Rationality Quotes September 2011

7 Post author: dvasya 02 September 2011 07:38AM

Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual 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  • Do not quote yourself.
  • Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.

Comments (482)

Sort By: Controversial
Comment author: dvasya 01 September 2011 07:34:20AM 1 point [-]

Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous.

-- Jim Dator ("Dator's Law")

Comment author: lessdazed 01 September 2011 06:44:44PM 2 points [-]

Like this one?

Comment author: JoshuaZ 01 September 2011 05:36:48PM 7 points [-]

Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous.

Strongly disagree with this quote. Some useful ideas about the future might seem ridiculous. But a lot won't. Lots of new technologies and improvements are due to steady fairly predictable improvement of existing technologies. It might be true that a lot of useful ideas or the most useful ideas have a high chance of appearing to be ridiculous. But even that means we're poorly calibrated about what is and is not reasonably doable. There's also a secondary issue that the many if not most of the ideas which seem ridiculous turn out to be about as ridiculous as they seemed if not more so (e.g. nuclear powered aircraft which might be doable but will remain ridiculous for the foreseeable future) and even plausible seeming technologies often turn out not to work (such as the flying car). Paleo Future is a really neat website which catalogs predictions about the future especially in the form of technologies that never quite made it or failed miserably or the like. The number of ideas which failed is striking.

Comment author: gwern 01 September 2011 07:02:18PM 4 points [-]

If there is a useful idea about the future which triggers no ridiculous or improbable filters, doesn't that imply many people will have already accepted that idea, using it and removing the profit from knowing it? To make money, you need an edge; being able to find ignored gems in the 'possible ridiculous futures' sounds like a good strategy.

Comment author: dvasya 01 September 2011 07:33:29AM *  2 points [-]

If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?’

-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

(I know it's old and famous and classic, but this doesn't make it any less precious, does it?)

Comment author: Kingreaper 01 September 2011 07:46:46AM 10 points [-]

Sometimes I suspect that wouldn't even occur to them as a question. That evolution might turn out to be one of those things that it's just assumed any race that had mastered agriculture MUST understand.

Because, well, how could a race use selective breeding, and NOT realise that evolution by natural selection occurs?

Comment author: AlanCrowe 01 September 2011 06:43:35PM 4 points [-]

The British agricultural revolution involved animal breeding starting in about 1750. Darwin didn't publish Origin of Species until 1859, so in reality it took about 100 years for the other shoe to drop.

Comment author: MarkusRamikin 02 September 2011 07:23:15AM 4 points [-]

Selective breeding had been around much longer than that.

Comment author: Logos01 02 September 2011 08:17:21PM 1 point [-]

Selective breeding isn't necessarily the same as artificial selection, however. The taming of dogs and cats was largely considered accidental; the neotenous animals were more human-friendly and thus able to access greater amounts of food supplies from humans until eventually they could directly interact, whereupon (at least in dogs) "usefulness" became a valued trait.

There wasn't purposefulness in this; people just fed the better dogs more and disliked the 'worse' dogs. It wasn't until the mid-1700's that dog 'breeds' became a concept.

Comment author: MarkusRamikin 01 September 2011 10:31:19AM 16 points [-]

Easily.

Realizing far-reaching consequences of an idea is only easy in hindsight, otherwise I think it's a matter of exceptional intelligence and/or luck. There's an enormous difference between, on the one hand, noticing some limited selection and utilising it for practical benefits - despite only having a limited, if any, understanding of what you're doing - and on the other hand realizing how life evolved into complexity from its simple beginnings, in the course of a difficult to grasp period of time. Especially if the idea has to go up against well-entrenched, hostile memes.

I don't know if this has a name, but there seems to exit a trope where (speaking broadly) superior beings are unable to understand the thinking and errors of less advanced beings. I first noticed it when reading H. Fast's The First Men, where this exchange between a "Man Plus" child and a normal human occurs:

"Can you do something you disapprove of?" "I am afraid I can. And do." "I don't understand. Then why do you do it?"

It's supposed to be about how the child is so advanced and undivided in her thinking, but to me it just means "well then you don't understand how the human mind works".

In short, I find this trope to be a fallacy. I'd expect an advanced civilisation to have a greater, not lesser, understanding of how intelligence works, its limitations, and failure modes in general.

Comment author: Logos01 02 September 2011 08:14:37PM 2 points [-]

In short, I find this trope to be a fallacy. I'd expect an advanced civilisation to have a greater, not lesser, understanding of how intelligence works, its limitations, and failure modes in general.

Have you never looked at something someone does and asked yourself, "How can they be so stupid?"

It's not as though you literally cannot conceive of such limitations; just that you cannot empathize with them.

Comment author: ata 02 September 2011 08:53:01PM *  1 point [-]

It's anthropomorphism to assume that it would occur to advanced aliens to try to understand us empathetically rather than causally/technically in the first place, though.

Comment author: Logos01 03 September 2011 12:06:18AM 3 points [-]

Anthropomorphism? I think not. All known organisms that think have emotions. Advanced animals demonstrate empathy.

Now, certainly it might be possible that an advanced civilization might arise that is non-sentient, and thus incapable of modeling other's psyche empathetically. I will admit to the possibility of anthropocentrism in my statements here; that is, in my inability to conceive of a mechanism whereby technological intelligence could arise without passing through a route that produces intelligences sufficiently like our own as to possess the characteristic of 'empathy'.

It's one thing to postulate counter-factuals; it's another altogether to actually attempt to legitimize them with sound reasoning.

Comment author: bogdanb 28 August 2013 08:03:42PM 2 points [-]

All known organisms that think have emotions.

Do you have any good evidence that this assertion applies to Cephalopods? I.e., either that they don’t think or that they have emotions. (Not a rhetorical question; I know about them only enough to realize that I don’t know.)

Comment author: Logos01 26 October 2013 05:22:09AM 3 points [-]

Do you have any good evidence that this assertion applies to Cephalopods?

Cephalopods in general have actually been shown to be rather intelligent. Some species of squid even engage in courtship rituals. There's no good reason to assume that given the fact that they engage in courtship, predator/prey response, and have been shown to respond to simple irritants with aggressive responses that they do not experience at the very least the emotions of lust, fear, and anger.

(Note: I model "animal intelligence" in terms of emotional responses; while these can often be very sophisticated, it lacks abstract reasoning. Many animals are more intelligent beyond 'simple' animal intelligence; but those are the exception rather than the norm.)

Comment author: bogdanb 26 October 2013 08:14:10PM *  1 point [-]

There's no good reason to assume

I agree, but I’m not sure the examples you gave are good reasons to assume the opposite. They’re certainly evidence of intelligence, and there are even signs of something close to self-awareness (some species apparently can recognize themselves in mirrors).

But emotions are a rather different thing, and I’m rather more reluctant to assume them. (Particularly because I’m even less sure about the word than I am about “intelligence”. But it also just occurred to me that between people emotions seem much easier to fake than intelligence, which stated the other way around means we’re much worse at detecting them.)

Also, the reason I specifically asked about Cephalopods is that they’re pretty close to as far away from humans as they can be and still be animals; they’re so far away we can’t even find fossil evidence of the closest common ancestor. It still had a nervous system, but it was very simple as far as I can tell (flatworm-level), so I think it’s pretty safe to assume that any high level neuronal structures have evolved completely separately between us and cephalopods.

Which is why I’m reluctant to just assume things like emotions, which in my opinion are harder to prove.

On the other hand, this means any similarity we do find between the two kinds of nervous systems (including, if demonstrated, having emotions) would be pretty good evidence that the common feature is likely universal for any brain based on neurons. (Which can be interesting for things like uploading, artificial neuronal networks, and uplifting.)

Comment author: Kingreaper 01 September 2011 11:11:26AM *  3 points [-]

In short, I find this trope to be a fallacy. I'd expect an advanced civilisation to have a greater, not lesser, understanding of how intelligence works, its limitations, and failure modes in general.

But what reason do we have to expect them to pick evolution, as opposed to the concept of money, or of extensive governments (governments governing more than 10,000 people at once), or of written language, or of the internet, or of radio communication, or of fillangerisation, as their obvious sign of advancement?

Just because humans picked up on evolution far later than we should have, doesn't mean that evolution is what they'll expect to be the late discovery. They might equally expect that the internet wouldn't be invented until the equivalent tech level of 2150. Or they might consider moveable type to be the symbol of a masterful race.

Just because they'll likely be able to understand why we were late to it, doesn't mean it would occur to them before looking at us. It's easy to explain why we came to it when we did, once you know that that's what happened, but if you were from a society that realised evolution [not necessarily common descent] existed as they were domesticating animals; would you really think of understanding evolution as a sign of advancement?

