Rationality Quotes September 2011
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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.
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Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
— Horatio__Caine on reddit
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, via The Lichtenberg Reader: selected writings, trans. and ed. Franz H. Mautner and Henry Hatfield.
"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) .
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, part VI
-- Turkish proverb
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. ;)
-- Chinese proverb
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.
--Mencius Moldbug
--Steve Sailer
Careful now.
Will Newsome on facebook ;)
-- Ari Rahikkala
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.
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.
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?
-- Upton Sinclair
Dupe
Forgot to google it. Sorry.
"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)
Laplace
Sheldon Ross
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.
-Hippocrates
Here's the ancient greek version, to appease NihilCredo:
No puns, upvoted.
Why is a quote by a Greek, about whom our main sources are also Greek, being posted in Latin?
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.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur.
(At the risk of ruining the joke: "Anything said in Latin sounds profound")
Considering the beast that some hope to kill by sharpening people's mind-sticks on LW, this sounds applicable wouldn't you agree?
Upvote for "mind-sticks".
--Scott Aaronson
Interesting! Examples?
The whole link is basically a tissue of suggested examples by Aaronson and commenters.
“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.
-Steve Jobs, [Wired, February 1996]
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.
My parents are incapable of using the context menu in any way.
Jobs may have been on to something.
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.
And many of his other simplifications were complete successes and why he died a universally-beloved & beatified billionaire.
Seems like a bit of an exaggeration. Almost universally respected, sure.
Yep. Respected and admired at a distance, certainly. But a lot of people who knew him personally tend to describe him as a manipulative jerk.
Which has little to do with how he & his simplifications were remembered by scores of millions of Americans. Don't you remember when he died, all the news coverage and blog posts and comments? It made me sick.
Actually, no, I don't remember because I didn't read them. I'm particular about the the kind of pollution I allow to contaminate my mind :-)
Anyway, we seem to agree. One of the interesting things about Jobs was the distance between his private self and his public mask and public image.
I am too, but I pay attention to media coverage to understand what the general population thinks so I don't get too trapped in my high-tech high-IQ bubble and wind up saying deeply wrong things like private_messaging's claim that "Jobs's one-button mice failed so ordinary people really are smart!"
Meh, I thought of him as a brilliant but heavy-handed and condescending jerk long before I heard of his health problems. I refused to help my family and friends with iTunes (bad for my blood pressure) and anything Mac. My line was: if it "just works" for you, great, if not, you are SOL. Your iPod does not sync? Sorry, I don't want to hear about any device that does not allow straight file copying.
Heh. I have been known to engage in "What do you mean you are having problems? <blink> That's impossible, there's the Apple guarantee It Just Works (tm) (r) <blink> <blink>" :-D
Most people didn't (and don't) understand the contextual difference and themes of interface to design a two-button mouse interface.
The current system is to throw design patterns against the wall and copy those that stick.
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.
I don't think knowing about science had much to do with the success of Star Trek. You're probably right about the professional science fiction writers, though. Did they stop using professional sf writers for the third season?
In general, does having professional science fiction writers reliably contribute to the success of movies?
A data point which may not point in any particular direction: I was delighted by Gattaca and The Truman Show-- even if I had specific nitpicks with them [1] because they seemed like Golden Age [2] science fiction. When composing this reply, I found that they were both written by Andrew Niccol, and I don't think a professional science fiction writer could have done better. Gattaca did badly (though it got critical acclaim), The Truman Show did well.
[1] It was actually at least as irresponsible as it was heroic for the main character in Gattaca to sneak into a space project he was medically unfit for.
I don't think Truman's fans would have dropped him so easily. And I would rather have seen a movie with Truman's story compressed into the first 15 minutes, and the main part of the movie being about his learning to live in the larger world.
[2] I think the specific Golden Age quality I was seeing was using stories to explore single clear ideas.
