Shoujo is a visual novel currently in beta, which you can freely download on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.
You know, when I first heard about Katawa Shoujo, I was horrified. (Struck a little too close to home.) But if the rest of the writing is on par with that, I might have to play it.
The writing isn't all shining gems of dialogue, but it's solidly entertaining, and not nearly as horrifying as the premise might make it sound. The various disabilities are treated more as inconvenient body quirks, rather than defining features; the characters are defined by their personalities and actions. If Katawa Shoujo has a message, that's it.
Anyway, I got a few very enjoyable hours out of it.
From wikiquote
Bruce Lee
Myth busted.
Proyas (fictional character - author: R. Scott Bakker)
-- Michael Shermer
The same Shermer who publicly recognizes that his widely-repeated "this is your brain on cryonics" is crap but won't even post a half-hearted correction? Yes. Yes they do.
Sometimes smart people believe weird things because they're actually, y'know, true.
If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin. - Ivan Turgenev
This sounds like a great way to prime yourself. Crossing yourself has all the wrong connotations, but a gesture meaning "I choose good." should help in general. (I like the fist-over-heart Battlestar Galactica salute.)
Having a whole set of gestures, along with pithy quotes, should prove even more effective.
ETA: Or is that reserved for "I choose whatever they aren't expecting"?
The essence of wisdom is to remain suspicious of what you want to be true.
-Jon K. Hart
Without wanting to start a debate: that belief kept me in Mormonism for about two unnecessary years.
Okay, so the essence of wisdom is to be exactly as suspicious of everything as you should be, the first-pass approximation of wisdom is to remain suspicious of what you want to be true, and the second-pass approximation of wisdom is to be also suspicious of current beliefs you want to be untrue.
MixedNuts, I take the quote as a mental "post-it note" reminder to be cognizant of the potential presence of confirmation bias-in both directions as you stated.
Richard Askey
It's the first follower who turns the lone nut into a leader.
Scott Aaronson, "Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong", which is worth reading in its own right.
"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." ~Thomas H. Huxley
One of my favorite quotes; from the father of the word "agnostic."
-Tylwyth Waff in Heretics of Dune
(Hi. I'm new.)
I don't understand this one. Anyone want to explain it?
Attack. Then based upon the results of the attack modify your behaviour. Or attacck then update your model of the enemy.
I don't have a strong feeling about the accuracy of the percentage, but the general point sounds plausible.
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
attribution unknown
I may have posted a little too fast-- I picked up the quote from a site which says it's a misquotation, and apt to be used to support dubious ideas.
On the other hand, contempt can come into play too quickly and reflexively, so I'm not deleting the quote.
Is this the absurdity heuristic, or a superset? If the later, what else is in the set? Maybe moral absurdity, and affiliation with outgroups (in particular, first encountering the idea during a heated debate or from someone lower-status than you).
"Ahh, there's no such thing as mysterious."
~Strong Bad, from sbemail 140 (Probably not originally intended in a rationalist sense.)
"When he is confronted by the necessity for a decision, even one which may be trivial from a normal standpoint, the obsessive-compulsive person will typically attempt to reach a solution by invoking some rule, principle, or external requirement which might, with some degree of plausibility, provide a "right" answer....If he can find some principle or external requirement which plausibly applies to the situation at hand, the necessity for a decision disappears as such; that is, it becomes transformed into the purely technical problem of applying the correct principle. Thus, if he can remember that it is always sensible to go to the cheapest movie, or "logical" to go to the closest, or good to go to the most educational, the problem resolves to a technical one, simply finding which is the most educational, the closest, or such. In an effort to find such requirements and principles, he will invoke morality, "logic," social custom, and propriety, the rules of "normal" behavior (especially if he is a psychiatric patient), and so on. In short he will try to figure out what he "should" do.
-David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles
Please post anything there might be on how to deal with that. I'm exactly like that, and my rules often break down and then I'm unable to decide.
I've known someone else like that. She made rules about food because it made it easier to decide what to eat.
Could you also post the cites on why "obsessive-compulsive"? Neither I nor the other person have an OCD diagnosis or seem to match the criteria. Any OCD LWers want to chip in?
-Clive Barker, Abarat