EDIT: IOW: I've upvoted your disagreement with the "advanced people can't understand the simpler ways" trope; but I stand by my original point: they wouldn't EXPECT evolution to be undiscovered.

Comment author: Nornagest 21 September 2011 12:49:59AM 2 points [-]

While I think you're right to point out that the uncomprehending-superior-beings trope is unrealistic, I don't think Dawkins was generalizing from fictional evidence; his quote reads more to me like plain old anthropomorphism, along with a good slice of self-serving bias relating to the importance of his own work.

A point similar to your first one shows up occasionally in fiction too, incidentally; there's a semi-common sci-fi trope that has alien species achieving interstellar travel or some other advanced technology by way of a very simple and obvious-in-retrospect process that just happened never to occur to any human scientist. So culture's not completely blind to the idea. Both tropes basically exist to serve narrative purposes, though, and usually obviously polemic ones; Dawkins isn't any kind of extra-rational superhuman, but I wouldn't expect him to unwittingly parrot a device that transparent out of its original context.

Comment author: wedrifid 02 September 2011 12:59:43PM 6 points [-]

but this doesn't make it any less precious, does it?

I wouldn't say it has much preciousness to begin with. It is is nearly nonsensical cheering. The sort of thing I don't like to associate myself with at all.

Comment author: Bugmaster 20 September 2011 11:48:03PM 8 points [-]

If I were an intelligent creature from space visiting Earth, I'd probably start by asking, "do they have anything that can shoot us out of orbit ?" That's just me though.

Comment author: curiousepic 02 September 2011 03:15:27PM *  0 points [-]

Emotions in the brain, they'll always be the same / it's just chemicals and glop and what you've got is what you've got / and we just apply it to whatever's passing by it

-- Jeffrey Lewis, If Life Exists, which is really about set point happiness

Comment author: brilee 08 September 2011 10:39:33PM 1 point [-]

"Communication usually fails, except by accident" - Osmo Wiio

"Communication" here has a different definition from the usual one. I interpreted it as meaning the richness of your internal experiences and the intricate web of associations are conjured in your mind when you say even a single word.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 September 2011 02:40:10PM 8 points [-]

When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to?

-- George Bernard Shaw

(Thanks to gwern for this one.)

Comment author: RobinZ 01 September 2011 05:56:08PM 10 points [-]
Comment author: [deleted] 01 September 2011 06:11:06PM *  8 points [-]

Whoops. I found it on gwern's website. Guess I should've done the next (in retrospect) most obvious thing. Sorry about that!

ETA: Feel free to vote me back down if you wish.

Comment author: anonym 04 September 2011 05:57:54PM 0 points [-]

The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

James Clerk Maxwell

Comment author: anonym 04 September 2011 06:11:38PM *  -1 points [-]

Every truth is a path traced through reality: but among these paths there are some to which we could have given an entirely different turn if our attention had been orientated in a different direction or if we had aimed at another kind of utility; there are some, on the contrary, whose direction is marked out by reality itself: there are some, one might say, which correspond to currents of reality. Doubtless these also depend upon us to a certain extent, for we are free to go against the current or to follow it, and even if we follow it, we can variously divert it, being at the same time associated with and submitted to the force manifest within it. Nevertheless these currents are not created by us; they are part and parcel of reality.

Henri L. Bergson -- The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 218

ETA: retracted. I posted this on the basis of my interpretation of the first sentence, but the rest of the quote makes clear that my interpretation of the first sentence was incorrect, and I don't believe it belongs in a rationality quotes page anymore.

Comment author: Thomas 03 September 2011 09:19:55AM 2 points [-]

That which does not kill [but it tries], makes me bitter and cynical.

  • Anthony Quinn Stanley
Comment author: djcb 03 September 2011 10:15:36AM 4 points [-]

I think I prefer Nietzsche's version...

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 03 September 2011 08:10:20AM 2 points [-]

In other words, they’re looking to someone’s life as an example of perfection, rather than what the person was saying, to see if it is true or false. They should know full well that everybody has that measure of hypocrisy in their lives; everybody has a measure of being flawed. My parents were no better or no worse. Thus, if someone who looked to my dad as a kind of a guru or someone who walked on water is disillusioned, they probably should be. But they shouldn’t only be disillusioned about him, they should be disillusioned about any idea of perfection in any human being because no one is like that.

Frank Schaeffer

Comment author: MinibearRex 03 September 2011 05:45:56PM 6 points [-]

My parents were no better or no worse.

Beware the fallacy of grey.

Comment author: Tripitaka 02 September 2011 07:05:21PM *  -1 points [-]

If other Mediators come to a different conclusion from mine, that is their affair. It may be that their facts are incomplete, or their aims different. I judge on the evidence.

-Whitbreads Fyunch(click), by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle in "The Mote in God's Eye".

Comment author: Tesseract 01 September 2011 08:49:27PM 5 points [-]

To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.

Locke

Comment author: Multiheaded 03 September 2011 09:21:11AM 3 points [-]

I disagree. A lot of human conducts that I find virtuous, such as compassion or tolerance, have no immediate connection with the truth, and sometimes they are best served with white lies.

For example, all the LGBTQ propaganda spoken at doubting conservatives, about how people are either born gay or they aren't, and how modern culture totally doesn't make young people bisexual, no sir. We're quite innocent, human sexuality is set in stone, you see. Do you really wish to hurt your child for what they always were? What is this "queer agenda" you're speaking about?

Tee-hee :D

Comment author: Jack 17 September 2011 01:38:39AM *  1 point [-]

Um, this is both a strawman of what LGBTQ activists say and appears to seriously overestimate the degree to which a person has control over their sexual orientation.

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 17 September 2011 02:19:56AM 4 points [-]

appears to seriously overestimate the degree to which a person has control over their sexual orientation.

I don't think control as such is the issue, though; at least, that's not how I read Multiheaded's comment. It seems at least plausible that human sexuality is at least somewhat malleable to cultural inputs: even if no one consciously and explicitly says, "I hereby choose to be gay," it could very well be that a gay-friendly culture results in more people developing non-straight orientations.

If nothing else, there are incentive effects: even if sexual orientation is fixed from birth, people's behavior is regulated by cultural norms. Thus, we should expect that greater tolerance of homosexuality will lead to more homosexual behavior, as gays and people who are only marginally non-straight feel more free to act on their desires. For example, an innately bisexual person might engage entirely in heterosexual behavior in a society where homosexuality was heavily stigmatized, but engage in more homosexual behavior once the stigma is lifted.

Thus, conservatives who fear that greater tolerance of homosexuality will lead to more homosexual behavior are probably correct on this one strictly factual point, although I would expect the magnitude of the effect to be rather modest.

Comment author: Jack 17 September 2011 02:31:06AM 0 points [-]

I don't disagree with any of this. Most LGBTQ activists wouldn't either. I used the hedging language "appears" because I don't know for sure what kind of agency Multiheaded thinks people have over their sexuality.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 September 2011 01:32:13AM 0 points [-]

I'm profoundly disappointed that this has been upvoted.

Comment author: Zack_M_Davis 17 September 2011 01:36:44AM 3 points [-]

Could you elaborate on what you found objectionable?

Comment author: Raw_Power 05 September 2011 01:01:42AM 0 points [-]

I can't tell if you're joking...

Comment author: Multiheaded 06 September 2011 12:03:47PM *  1 point [-]

Dead serious actually. Well, what I mean is that a heteronormative approach where everyone must be either 6 or 1 on the Kinsey scale is hard to maintain in the modern world, and that when some extremely irrational older folks hate to see how young people can, for the first time in history, 1)discover their sexuality with some precision by using media and freely experimenting and 2)get a lot of happiness that way, it's fine to spin a clean and simple tale of the subject matter to those sorry individuals.

Comment author: Raw_Power 06 September 2011 01:44:41PM 0 points [-]

... I like the way you talk. This goes a long way into explaining the same person saying "homosexuality is not a choice" and "I have been with qute a few straight guys", as well as the treatment bi people get as "fence-sitters" and the resentment they generate by having an easier time in the closet.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 17 September 2011 01:27:49AM 2 points [-]

You may want to carefully consider this comment.

Comment author: Yvain 19 September 2011 06:22:15PM 11 points [-]

I think there's a few posts by Yudkowsky that I think deserve the highest praise one can give to a philosopher's writing: That, on rereading them, I have no idea what I found so mindblowing about them the first time. Everything they say seems patently obvious now!