I disagree. As I see it, The Truman Show is, at its core, a Gnostic parable similar to The Matrix, but better executed. It follows the protagonist's journey of discovery, as he begins to get hints about the true nature of reality; namely, that the world he thought of as "real" is, in fact, a prison of illusion. In the end, he is able to break through the illusion, confront its creator, and reject his offer of a comfortable life inside the illusory world, in favor of the much less comfortable yet fully real world outside.
In this parable, the Truman Show dome stands for our current world (which, according to Gnostics, is a corrupt illusion); Christoff stands for the Demiurge; and the real world outside stands for the true world of perfect forms / pure Gnosis / whatever which can only be reached by attaining enlightenment (for lack of a better term). Thus, it makes perfect sense that we don't get to see Truman's adventures in the real world -- they remain hidden from the viewer, just as the true Gnostic world is hidden from us. In order to overcome the illusion, Truman must led go of some of his most cherished beliefs, and with them discard his limitations.
IMO, the interesting thing about The Truman Show is not Truman's adventures, but his journey of discovery and self-discovery. Sure, we know that his world is a TV set, but he doesn't (at first, that is). I think the movie does a very good job of presenting the intellectual and emotional challenges involved in that kind of discovery. Truman isn't some sort of a cliched uber-hero like Neo; instead, he's just an ordinary guy. Letting go of his biases, and his attachments to people who were close to him (or so he thought) involves a great personal cost for Truman -- which, surprisingly, Jim Carrey is actually able to portray quite well.
Sure, it might be fun to watch Truman run around in the real world, blundering into things and having adventures, but IMO it wouldn't be as interesting or thought-provoking -- even accounting for the fact that Gnosticism is, in fact, not very likely to be true.
Your essay fails to account for the deep philosophical metaphors of guns, leather, gratuitous exaggerated action and nerds doing kung fu because of their non-comformist magic.
With apologies to Freud, sometimes a leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu is just a leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu :-)
That's kind of the point. A leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu probably isn't a costar in an 'inferior execution of a Gnostic parable'. She's probably a costar in a entertaining nerd targeted action flick.
In general it is a mistake to ascribe motives or purpose (Gnostic parable) to something and judge it according to how well it achieves that purpose (inferior execution) when it could be considered more successful by other plausible purposes.
Another thing the Matrix wouldn't be a good execution of, if that is what it were, is a vaguely internally coherent counterfactual reality even at the scene level. FFS Trinity, if you pointed a gun at my head and said 'Dodge This!' then I'd be able to dodge it without any Agent powers. Yes, this paragraph is a rather loosely related tangent but damn. The 'batteries' thing gets a bad rap but I can suspend my disbelief on that if I try. Two second head start on your 'surprise attack' to people who can already dodge bullets is inexcusable.
I did not mean to give the impression that I judged The Truman Show or The Matrix solely based on how well they managed to convey the key principles of Gnosticism. I don't even know if their respective creators intended to convey anything about Gnosticism at all (not that it matters, really).
Still, Gnostic themes (as well Christian ones, obviously) do feature strongly in these movies; more so in The Truman Show than The Matrix. What I find interesting about The Truman Show is not merely the fact that it has some religious theme or other, but the fact that it portrays a person's intellectual and emotional journey of discovery and self-discovery, and does so (IMO) well. Sure, you could achieve this using some other setting, but the whole Gnostic set up works well because it maximizes Truman's cognitive dissonance. There's almost nothing that he can rely on -- not his senses, not his friends, and not even his own mind in some cases -- and he doesn't even have any convenient superpowers to fall back on. He isn't some Chosen One foretold in prophecy, he's just an ordinary guy. This creates a very real struggle which The Matrix lacks, especially toward the end.
AFAIK, in the original script the AIs were exploiting humans not for energy, but for the computing capacity in their brains. This was changed by the producers because viewers are morons .
This is why I'm so glad the creators realized they had pushed their premise as far as they were capable and quit while they were ahead, never making a sequel.
I have many times heard fans say this. Not once have any produced any evidence. Can you do so?
The only evidence I have is that it's so obviously the way the story should be. That's good enough for me. It does not matter precisely what fallen demiurge corrupted the parable away from its original perfection.
