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Nominull comments on Rationality Quotes August 2011 - Less Wrong
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-Bruce Sterling, cyberpunk author
Cut off three legs.
Just sew an extra one on first.
Fully general version: just sew a rat onto the human first
The first three times I read this I thought you said "just sew a rat onto the human fist".
And I thought: that would be a pretty terrible superpower. But, because of that, it could make for a really interesting superhero. What use is a rat sewn to your fist? At first, it seems like the answer is "none, if not negative", but that's just what they want the criminal underworld to think...
Possible on a man, if we perturb slightly the definition of leg.
How many legs does a man have if you call a penis a leg? ;)
^Wrong. Actually what we can do to rats is very limited compared to what we can do to humans. As for what we can do with humans... Together, even the sky is not the limit anymore: we pierce through it with our XXX. Also, wrong: in an absolute sense, we "can" do to humans the stuff we do on rats, but there are reasons, beyond ethics, why we don't. It's just. Not. Convenient.
My reading was "neurological manipulations that reveal the frailty of the rat mind would work on humans, thus our minds are also frail".
My first thought was of the robot controlled by rat neurons, though I know the quote predates this technology.
It seems like your read is close to what he had in mind. Here's the preceeding paragraph, it's from an essay on what makes cyberpunk:
"Human thought itself, in its unprecedented guise as computer software, is becoming something to be crystallized, replicated, made a commodity. Even the insides of our brains aren't sacred; on the contrary, the human brain is a primary target of increasingly successful research, ontological and spiritual questions be damned. The idea that, under these circumstances, Human Nature is somehow destined to prevail against the Great Machine, is simply silly; it seems weirdly beside the point. It's as if a rodent philosopher in a lab-cage, about to have his brain bored and wired for the edification of Big Science, were to piously declare that in the end Rodent Nature must triumph."
I would have phrased this comment differently, perhaps by saying "This quote is unimpressive because it glosses over the fact that we can do numerous bad things to humans that we can't do to rats."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Most, almost all, things we can do to rats, we can do to humans. We can do very many things to rats. Therefore, we can do most, almost all, of very many things to humans, i.e. we can do many things to humans.
P1. RATdo-->HUMANdo
P2. RATdomostanything
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
C. HUMANdomostanything
As the statement is correct according to a common and natural (the most common and natural?) way of corresponding language with logic, I don't approve of beginning a comment on it with "^Wrong".
I don't think the original statement at all strongly implies that what we can do to humans is limited to things we can do to rats. If I did, I'd feel some obligation to interpret it charitably.
Your phrasing is much better. But I still think the comparison is very weak, it's like saying "natural numbers are infinite, real numbers contain natural numbers, therefore they are infinite": it fails to convey the sheer MAGNITUDE of the situation.