-- Ari Rahikkala

Comment author: MinibearRex 20 September 2011 09:04:41PM 7 points [-]

Is this really a rationality quote, is it just pro-Yudkowsky?

It does set a standard for the clarity of any writing you do, but I've seen substantially better quotes on that topic before.

Comment author: Yvain 21 September 2011 10:02:15AM *  2 points [-]

Related to hindsight bias and inferential distances. I'd sort of noticed this happening before, but if I hadn't realized other people had the same experience I probably would have underestimated the degree to which rationality had changed my worldview and so underestimated the positive effect of spreading it to others.

Comment author: wedrifid 20 September 2011 11:08:36PM 5 points [-]

Is this really a rationality quote

I say yes. This is the difference between learning the 'Philosophy' how to quote deep stuff with names like Wittgenstein and Nietzsche and just learning stuff about reality that is just obvious. Once the knowledge is there is shouldn't seem remarkable at all.

For me at least this is one of the most important factors when evaluating a learning source. Is the information I'm learning simple in retrospect or is it a bunch of complicated rote learning. If the latter, is there a good reason related to complexity in the actual world that requires me to be learning complex arbitrary things?

Comment author: [deleted] 19 September 2011 07:16:24PM 3 points [-]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

-- Upton Sinclair

Comment author: gwern 19 September 2011 07:23:41PM 3 points [-]
Comment author: [deleted] 19 September 2011 07:38:59PM *  1 point [-]

Forgot to google it. Sorry.

Comment author: Patrick 04 September 2011 01:37:22PM *  3 points [-]

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.

-- HL Mencken

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 04 September 2011 03:26:12PM 2 points [-]

I disagree, especially with the second part. For a trivial example, take the traditional refutation of Kantianism: You are hiding Jews in your house during WWII. A Nazi shows up and asks if you are hiding any Jews.

Comment author: DSimon 02 September 2011 06:41:16PM *  3 points [-]

(Sheen is attempting to perform brain surgery on an unknown alien)

Sheen: That's weird. This brain has no labels.

Doppy: Labels?

Sheen: Yeah! Usually brains come with labels, like "this is the section for tasting chicken", "this is the section for running around in circles", "this is the section for saying AAAAARGHLBLAHH." But, this brain doesn't have any labels at all. So, I'm going to have to do what all the best doctors do.

Doppy: What's that?

Sheen: Poke around and see what happens!

-- Planet Sheen

Comment author: lionhearted 01 September 2011 11:34:16PM *  14 points [-]

I moved out of the hood for good, you blame me?

Niggas aim mainly at niggas they can't be.

But niggas can't hit niggas they can't see.

I'm out of sight, now I'm out of they dang reach.

-- Dr. Dre, "The Watcher"

Comment author: PhilGoetz 11 September 2011 07:06:33PM *  2 points [-]

“When anyone asks me how I can describe my experience of nearly forty years at sea, I merely say uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales and storms and fog and the like, but in all my experience, I have never been in an accident of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea… I never saw a wreck and have never been wrecked, nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.”

E.J. Smith, 1907, later captain of the RMS Titanic

Note: This is one of those comments that has been repeated, without citation, on the internet so many times that I can no longer find a citation.

Comment author: MichaelGR 11 September 2011 04:36:28AM 4 points [-]

"Using the bible to prove the existence of god is like using The Lord Of The Rings to prove the existence of Hobbits."

-Anon.

Comment author: Patrick 07 September 2011 10:07:26AM 2 points [-]

Leonard, if you were about to burn or drown or starve I would panic. It would be the least I could do. That's what's happening to people now, and I don't think my duty to panic disappears just because they're not in the room!

-- Raymond Terrific

Comment author: MixedNuts 08 February 2013 05:22:26PM 3 points [-]

I think it comes down to this:

If you live in a small community, and your friend or neighbor or family member contacts you and says “someone just committed a horrible act of violence here!” you have to drop everything and listen. Your discomfort is so insignificant compared to the magnitude of the event, you can’t ignore something like that.

You certainly can’t answer “sorry, I need you to stop right there, I’m trying to do some self-care right now and I’m avoiding triggers until I feel ready to engage with difficult subjects.” They’d crown you King Butthead.

But on the Internet, the “community” is 2.4 billion people. Something horrible will be happening to thousands of them every day. You can’t apply the same ethics. It’s emotionally impossible, and not terribly helpful to the world, to even try.

So hand me my Butt Crown.

-- Cliff Pervocracy

Comment author: [deleted] 01 September 2011 04:06:30PM -2 points [-]

[Joseph] Campbell was no pessimist. He believed there is a "point of wisdom beyond the conflicts of illusion and truth by which lives can be put back together again." Finding it is the "prime question of the time."

-- Bill Moyers, introduction to The Power of Myth

Comment author: lukeprog 01 September 2011 12:12:13PM 15 points [-]

Imagine that everyone in North America took [a cognitive enhancement pill] before retiring and then woke up the next morning with more memory capacity and processing speed... I believe that there is little likelihood that much would change the next day in terms of human happiness. It is very unlikely that people would be better able to fulfill their wishes and desires the day after taking the pill. In fact, it is quite likely that people would simply go about their usual business - only more efficiently. If given more memory capacity and processing speed, people would, I believe: carry on using the same ineffective medical treatments because of failure to think of alternative causes; keep making the same poor financial decisions because of overconfidence; keep misjudging environmental risks because of vividness; play host to the [tempting bad ideas] of Ponzi and pyramid schemes; [and] be wrongly influenced in their jury decisions by incorrect testimony about probabilities... The only difference would be that they would be able to do all of these things much more quickly!

Keith Stanovich, What Intelligence Tests Miss

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 September 2011 07:42:39AM 29 points [-]

It's a nice list, but I think the core point strikes me as liable to be simply false. I forget who it was presenting this evidence - it might even have been James Miller, it was someone at the Winter Intelligence conference at FHI - but they looked at (1) the economic gains to countries with higher average IQ, (2) the average gains to individuals with higher IQ, and concluded that (3) people with high IQ create vast amounts of positive externality, much more than they capture as individuals, probably mostly in the form of countries with less stupid economic policies.

Maybe if we're literally talking about a pure speed and LTM pill that doesn't affect at all, say, capacity to keep things in short-term memory or the ability to maintain complex abstractions in working memory, i.e., a literal speed and disk space pill rather than an IQ pill.

Comment author: erniebornheimer 02 September 2011 10:28:01PM 1 point [-]

Sounds implausible to me, so I'm very interested in a citation (or pointers to similar material). If true, I'm going to have to do a lot of re-thinking.

Comment author: DanielLC 02 September 2011 11:07:58PM -1 points [-]

Perhaps IQ correlates weakly with intelligence. If their are lots of people with high IQ, their are probably lots of intelligent people, but they're not necessarily the same people. Hence, the countries with high IQ do well, but not the people.

Comment author: AlexMennen 02 September 2011 11:07:05PM 2 points [-]

they looked at (1) the economic gains to countries with higher average IQ, (2) the average gains to individuals with higher IQ, and concluded that (3) people with high IQ create vast amounts of positive externality, much more than they capture as individuals

How did they establish that economic gains are influenced by average IQ, rather than both being influenced by some other factor?

Comment author: lukeprog 02 September 2011 05:01:50PM 3 points [-]

Sounds plausible. If anybody finds the citation for this, please post it.

Comment author: gwern 17 February 2016 11:41:34PM 1 point [-]

If anyone is curious, I am moving my bibliography here to http://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection#value-of-iq and I will be keeping that updated in the future rather than continue this thread further.

Comment author: gwern 28 February 2012 11:09:29PM 13 points [-]

Here's another one: "National IQ and National Productivity: The Hive Mind Across Asia", Jones 2011

...cognitive skills—intelligence quotient scores, math skills, and the like—have only a modest influence on individual wages, but are strongly correlated with national outcomes. Is this largely due to human capital spillovers? This paper argues that the answer is yes. It presents four different channels through which intelligence may matter more for nations than for individuals: (i) intelligence is associated with patience and hence higher savings rates; (ii) intelligence causes cooperation; (iii) higher group intelligence opens the door to using fragile, high-value production technologies; and (iv) intelligence is associated with supporting market-oriented policies.