ETA: Just to clarify, I mean that as far as I'm concerned, brains used as computing substrate is the real story, even if it never crossed the Wachowskis' minds. Just like some people say there was never a sequel (although personally I didn't have a problem with it).
According to IMDB,
So, I guess the answer is "probably not". Sorry.
But... but... TVTropes says it!
Damnit, I've been saying that too, and now I realize I'm not sure why I believe it. Ah well, updating is good.
I'm pretty sure that one of the Wachowski brothers talked about the deliberate Gnostic themes of The Matrix in an interview, but as for The Truman Show I have no idea.
-Seth Klarman, Margin of Safety, p.90
-Anon.
Julian Huxley, Darwinism To-Day
A nod to Molière's satirical line which coined the 'dormitive fallacy':
(Le Malade Imaginere (1673), Act III, sc. iii)
-- Nick Tarleton
The original goes:
-- T. S. Eliot
Local optima of what function?
Matthew (slightly paraphrased...)
It's been far too long since I've heard this underlying point acknowledged! Thankyou!
What does this mean?
If you have good judgement about what things imply, you'll be good at gathering evidence.
If you have poor judgement about what things imply, you'll lose track of the meaning of the evidence you've got.
Let me see if I've cottoned on by coming up with an example.
Say you work with someone for years, and often on Mondays they come in late & with a headache. Other days, their hands are shaking, or they say socially inappropriate things in meetings.
"Good inductive bias" appears to mean you update in the correct direction (alcoholism/drug addiction) on each of these separate occasions, whereas "bad inductive bias" means you shrug each occurrence off and then get presented with each new occurrence, as it were, de novo. So this could be glossed as basically "update incrementally." Have I got the gist?
I think what's mildly confusing is the normatively positive use of the word "bias," which typically suggests deviation from ideal reasoning. But I suppose it is a bias in the sense that one could go too far and update on every little piece of random noise...
"Inductive bias" is a technical term, where the word bias isn't meant negatively.
I think that's it, though there are at least two sorts of bad bias. The one you describe (nothing is important enough to notice or remember) is one, but there's also having a bad theory ("that annoying person is aiming it all at me", for example, which would lead to not noticing evidence of things going wrong which have nothing to do with malice).
This is reminding me of one of my favorite bits from Illuminatus!. There's a man with filing cabinets [1] full of information about the first Kennedy assassination. He's convinced that someday, he'll find the one fact which will make it all make sense. He doesn't realize that half of what's he's got is lies people made up to cover their asses.
In the novel, there were five conspiracies to kill JFK-- but that character isn't going to find out about them.
[1] The story was written before the internet.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Onion (it's sort of a rationality and anti-rationality quote at multiple levels)
-- Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism
Gary Marcus, Kluge
Relevant to deathism and many other things
"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.
Plato, Philebus
G.K. Chesterton
If I were a jelly fish,
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
All day long I'd biddy biddy bum.
If I were a jelly fish.
I wouldn't have to work hard.
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
I prefer if I were a deep one.
(If you aren't familiar with this song I strongly recommend one looks at all of Shoggoth on the Roof.)
A gentle introduction to the mythos.
-- Raymond Terrific
-- Cliff Pervocracy
-- Aleister Crowley
I recently contemplated learning to play chess better (not to make an attempt at mastery, but to improve enough so I wasn't so embarassed about how bad I was).
Most of my motivation for this was an odd signalling mechanism: People think of me as a smart person, and they think of smart people as people who are good at chess, and they are thus disappointed with me when it turns out I am not.
But in the process of learning, I realized something else: I dislike chess, as compared to say, Magic the Gathering, because chess is PURE strategy, whereas Magic or StarCraft have splashy images and/or luck that provides periodic dopamine rushes. Chess only is mentally rewarding for me at two moments: when I capture an enemy piece, or when I win. I'm not good enough to win against anyone who plays chess remotely seriously, so when I get frustrated, I just go capturing enemy pieces even though it's a bad play, so I can at least feel good about knocking over an enemy bishop.