Comment author: gwern 28 August 2013 06:13:21PM *  5 points [-]

"Salt Iodization and the Enfranchisement of the American Worker", Adhvaryu et al 2013:

...We find substantial impacts of salt iodization. High school completion rose by 6 percentage points, and labor force participation went up by 1 point. Analysis of income transitions by quantile shows that the new labor force joiners entered at the bottom of the wage distribution and took up blue collar labor, pulling down average wage income conditional on employment. Our results inform the ongoing debate on salt iodization in many low-income countries. We show that large-scale iodized salt distribution had a targeted impact, benefiting the worker on the margin of employment, and generating sizeable economic returns at low cost...The recent study by Feyrer et al. (2013) estimates that Morton Salt Co.’s decision to iodize may have increased IQ by 15 points, accounting for a significant part of the Flynn Effect, the steady rise IQ in the US over the twentieth century. Our estimates, paired with this number, suggest that each IQ point accounts for nearly one tenth of a point increase in labor force participation.

If, in the 1920s, 10 IQ points could increase your labor participation rate by 1%, then what on earth does the multiplier look like now? The 1920s weren't really known for their demands on intelligence, after all.

And note the relevance to discussions of technological unemployment: since the gains are concentrated in the low end (think 80s, 90s) due to the threshold nature of iodine & IQ, this employment increase means that already, a century ago, people in the low-end range were having trouble being employed.

Comment author: gwern 03 February 2013 01:41:12AM *  5 points [-]

"Exponential correlation of IQ and the wealth of nations", Dickerson 2006:

Plots of mean IQ and per capita real Gross Domestic Product for groups of 81 and 185 nations, as collected by Lynn and Vanhanen, are best fitted by an exponential function of the form: GDP = a * 10^b*(IQ), where a and b are empirical constants. Exponential fitting yields markedly higher correlation coefficients than either linear or quadratic. The implication of exponential fitting is that a given increment in IQ, anywhere along the IQ scale, results in a given percentage in GDP, rather than a given dollar increase as linear fitting would predict. As a rough rule of thumb, an increase of 10 points in mean IQ results in a doubling of the per capita GDP.

....In their book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Lynn and Vanhanen (2002) present a table listing for 81 nations the measured mean IQ and the per capita real Gross Domestic Product as of 1998 (their Table 7.7). They subsequently extend this to all 185 nations, using estimated IQs for the 104 new entries based chiefly on IQ values for immediate neighbors (their Table 8.9). In both cases they observe a significant correlation between IQ and GDP, with linear correlation factors R^2 = 0.537 for the 81-nation group and 0.389 for 185 nations. McDaniel and Whetzel have extended the examination of correlations to quadratic fitting in a paper that demonstrates the robustness of these correlations to minor variations in individual IQ values (McDaniel & Whetzel, in press). But an even stronger correlation is found if the fitting is exponential rather than linear or quadratic.

Comment author: Vaniver 09 February 2013 10:19:33PM 1 point [-]

Is it easy to compare the fit of their theory to the smart fraction theory?

Comment author: gwern 09 February 2013 11:32:07PM *  4 points [-]

I dunno. I've given it a try and while it's easy enough to reproduce the exponential fit (and the generated regression line does fit the 81 nations very nicely), I think I screwed up somehow reproducing the smart fraction equation because the regression looks weird and trying out the smart-fraction function (using his specified constants) on specific IQs I don't get the same results as in La Griffe's table. And I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong, my function looks like it's doing the same thing as his. So I give up. Here is my code if you want to try to fix it:

lynn <- read.table(stdin(),header=TRUE,sep="")
Country IQ rGDPpc
Argentina 96 12013
Australia 98 22452
Austria 102 23166
Barbados 78 12001
Belgium 100 23223
Brazil 87 6625
Bulgaria 93 4809
Canada 97 23582
China 100 3105
Colombia 89 6006
Congo 65 822
Congo 73 995
Croatia 90 6749
Cuba 85 3967
CzechRepublic 97 12362
Denmark 98 24218
Ecuador 80 3003
Egypt 83 3041
EquatorialGuinea 59 1817
Ethiopia 63 574
Fiji 84 4231
Finland 97 20847
France 98 21175
Germany 102 22169
Ghana 71 1735
Greece 92 13943
Guatemala 79 3505
Guinea 66 1782
HongKong 107 20763
Hungary 99 10232
India 81 2077
Indonesia 89 2651
Iran 84 5121
Iraq 87 3197
Ireland 93 21482
Israel 94 17301
Italy 102 20585
Jamaica 72 3389
Japan 105 23257
Kenya 72 980
Lebanon 86 4326
Malaysia 92 8137
MarshallIslands 84 3000
Mexico 87 7704
Morocco 85 3305
Nepal 78 1157
Netherlands 102 22176
NewZealand 100 17288
Nigeria 67 795
Norway 98 26342
Peru 90 4282
Philippines 86 3555
Poland 99 7619
Portugal 95 14701
PuertoRico 84 8000
Qatar 78 20987
Romania 94 5648
Russia 96 6460
SierraLeone 64 458
Singapore 103 24210
Slovakia 96 9699
Slovenia 95 14293
SouthAfrica 72 8488
SouthKorea 106 13478
Spain 97 16212
Sudan 72 1394
Suriname 89 5161
Sweden 101 20659
Switzerland 101 25512
Taiwan 104 13000
Tanzania 72 480
Thailand 91 5456
Tonga 87 3000
Turkey 90 6422
UKingdom 100 20336
Uganda 73 1074
UnitedStates 98 29605
Uruguay 96 8623
WesternSamoa 87 3832
Zambia 77 719
Zimbabwe 66 2669
em <- lm(log(lynn$rGDPpc) ~ lynn$IQ); summary(em)
Call:
lm(formula = log(lynn$rGDPpc) ~ lynn$IQ)
Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-1.6124 -0.3866 -0.0429 0.3363 2.0311
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 1.77760 0.51848 3.43 0.00097
lynn$IQ 0.07876 0.00583 13.52 < 2e-16
Residual standard error: 0.624 on 79 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.698, Adjusted R-squared: 0.694
F-statistic: 183 on 1 and 79 DF, p-value: <2e-16
# plot
plot (log(lynn$rGDPpc) ~ lynn$IQ)
abline(em)

successful reproduction of Dickerson 2006

# an attempt at La Griffe
erf <- function(x) 2 * pnorm(x * sqrt(2)) - 1
sf <- function(iq) ((69321/2) * (1 + erf(((iq - 108)/15) / sqrt(2))))
# check for sigmoid
# plot(c(85:130), sf(c(85:130)))
lg <- lm(log(lynn$rGDPpc) ~ sf(lynn$IQ)); summary(lg)
Call:
lm(formula = log(lynn$rGDPpc) ~ sf(lynn$IQ))
Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-2.5788 -0.6857 0.0678 1.0521 1.5901
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 8.705620 0.126152 69.01 <2e-16
sf(lynn$IQ) 0.000121 0.000102 1.19 0.24
Residual standard error: 1.13 on 79 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.0175, Adjusted R-squared: 0.0051
F-statistic: 1.41 on 1 and 79 DF, p-value: 0.239
# same plotting code

A failed fit of smart fraction theory?

(In retrospect, I'm not sure it's even meaningful to try to fit the sf function with the constants already baked in, but since I apparently didn't write it right, it doesn't matter.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 February 2013 08:42:30AM *  3 points [-]

It peeves me when scatterplots of GDP per capita versus something else use a linear scale -- do they actually think the difference between $30k and $20k is anywhere near as important as that between $11k and $1k? And yet hardly anybody uses logarithmic scales.

Likewise, the fit looks a lot less scary if you write it as ln(GDP) = A + B*IQ.

Comment author: gwern 17 January 2013 08:53:07PM 1 point [-]

A 2012 Jones followup: "Will the intelligent inherit the earth? IQ and time preference in the global economy"

Social science research has shown that intelligence is positively correlated with patience and frugality, while growth theory predicts that more patient countries will save more. This implies that if nations differ in national average IQ, countries with higher average cognitive skills will tend to hold a greater share of the world’s tradable assets. I provide empirical evidence that in today’s world, countries whose residents currently have the highest average IQs have higher savings rates, higher ratios of net foreign assets to GDP, and higher ratios of U.S. Treasuries to GDP. These nations tend to be in East Asia and its offshoots. The relationship between national average IQ and net foreign assets has strengthened since the end of Bretton Woods.

...And time preference differs across countries in part because psychometric intelligence, a key predictor of patient behavior, differs persistently across countries (Wicherts et al., 2010a,b; Jones and Schneider, 2010)....John Rae (1834) provides a precursor of the approach presented here: Chapter Six of his treatise (cited in Becker and Mulligan, 1997, and Frederick et al., 2002) focuses on individual determinants of savings, including differences in rates of time preference, while his Chapter Seven draws out the cross-country implications...A recent meta-analysis of 24 studies by Shamosh and Gray concluded: “[A]cross studies, higher intelligence was associated with lower D[elay] D[iscounting]...” Their meta-study drew on experiments with preschool children and college students, drug addicts and relatively healthy populations: With few exceptions, they found a reliable relationship between measured intelligence and patience. And recent work by economists (Frederick, 2005; Benjamin et al. 2006; Burks et al, 2009; Chabris et al., 2007) has demonstrated that low-IQ individuals tend to act in a more “behavioral,” more impulsive fashion when facing decisions between smaller rewards sooner versus larger rewards later.

Comment author: Dr_Manhattan 26 April 2012 12:23:18AM 5 points [-]

Above link is dead. Here is a new one

http://mason.gmu.edu/~gjonesb/JonesADR

Comment author: gwern 27 February 2012 02:44:15AM 6 points [-]
Comment author: juliawise 05 September 2011 12:26:27PM 4 points [-]

If this is true, it would affect my decisions about whether and how to have children. So I'd really like to see the source if you can figure out what it was.

Comment author: [deleted] 03 September 2011 04:53:09AM *  7 points [-]

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

-- Richard P. Feynman

Comment author: anonym 04 September 2011 05:42:34PM 3 points [-]

And oldy but goody.

Comment author: Patrick 05 September 2011 12:37:46AM 5 points [-]

On some other subjects people do wish to be deceived. They dislike the operation of correcting the hypothetical data which they have taken as basis. Therefore, when they begin to see looming ahead some such ridiculous result as 2 + 3 = 7, they shrink into themselves and try to find some process of twisting the logic, and tinkering the equation, which will make the answer come out a truism instead of an absurdity; and then they say, “Our hypothetical premiss is most likely true because the conclusion to which it brings us is obviously and indisputably true.” If anyone points out that there seems to be a flaw in the argument, they say, “You cannot expect to get mathematical certainty in this world,” or “You must not push logic too far,” or “Everything is more or less compromise,” and so on.

-- Mary Everest Boole

Comment author: anonym 04 September 2011 05:58:03PM 5 points [-]

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Richard P. Feynman

Comment author: XFrequentist 01 September 2011 08:26:54PM 3 points [-]

Rationality gives us greater knowledge and greater control over our own actions and emotions and over the world. Although our rationality is, initially, an evolved quality - the nature of rationality includes the Nature in it - it enables us to transform ourselves and hence transcend our status as mere animals, actually and also symbolically. Rationality comes to shape and control its own function.

Our principles fix what our life stands for, our aims create the light our life is bathed in, and our rationality, both individual and coordinate, defines and symbolizes the distance we have come from mere animality. It is by these means that our lives can come to mean more than what they instrumentally yield. And by meaning more, our lives yield more.

-- Robert Nozick (The Nature of Rationality)

Comment author: listic 02 September 2011 01:42:17PM *  10 points [-]

True courage is loving life while knowing all the truth about it.

-- Sergey Dovlatov

(translation is mine; can you propose a better translation from Russian?)

Comment author: Will_Newsome 10 September 2011 01:31:18PM 4 points [-]

One must give value to their existence by behaving as if ones very existence were a work of art.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Comment author: AdeleneDawner 01 September 2011 09:54:09PM 12 points [-]

I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

-Sam Harris

Comment author: Nominull 01 September 2011 10:51:49PM 3 points [-]

What about, I dunno, the protestant reformation, where people were persecuted for wanting, among other things, to read the bible themselves rather than have it interpreted for them by the priesthood?

Comment author: Vaniver 02 September 2011 12:29:29AM 9 points [-]

What does it mean for a society to suffer?

Comment author: Thomas 05 September 2011 01:25:02PM 14 points [-]

The investor who finds a way to make soap from peanuts has more genuine imagination than the revolutionary with a bayonet, because he has cultivated the faculty of imagining the hidden potentiality of the real. This is much harder than imagining the unreal, which may be why there are so many more utopians than inventors

  • Joe Sobran
Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 05 September 2011 01:31:19PM *  8 points [-]

which may be why there are so many more utopians than inventors

Is that the case?

Comment author: Thomas 05 September 2011 01:48:46PM *  9 points [-]

The majority dreams about a "just society", the minority dreams about a better one through technological advances. No matter there was 20th century when "socialism" brought us nothing and the technology brought us everything.

Comment author: Raw_Power 06 September 2011 12:31:59AM 6 points [-]

I feel obliged to point out that Socialdemocracy is working quite well in Europe and elsewhere and we owe it, among other stuff, free universal health care and paid vacations. Those count as "hidden potentiality of the real." Which brings us to the following point: what's , a priori, the difference between "hidden potentiality of the real" and "unreal"? Because if it's "stuff that's actually been made", then I could tell you, as an engineer, of the absolutely staggering amount of bullshit patents we get to prove are bullshit everyday. You'd be amazed how many idiots are still trying to build Perpetual Motion Machines. But you've got one thing right: we do owe technology everything, the same way everyone ows their parents everything. Doesn't mean they get all the merit.

Comment author: CG_Morton 13 September 2011 02:49:31PM 3 points [-]

I feel obliged to point out that Socialdemocracy is working quite well in Europe and elsewhere and we owe it, among other stuff, free universal health care and paid vacations.

It's not fair to say we 'owe' Socialdemocracy for free universal health care and paid vacations, because they aren't so much effects of the system as they are fundamental tenets of the system. It's much like saying we owe FreeMarketCapitalism for free markets - without these things we wouldn't recognize it as socialism. Rather, the question is whether the marginal gain in things like quality of living are worth the marginal losses in things like autonomy. Universal health care is not an end in itself.

Comment author: Raw_Power 16 September 2011 01:23:41PM 2 points [-]

I dunno man, maybe it's a confusion on my part, but universal health coverage for one thing seems like a good enough goal in and of tiself. Not specifically in the form of a State-sponsored organziation, but the fuction of everyone having the right to health treatments, of no-one being left to die just because they happen not to have a given amount of money at a given time, I think that, from a humanistic point of view, it's sort of obvious that we should have it if we can pay for it.

Comment author: lessdazed 16 September 2011 11:00:29PM 2 points [-]

universal

What does this mean?

of no-one being left to die just because they happen not to have a given amount of money at a given time

What does this mean?

we should have it if we can pay for it

What does this mean?

Comment author: Raw_Power 18 September 2011 12:54:02AM 1 point [-]

I have left it ambiguous on purpose. What this means specifically depends on the means available at any given time.

IDEALLY: Universal means everyone should have a right to as much health service as is necessary for their bodies and minds functioning as well as it can, if they ask for it. That would include education, coaching, and sports, among many others. And nobody should ever be allowed to die if they don't want to and there's any way of preventing it.

Between "leaving anyone to die because they don't have the money or assets to pay for their treatment"[your question puzzles me, what part of this scenario don't you understand] and "spending all our country's budget on progressively changing the organs of seventy-year-.olds", there's a lot of intermediate points. The touchy problem is deciding how much we want to pay for, and how, and who pays it for whom, No matter how you cut the cake, given our current state of development, at some point you have to say X person dies in spite of their will because either they can't afford to live or because *his can't". So, are you going to deny that seventy-year-old their new organs?

Comment author: lessdazed 18 September 2011 06:31:01AM *  4 points [-]

what part of this scenario don't you understand

Resources are limited and medical demand is not. The medical response time if the President of the United States gets shot is less for than if anyone else gets shot. It's not possible to give everyone as much health protection as the president. So it's not a scenario. I can imagine each person as being the only person on earth with such care, and I can imagine imagining a single hypothetical world has each person with that level of care, but I can't actually imagine it.

there's a lot of intermediate points

That indicates that no argument about the type of thing to be done will be based on a difference in kind. It won't resemble saying that we should switch from what happens at present to "no-one being left to die just because they happen not to have a given amount of money". We currently allow some people to die based on rationing, and you are literally proposing the impossible to connote that you would prefer a different rationing system, but then you get tripped up when sometimes speaking as if the proposal is literally possible.

deciding how much we want to pay for

Declaring that someone has a right is declaring one's willingness to help that person get something from others over their protests. We currently allow multimillionaires, and we allow them to spend all their money trying to discover a cure for their child's rare or unique disease, and we allow people to drive in populated areas.

We allow people to spend money in sub-optimal ways. Resources being limited means that not every disease gets the same attention. Allowing people to drive in populated areas is implicitly valuing the fun and convenience of some people driving over the actuarially inevitable death and carnage to un-consenting pedestrians.

What this means specifically depends on the means available at any given time.