What I found most significant, though, was the realization that this fundamental not enjoying the process of thinking out chess strategies gave me some level of empathy for people who, in general, don't like to think. (This is most non-nerds, as far as I can tell). Thinking about chess is physically stressful for me, whereas thinking about other kinds of abstract problems is fun and rewarding purely for its own sake.
LW has put a lot of thought into the problem of akrasia, but nothing I can think of on how to induce more pleasure from thinking.
I think rationality helps to avoid making mistakes, and avoiding feeling unnecessarily bad, but not too much to the positive side of things.
I agree-- pleasure in thinking might not be part of the study of rationality, but it could very much be part of raising sanity waterline.
Wow - I have a similar response to chess, but never drew that analogy. Thanks.
Learn to play Go, then even if your chess ability is lower, people won't be able to judge your Go ability.
Go is roughly a game based on encircling the other's army before his or her army encircles yours. A bit of thought about the meaning of the word 'encircle" should hint to how awesome that can be.
If your gaming heart has been more oriented towards WWII operational and strategic-level games, Go is the game for you. If chess incorporates the essence of WWI, Go is incorporates the essence of mobile warfare in WWII, if the part of the essence represented by Poker is removed.
Go=an abstraction of mobile warfare - Poker
Chess is battle, Go is war. I don't see how it's very much about mobility rather than scale.
What real scale and era, if any, is even roughly modeled?
Scott Boorman in The Protracted Game tried to model Mao with Go, and in particular, the anti-Japanese campaign in Manchuria. It was an interesting book. I'm not convinced that Go is a real analogy beyond beginner-level tactics, but he did convince me that Go modeled insurgencies much better than, say, Chess.
My issue with chess is that the skills are non-transferable. As far as I can tell the main difference between good and bad players is memorisation of moves and strategies, which I don't find very interesting and can't be transferred to other more important areas of life. Whereas other games where tactics and reaction to situation is more important can have benefits in other areas.
I think the literature disagrees. E.g. good players are less prone to confirmation bias and I think that this is transferable. (Google Scholar would know better.) Introspectively I feel like playing chess makes me a better thinker. Chess is memorization of moves and strategies only in the sense that guitar is memorization of scales and chords. You need them to play well but they're not sufficient.
True; see 2004 "Chess Masters' Hypothesis Testing" Cowley & Bryne:
Well... The chess literature and general literature on learning rarely finds transfer. From the Nature coverage of that study:
Checking Google Scholar, I see only one apparent followup, the 2005 paper by the same authors, "When falsification is the only path to truth":
While interesting and very relevant to some things (like programmers' practice of 'rubber ducking' - explaining their problem to an imaginary creature), it doesn't directly address chess transfer.
This is an awesome quote that captures an important truth, the opposite of which is also an important truth :-) If I were choosing a vocation by the way its practicioners look and dress, I would never take up math or programming! And given how many people on LW are non-neurotypical, I probably wouldn't join LW either. The desire to look cool is a legitimate desire that can help you a lot in life, so by all means go join clubs whose members look cool so it rubs off on you, but also don't neglect clubs that can help you in other ways.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872); cf. "Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism"
Is that the case?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At what margin? Using randomized procedures?
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.
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?
What does this mean?
What does this mean?
What does this mean?
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?
Yes, it's amazing how many bad decisions are made because it's heartbreaking to just say no.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Not quite. ER doctor.
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.
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.
Would you care to expand on that?
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.
Thank you. Cliff notes is fine. What do you expect social democracies to turn into?
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).
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.
Echoing a utopian meme is analogous to stamping an instance of an invention, not to inventing something anew. It is inventors of utopian dreams that I doubt to be more numerous than inventors of technology.
Can you invent a utopia? A utopia is an incoherent concept about a society that contains too many internal contradictions or impracticalities to ever exist. Thus, it cannot be invented any more than a perpetual motion machine can be.
If you do consider utopias inventable, what's the difference between "inventing a new utopia" and "having a new preference"? You want X; you dream of a world where you get X, inventing Utopia X.