I don't understand how you want to ration or limit people, in an ideal world, because you have proposed the literally impossible as a way of gesturing towards a different rationing system (infinitely) short of that ideal and (as far as I can see) not different in kind than any other system.

By analogy, you don't describe what you mean when you declare "infinity" a number preferable to 1206. Do you mean that any number higher than 1206 is equally good? Do you mean that every number is better than its predecessor, no matter what? Since you probably don't, then...what number do you mean? Approximately?

I can perhaps get an idea of the function if you tell me some points of x (resources) and y (what you are proposing).

Comment author: Raw_Power 18 September 2011 03:29:48PM *  0 points [-]

Your post confuses me a lot: I am being entirely honest about this, there seem to be illusions of transparency and (un)common priors. The only part I feel capable of responding to is the first: I can perfectly imagine every human being having as much medical care as the chief of the wealthiest most powerful organization in the world, in an FAI-regimented society. For a given value of "imagining", of course: I have a vague idea of nanomachines in the bloodstream, implants, etc. I basically expect human bodies to be self-sufficient in taking care of themsleves, and able to acquire and use the necessary raw materials with ease, including being able to medically operate on themselves. The rare cases will be left to the rare specialist, and I expect everyone to be able to take care of the more common problems their bodies and minds may encounter.

As for the rest of your post:

What are people's rationing optimixation functions? Is it possible to get an entire society to agree to a single one, for a given value of "agree"? Or is it that people don't have a consistent optimization function, and that it's not so much a matter of some things being valued over others as a matter of tradition and sheer thoughtless inertia? Yes, I know I am answering questions with questions, but that's all I got right now.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 September 2011 07:28:43PM 4 points [-]

The medical response time if the President of the United States gets shot is less for than if anyone else gets shot.

Not quite. ER doctor.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2011 04:35:33AM 11 points [-]

So, are you going to deny that seventy-year-old their new organs?

Yes, it's amazing how many bad decisions are made because it's heartbreaking to just say no.

Comment author: Raw_Power 18 September 2011 03:50:53PM 0 points [-]

More like it's potentially corrupting, but yeah, that too.

Comment author: wedrifid 18 September 2011 04:39:47AM 5 points [-]

So, are you going to deny that seventy-year-old their new organs?

Yes, unless there is nobody else that can use them. If my watching of House tells me anything it is standard practice to prioritize by this kind of criteria.

Comment author: Raw_Power 18 September 2011 03:49:08PM 0 points [-]

I like this answer, if only for emotional reasons :). I also think the vast majority of seventy-years-old would be compelled by this argument.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 16 September 2011 09:59:29PM 3 points [-]

Free universal health care is a good thing in itself; the question is whether or not that's worth the costs of higher taxes and any bureaucratic inefficiencies that may exist.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 September 2011 04:26:49AM 2 points [-]

Free universal health care is a good thing in itself

The healthcare isn't actually "free". It's either paid for individually, collectively on a national level, or some intermediate level, e.g., insurance companies. The question is what the most efficient way to deliver it is?

Comment author: Jack 19 September 2011 12:11:10AM *  2 points [-]

This conversation appears to not have incorporated the very strong evidence that higher health care spending does lead to improved health outcomes.

Personally I'd reform the American system in one of two ways- either privatize health care completely so that cost of using a health care provider is directly connected to the decision to use health care OR turn the whole thing over to the state and ration care (alternatively you could do the latter for basic health care and than let individuals purchase anything above that). What we have now leaves health care consumption decisions up to individuals but collectivizes costs-- which is obviously a recipe for inflating an industry well above its utility.

Comment author: gwern 19 September 2011 01:53:12PM 3 points [-]

This conversation appears to not have incorporated the very strong evidence that higher health care spending does lead to improved health outcomes.

At what margin? Using randomized procedures?

Comment author: [deleted] 12 September 2011 09:02:40PM *  3 points [-]

I feel obliged to point out that Socialdemocracy is working quite well in Europe and elsewhere and we owe it, among other stuff, free universal health care and paid vacations.

Comfortable, well maintained social democracies where the result of a very peculiar set of circumstances and forces which seem very unlikely to return to Europe in the foreseeable future.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 September 2011 12:53:22PM 2 points [-]

Would you care to expand on that?

Comment author: [deleted] 13 September 2011 05:27:48PM *  8 points [-]

Sure, though I hope you don't mind me giving the cliff note version.

  • Demographic dividend is spent. (The rate of dependency falls after the introduction of modernity (together with legalised contraception) because of lower birth rates. It later rises again as the population ages a few decades after the drop in birthrates)

  • Related, precisely because the society on average is old and seems incapable of embracing any kind of new ideas or a change in what its stated ideals and values are. Not only are young people few but they extremely conformist outside of a few designated symbolic kinds of "rebelling" compared to young people in other parts of the world. Oversocialized indeed.

  • Free higher education and healthcare produced a sort of "social uplift dividend", suddenly the cycle of poverty was broken for a whole bunch of people who where capable of doing all kinds of work, but simply didn't have the opportunity to get the necessary education to do so. After two generations of great results not only has this obviously hit diminishing returns, there are also some indications that we are actually getting less bang for buck on the policies as time continues. Though its hard to say since European society has also shifted away from meritocracy.

  • Massive destruction of infrastructure and means of production that enabled high demand for rebuilding much of the infrastructure (left half of the bell curve had more stuff to do than otherwise, since the price of the kinds of labour they are capable of was high).

  • The burden of technological unemployment was not as great as it is today (gwern's arguments regarding its existence where part of what changed my opinion away from the default view most economists seem to take. After some additional independent research I found myself not only considering it very likley but looking at 20th century history from an entirely fresh perspective ).

  • Event though there are some indications youth in several European countries is more trusting, the general trend seem to still be a strong move away from high trust societies.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 13 September 2011 05:56:56PM 1 point [-]

Thank you. Cliff notes is fine. What do you expect social democracies to turn into?

Comment author: [deleted] 13 September 2011 06:44:44PM *  3 points [-]

I put significantly lower confidence in these predictions than those of the previous post.

Generally speaking I expect comfortable, well maintained social democracies to first become uncomfortable, run down social democracies. Stagnation and sclerosis. Lower trust will mean lower investment which together with the rigidity and unadaptability will strengthen the oligarchic aspect of the central European technocratic way of doing things. Nepotism will become more prevalent in such an environment.

Overall violent crime will still drop, because of better surveillance and other crime fighting technology, but surprising outbursts of semi organized coordinated violence will be seen for a decade or two more (think London). These may become targeted at prosperous urban minorities. Perhaps some politically motivated terrorist attacks, which however won't spiral out into civil wars, but will produce very damaging backlash (don't just think radical Islam here, think Red Army fraction spiced with a nationalist group or two).

Comment author: Raw_Power 16 September 2011 02:42:44PM 3 points [-]

What, you mean like in Gangs of New York?

Could you please give more links to the stuff that helped you form these opinions? I'm very interested in this, especialy in explaining the peculiar behaviour of this generation's youth as opposed to that of the Baby Boomers when they were the same age. After all, it's irrational to apply the same tactics to a socipoloitical lanscape that's wildly different from the one in which these tactics got their most spectacular successes. Exiting the mind-killing narratives developed in bipartidist systems and finding the way to rethink the problems of this age from scratch is a worthy goal for the rationalist project, especially in a "hold off on proposing solutions", analyze-the-full-problem-and-introduce-it-from-a-novel-angle sense. Publications such as, say, Le Monde Diplomatique, are pretty good at presenting well-researched, competently presented alternative opinions, but they still suffer a lot from "political leanings".

I know we avoid talking politics here because of precisely its mind-killing properties, able to turn the most thoughtful of agents into a stubborn blind fool, but I think it's also a good way of putting our skills to the test, and refine them.

Comment author: MixedNuts 05 September 2011 03:27:16PM 7 points [-]

Be fair. We tried socialism once (in several places, but with minor variations). We tried a lot of technology, including long before the 20th century.

Comment author: [deleted] 12 September 2011 09:13:03PM *  4 points [-]

I think socialism must fail because humans once freed from material want will compete for status. Status inequality will activate much the same sentiments as material inequality did. To level status one needs to embark on a massive value engineering campaign. These have so far always created alternative status inequalities, thus creating internal contradictions which combined with increasing material costs eventually bring the dissolution of the system and a partial undoing of the engineering efforts.

If technology advances to the point where such massive social engineering becomes practical and is indeed used for such a purpose on the whim of experts in academia/a democratic consensus/revolutionary vanguard... the implications are simply horrifying.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 03 September 2011 01:08:18AM *  14 points [-]

From the day we arrive on the planet

and blinking, step into the sun

there's more to see than can ever be seen

more to do than can ever be done

--The Lion King opening song

Comment author: AlexSchell 27 September 2011 02:38:34AM 5 points [-]

At this point one must expect to meet with an objection. ‘Well then, if even obdurate sceptics admit that the assertions of religion cannot be refuted by reason, why should I not believe in them, since they have so much on their side tradition, the agreement of mankind, and all the consolations they offer?’ Why not, indeed? Just as no one can be forced to believe, so no one can be forced to disbelieve. But do not let us be satisfied with deceiving ourselves that arguments like these take us along the road of correct thinking. If ever there was a case of a lame excuse we have it here. Ignorance is ignorance; no right to believe anything can be derived from it. In other matters no sensible person will behave so irresponsibly or rest content with such feeble grounds for his opinions and for the line he takes. It is only in the highest and most sacred things that he allows himself to do so.

Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, part VI

Comment author: Will_Newsome 10 September 2011 05:07:10PM 5 points [-]

This is the use of metaness: for liberation - not less of love but expanding of love beyond local optima.

-- Nick Tarleton

The original goes:

This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.

-- T. S. Eliot

Comment author: Nisan 17 September 2011 04:29:54PM 1 point [-]

Local optima of what function?

Comment author: Will_Newsome 10 September 2011 10:49:04AM *  5 points [-]

Why should the government get to decide how to destroy our money? We should let the free market find more efficient ways to destroy money.

The Onion (it's sort of a rationality and anti-rationality quote at multiple levels)

Comment author: anonym 04 September 2011 06:06:58PM 5 points [-]

Very often in mathematics the crucial problem is to recognize and discover what are the relevant concepts; once this is accomplished the job may be more than half done.

Yitz Herstein

Comment author: [deleted] 01 September 2011 02:38:27PM 15 points [-]

On practical questions of urgent importance we must make up our minds one way or the other even when we know that the evidence is incomplete. To refuse to make up our minds is equivalent to deciding to leave things as they are (which is just as likely as any other to be the wrong solution).

-- Robert H. Thouless

Comment author: lukeprog 01 September 2011 12:02:14PM 6 points [-]

The mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture…

Francis Bacon, The advancement of Learning and New Atlantis

Comment author: lukeprog 16 September 2011 12:54:43AM 13 points [-]

The enlightened individual has learned to ask not "Is it so?" but rather "What is the probability that it is so?"

Sheldon Ross

Comment author: Will_Newsome 10 September 2011 01:06:25PM 7 points [-]

For whosoever hath good inductive biases, to him more evidence shall be given, and he shall have an abundance: but whosoever hath not good inductive biases, from him shall be taken away even what little evidence that he hath.

Matthew (slightly paraphrased...)

Comment author: sabre51 02 September 2011 01:36:08PM *  8 points [-]

I believe no discovery of fact, no matter how trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and no trumpeting of falsehood, no matter how virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious... I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech- alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the utmost freedom of conduct that is consistent in living in an organized society... But the whole thing can be put very simply. I believe it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than be ignorant.

-HL Menken

Comment author: brazil84 03 September 2011 12:03:08AM 6 points [-]

From an evolutionary perspective, I would have to disagree. Believing that one's children are supremely cute; that one's spouse is one's soulmate; or even that an Almighty Being wants you to be fruitful and multiply -- these are all beliefs which are a bit shaky on rationalist grounds but which arguably increase the reproductive fitness in the individuals and groups who hold them.

Comment author: Maniakes 02 September 2011 08:49:38PM 9 points [-]

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

-- Oliver Cromwell

Comment author: Will_Newsome 10 September 2011 01:46:55PM 1 point [-]

(Rephrasing: "For the love of Cthulhu, take a second to notice that you might be confused.")

Comment author: [deleted] 17 November 2011 11:16:06PM 2 points [-]

Cromwell's rule is neatly tied to that phrase.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 10 September 2011 10:12:14PM *  10 points [-]

To say that life evolves because of an elan vital is on a par with saying that a locomotive runs because of an elan locomotif.

Julian Huxley, Darwinism To-Day

Comment author: cwillu 05 September 2011 01:43:36AM *  11 points [-]

[...] Often I find that the best way to come up with new results is to find someone who's saying something that seems clearly, manifestly wrong to me, and then try to think of counterarguments. Wrong people provide a fertile source of research ideas.

-- Scott Aaronson, Quantum Computing Since Democritus (http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec14.html)

Comment author: Raw_Power 05 September 2011 02:07:13AM 0 points [-]

Reversed Stupidity?

Comment author: shokwave 05 September 2011 12:33:16PM 1 point [-]

Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence, but it's not a bad place to start.

Comment author: Tesseract 01 September 2011 08:48:19PM 23 points [-]

If you want to live in a nicer world, you need good, unbiased science to tell you about the actual wellsprings of human behavior. You do not need a viewpoint that sounds comforting but is wrong, because that could lead you to create ineffective interventions. The question is not what sounds good to us but what actually causes humans to do the things they do.

Douglas Kenrick

Comment author: lukeprog 08 September 2011 01:58:27AM 12 points [-]

If you cannot calculate you cannot speculate on future pleasure and your life will not be that of a human, but that of an oyster or a jellyfish.

Plato, Philebus

Comment author: crazy88 04 September 2011 07:29:46AM *  17 points [-]

Ralph Hull made a reasonable living as a magician milking a card trick he called "The Tuned Deck"...Hull enjoyed subjecting himself to the scrutiny of colleagues who attempted to eliminate, one by one, various explanations by depriving him of the ability to perform a particular sleight of hand. But the real trick was over before it had even begun, for the magic was not in clever fingers but in a clever name. The blatantly singular referent cried out for a blatantly singular explanation, when in reality The Tuned Deck was not one trick but many. The search for a single explanation is what kept this multiply determined illusion so long a mystery.

--Nicholas Epley, "Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making"

Comment author: PhilGoetz 10 September 2011 03:48:01PM *  7 points [-]

Google tells me Dennett referred to this, in arguing that there is nothing mysterious about consciousness, because it is just a set of many tricks.

It’s a shame that the niceness of the story of the tuned deck makes Dennett’s bad argument about consciousness more appealing.

Dennett’s argument that there is no hard problem of consciousness can be summarized thus:

  1. Take the hard problem of consciousness.

  2. Add in all the other things anybody has ever called “consciousness”.

  3. Solve all those other issues one by one.

  4. Conveniently forget about the hard problem of consciousness.

Comment author: lukeprog 01 September 2011 12:04:59PM 18 points [-]

The rule that human beings seem to follow is to engage the brain only when all else fails - and usually not even then.

David Hull, Science and Selection: Essays on Biological Evolution and the Philosophy of Science

Comment author: James_Miller 01 September 2011 05:23:38PM 5 points [-]

This is the idea behind duel-N back, that the only strategy your lazy brain can implement to do better at the game is to increase the brain's working memory.

Comment author: CronoDAS 24 September 2011 10:55:38PM *  21 points [-]

No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back.

-- Turkish proverb

Comment author: wedrifid 25 September 2011 08:43:28AM 3 points [-]

Only if the road goes exactly the wrong way, which is unlikely. But I must admit "No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn down whatever road is the best road now" doesn't sound quite as catchy. ;)

Comment author: [deleted] 03 September 2011 09:07:47PM 29 points [-]

"The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers. For most people, wanting to know the truth about the world is way, way down the list. Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust."

— John Derbyshire

Comment author: Maniakes 02 September 2011 08:52:25PM 30 points [-]

The church is near, but the road is icy. The bar is far away, but I will walk carefully.

-- Russian proverb

Comment author: gwern 11 September 2011 02:53:32PM 36 points [-]

Again and again, I’ve undergone the humbling experience of first lamenting how badly something sucks, then only much later having the crucial insight that its not sucking wouldn’t have been a Nash equilibrium.

--Scott Aaronson

Comment author: PhilGoetz 11 September 2011 07:07:13PM 1 point [-]

Interesting! Examples?

Comment author: gwern 11 September 2011 07:28:40PM *  3 points [-]

The whole link is basically a tissue of suggested examples by Aaronson and commenters.

Comment author: FiftyTwo 15 September 2011 10:20:49PM 0 points [-]

I like that quote, but the rest of the article seems to be just restating obvious collective action problems. Not sure where he gets the "Whole ideaologies have been built around ignoring these" bit.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 12 March 2012 10:36:22PM 3 points [-]

Most of the relevant ideologies in question are ideologies that try to avoid this problem in economic contexts.