And let's not forget how many millions of patents there are; I don't think there are that many millions of utopias, even if we let them differ as little as patents can differ.
You may be right here. Utopias are usually also quite uninnovative. "All people will be brothers and sisters with enough to eat and Bible (or something else stupid) reading in a community house every night".
Variations are not that great.
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.
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.
-- Scott Aaronson, Quantum Computing Since Democritus (http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec14.html)
It's even more useful to you when they turn out to be right. (As happened to me with sailing upwind faster than the wind, and with Peter deBlanc's 2007 theorem about unbounded utility functions.)
-- Mary Everest Boole
Yitz Herstein
Banach, in a 1957 letter to Ulam.
Richard P. Feynman
--Nicholas Epley, "Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making"
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:
Take the hard problem of consciousness.
Add in all the other things anybody has ever called “consciousness”.
Solve all those other issues one by one.
Conveniently forget about the hard problem of consciousness.
Would this count as doing something deliberately complicated to throw off anyone with an Occam prior?
You don't have to put the little '>' signs in on every line, just the beginning of a paragraph.
Fixed. Thanks.
-- HL Mencken
This is quoted already on this page albeit with "no matter" substituted for "however".
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.
-- Lewis Carrol, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
Hard to believe that it hasn't show up here before...
— John Derbyshire
--Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 2006, p. 255
Not if Western society is anything to go by. Not asking (but knowing the answer) produces a lifetime's worth of successes, as far as I can tell.
-Richard Feynman
-- Henry David Thoreau
--The Lion King opening song
Do you consider this a promotion of fun theory? Or a justification for living forever?
My initial guess was "keep learning, there's always more to learn."
Can also be an indication that everything is more than one person/mind can handle. By stepping into the sun, we enjoy the warmth and may be overwhelmed by the world as we see it. The song's lyrics seem cautionary, indicating that despite the warmth of being in the world do not attempt to see everything, do not attempt to do everything? This is rational, there are things we may not enjoy as much as others. To reduce our overall enjoyment by not placing parameters on our activities would be irrational in my opinion.
Both.
-- Richard P. Feynman
And oldy but goody.
-- Russian proverb
I'm Russian, and I don't think I've heard this proverb before. What does it sound like in Russian ? Just curious.
It's a rather lousy translation of the proverb, the more close variant of which than that above is mentioned in Vladimir Dahl's famous collection of russian proverbs: Церковь близко, да ходить склизко, а кабак далеконько, да хожу потихоньку.
Ahh, yes, thank you ! I didn't even recognize the proverb in English, but I doubt that I myself could translate it any better...
Can you provide a better translation?
http://masterrussian.net/f13/old-russian-proverb-10675/
I think I prefer Nietzsche's version...
-- C.S. Peirce
Frank Schaeffer
Beware the fallacy of grey.
-- Oliver Cromwell
Cromwell's rule is neatly tied to that phrase.
(Rephrasing: "For the love of Cthulhu, take a second to notice that you might be confused.")
This has been mentioned in a few places on LW before (e.g. here) although I don't know if it has been in a quotes thread.
-- C.S. Peirce
I will submit (separately) three quotations from my favorite philosopher, C.S. Peirce:
-- C.S. Peirce
~ William Johnson Cory
-- Sergey Dovlatov
(translation is mine; can you propose a better translation from Russian?)
-HL Menken
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.
-- Planet Sheen
Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
Megan McArdle
reminds me of:
"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant." --Robert McCloskey
Related SMBC.
-- Dr. Dre, "The Watcher"
Douglas Kenrick
-Sam Harris
-Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
In other words, politics is the mind killer.
I think it may be wiser to say "policy is the mind killer"; it emphasizes the cross-institutional cross-scale pervasive nature of political thinking.
-- Paul Graham
Locke
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
You may want to carefully consider this comment.
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.
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.
-- Robert H. Thouless
(Only in the sense of constructing some plan of action (or inaction) that currently seems no worse than others, not in the sense of deciding to believe things you have no grounds for believing. "Make up your mind" is a bad phrase because of this equivocation.)
...Unless your decision makes things worse.