Comment author: shokwave 25 September 2011 08:38:41AM 6 points [-]

Everyone doing nothing in a collective action problem is a Nash equilibrium, I believe.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 September 2011 02:43:49PM 36 points [-]

If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.

-- Paul Graham

Comment author: James_Miller 01 September 2011 05:13:46PM 58 points [-]

It is a vast, and pervasive, cognitive mistake to assume that people who agree with you (or disagree) do so on the same criteria that you care about.

Megan McArdle

Comment author: JoshuaZ 01 September 2011 05:27:58PM 31 points [-]

Related SMBC.

Comment author: Grognor 28 September 2011 03:51:15AM *  12 points [-]

Kant was proud of having discovered in man the faculty for synthetic judgements a priori. But "How are synthetic judgements a priori possible?" How did Kant answer? By saying "By virtue of a faculty" (though unfortunately not in five words). But is that an answer? Or rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? "by virtue of a faculty, namely the virtus dormitiva", replies the doctor in Molière. Such replies belong in comedy. It is high time to replace the Kantian question by another question, "Why is belief in such judgements necessary?"

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Comment author: ata 28 September 2011 03:07:16AM 7 points [-]

"No. You have just fallen prey to the meta-Dunning Kruger effect, where you talk about how awesome you are for recognizing how bad you are."

Horatio__Caine on reddit

Comment author: JoshuaZ 28 September 2011 03:10:45AM *  -1 points [-]

You could say that... puts on sunglasses ... his competence killed him.

Cue music. yeahhh

Comment author: RobinZ 27 September 2011 08:44:52PM *  7 points [-]

It is certain, it seems, that we can judge some matters correctly and wisely and yet, as soon as we are required to specify our reasons, can specify only those which any beginner in that sort of fencing can refute. Often the wisest and best men know as little how to do this as they know the muscles with which they grip or play the piano.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, via The Lichtenberg Reader: selected writings, trans. and ed. Franz H. Mautner and Henry Hatfield.

Comment author: engineeredaway 27 September 2011 06:06:11PM *  6 points [-]

"What I cannot create, I do not understand."

-Richard Feynman

taken from wiki quotes which took it from Stephen Hawking's book Universe in a Nutshell which took it from Feynman's blackboard at the time of this death (1988)

its simple but it gets right at the heart of why the mountains of philosophy are the foothills of AI (as Eliezer put it) .

Comment author: lukeprog 26 September 2011 09:10:35AM 6 points [-]

Let us then take in our hands the staff of experience, paying no heed to the accounts of all the idle theories of the philosophers. To be blind and to think one can do without this staff if the worst kind of blindness.

Comment author: CronoDAS 24 September 2011 10:56:02PM 17 points [-]

If we don't change our direction, we're likely to end up where we're headed.

-- Chinese proverb

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 25 September 2011 12:27:29AM 14 points [-]

Ian Stewart invented the game of tautoverbs. Take a proverb and manipulate it so that it's tautological. i.e. "Look after the pennies and the pennies will be looked after" or "No news is no news". There's a kind of Zen joy in forming them.

This proverb however, is already there.

Comment author: [deleted] 24 September 2011 03:35:50PM 10 points [-]

The key is that it's adaptive. It's not that it succeeds despite the bad results of its good intentions. It succeeds because of the bad results of its good intentions.

--Mencius Moldbug

Comment author: wedrifid 23 September 2011 03:55:27PM 4 points [-]

The human condition is mass mutual Stockholm syndrome.

Will Newsome on facebook ;)

Comment author: CaveJohnson 23 September 2011 09:50:22AM 13 points [-]

One of my favorite genres in the prestige press is the Self-Refuting Article. These are articles that contain all the facts necessary to undermine the premise of the piece, but reporters, editors, and readers all conspire together in an act of collective stupidity to Not Get the Joke

--Steve Sailer

Comment author: lessdazed 23 September 2011 08:31:45PM 1 point [-]
Comment author: [deleted] 18 September 2011 11:21:13PM 4 points [-]

"Our present study is not, like other studies, purely theoretical in intention; for the object of our inquiry is not to know what virtue is but how to become good, and that is the sole benefit of it." —Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics (translated by James E. C. Weldon; emphasis added)

Comment author: lukeprog 16 September 2011 12:53:43AM 14 points [-]

It is remarkable that [probability theory], which originated in the consideration of games of chance, should have become the most important object of human knowledge... The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability.

Laplace

Comment author: engineeredaway 15 September 2011 02:11:55AM *  7 points [-]

Captain Tagon: Lt. Commander Shodan, years ago when you enlisted you asked for a job as a martial arts trainer.

Captain Tagon: And here you are, trying to solve our current problem with martial arts training.

Captain Tagon: How's that saying go? "When you're armed with a hammer, all your enemies become nails?"

Shodan: Sir,.. you're right. I'm being narrow-minded.

Captain Tagon: No, no. Please continue. I bet martial arts training is a really, really useful hammer.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 September 2011 10:21:34PM *  11 points [-]

Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile.

-Hippocrates

Comment author: NihilCredo 17 September 2011 03:25:30AM 6 points [-]

Why is a quote by a Greek, about whom our main sources are also Greek, being posted in Latin?

Comment author: lessdazed 17 September 2011 05:01:41AM 3 points [-]

Quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur.

Comment author: MBlume 17 September 2011 05:04:25AM *  4 points [-]

(At the risk of ruining the joke: "Anything said in Latin sounds profound")

Comment author: [deleted] 17 September 2011 11:32:19AM *  6 points [-]

The saying "Ars longa, vita brevis" is a well known saying in my lanugage in its latin form. Seems to be the most common renderng in English as well.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 23 September 2011 08:39:26PM 5 points [-]

Here's the ancient greek version, to appease NihilCredo:

Ὁ μὲν βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή, ὁ δὲ καιρὸς ὀξύς, ἡ δὲ πεῖρα σφαλερή, ἡ δὲ κρίσις χαλεπή

Comment author: lessdazed 24 September 2011 09:27:33PM 2 points [-]

No puns, upvoted.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 September 2011 10:27:34PM *  15 points [-]
[The] art is long,
life is short,
opportunity fleeting,
experiment dangerous,
judgment difficult.

Considering the beast that some hope to kill by sharpening people's mind-sticks on LW, this sounds applicable wouldn't you agree?

Comment author: Nisan 17 September 2011 06:49:37AM 2 points [-]

Upvote for "mind-sticks".

Comment author: MichaelGR 11 September 2011 04:37:20AM 4 points [-]

Not only may questions remain unanswered; all the right questions may not even have been asked.

-Seth Klarman, Margin of Safety, p.90

Comment author: MichaelGR 11 September 2011 04:37:05AM 21 points [-]

“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.”

-Steve Jobs, [Wired, February 1996]

Comment author: private_messaging 28 August 2013 06:54:59PM *  1 point [-]

He was the guy who thought that people were too dumb to operate a two-button mouse. It's not that the networks conspired to dumb us down, and it's not that people want something exactly this dumb, but it's that those folks in control at the networks, much like Jobs himself, tend to make systematic errors such as believing themselves to be higher above the masses than is actually the case. Sometimes that helps to counter the invalid belief that people will really want to waste a lot of effort on your creation.

Comment author: gwern 30 August 2013 02:13:39AM 6 points [-]

He was the guy who thought that people were too dumb to operate a two-button mouse.

And many of his other simplifications were complete successes and why he died a universally-beloved & beatified billionaire.

Comment author: shminux 30 August 2013 05:28:44AM *  4 points [-]

universally-beloved

Seems like a bit of an exaggeration. Almost universally respected, sure.

Comment author: mare-of-night 30 August 2013 09:08:36PM 1 point [-]

He was the guy who thought that people were too dumb to operate a two-button mouse.

Did he say this, or are you inferring it from his having designed a one-button mouse?

Having two incorrect beliefs that counter each other (thinking that people want to spend time on your creation but are less intelligent than they actually are) could result in good designs, but so could making neither mistake. I'd expect any decent UI designer to understand that the user shouldn't need to pay attention to the design, and/or that users will sometimes be tired, impatient or distracted even if they're not stupid.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 11 September 2011 07:11:51PM *  3 points [-]

It's still an open question how well the networks succeed at giving people what they want. We still see, for instance, Hollywood routinely spending $100 million on a science fiction film written and directed by people who know nothing about science or science fiction, over 40 years after the success of Star Trek proved that the key to a successful science fiction show is hiring professional science fiction writers to write the scripts.