Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
Sometimes you hear philosophers bemoaning the fact that philosophers tend not to form consensuses like certain other disciplines do (sciences in particular). But there is no great mystery to this. The sciences reward consensus-forming as long as certain procedures are followed: agreements through experimental verification, processes of peer review, etc. Philosophy has nothing like this. Philosophers are rewarded for coming up with creative reasons not to agree with other people. The whole thrust of professional philosophy is toward inventing ways to regard opposing arguments as failure, as long as those ways don't exhibit any obvious flaws. However much philosophers are interested in the truth, philosophy as a profession is not structured so as to converge on it; it is structured so as to have the maximal possible divergence that can be sustained given common conventions. We are not trained to find ways to come to agree with each other; we are trained to find ways to disagree with each other.
Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.
Bertrand Russell
News flash, dearies: there’s lots of areas of life that aren’t ‘science’ where people do tend to get a mite hung up on particulars of what is and is not, in fact, true. Like in bookkeeping. Like in criminal investigations. Like when they’re trying to establish where their spouse was last night.
Like, in fact, in most facets of life, hundreds of times a day, even if accounting isn’t your field and you’re not the accused at a criminal trial, and you’re not even married. Getting the facts right isn’t a concern of ‘science’, specifically. It’s a general concern of human beings. Getting reality right is, frequently, indeed, rather important if you wish to stay alive. It’s not a particularly academic question whether the car is or is not coming, when you cross the road. It’s the sort of thing one likes to get right. And we don’t generally call this ‘science’, either. We call it ‘looking’.
-- AJ Milne
Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality. When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world itself becomes your memory, and if questions arise, you can always point others back to it. You can even reconsider certain facts and honestly change your views. And you can openly discuss your confusion, conflicts, and doubts with all comers. In this way, a commitment to the truth is naturally purifying of error.
Sam Harris, "Lying"
I think this is actually a myth. It's appealing, to us who love truth so much, to think that deviating from the path of the truth is deadly and dangerous and leads inevitably to dark side epistemology. But there is a trick to telling lies, such that they only differ from the truth in minor, difficult to verify ways. If you tell elegant lies, they will cling to the surface of the truth like a parasite, and you will be able to do almost anything with them that you could do with the truth. You just have to remember a few extra bits that you changed, and otherwise behave as a normal honest person would, given those few extra bits.
Worse, you can simply let people catch you, then get angry with them and bully them into accepting your claims not to have lied out of a mix of imperfect certainty and conflict avoidance. By doing this you condition them to accept the radical form of dominance where they have the authority to tell you what you are morally entitled to believe.
You're not actually disagreeing with Harris. Crafting efficient lies that behave as you describe is hard, particularly on the spot during conversation. Practice helps, and having your interlocutor's trust can compensate for a lot of imperfections, but it's still a lot of work compared to just sharing everything you know
Hm, that gives me an idea: study lying as a computational complexity problem. Just as we can study how much computing power it takes to distinguish random data from encrypted data, we can study how much computing power it takes to formulate (self-serving) hypotheses that take too much effort to distinguish from the truth.
Just a thought...
(Scott Aaronson's paper opened my eyes on the subject.)
I don't know much about the problem in question, but there's a related open problem in number theory.
Suppose I am thinking of a positive integer from 1 to n. You know this and know n. You want to figure out my number but are only allowed to ask if my number is in some range you name. In this game it is easy to see that you can always find out my number in less than 1+log2 n questions.
But what if I'm allowed to lie k times for some fixed k (that you know). Then the problem becomes much more difficult. A general bound in terms of k and n is open.
This suggests to me that working out problems involving lying, even in toy models, can quickly become complicated and difficult to examine.
Are you familiar with the seemingly similar question about the prisoners, king, and coin? I don't know the name, but it goes like this:
...There are n prisoners in separate rooms, each with a doorway to a central chamber (CC) that has a coin. One by one, the king takes a random prisoner into the CC (no one else can see what is going on), and asks the prisoner if the king has brought all prisoners into the CC by now. The prisoner can either answer "yes" or "I don't know". If he says the former and is wrong, all prisoners are executed. If he's right, they're released.
If If he says "I don't know", he can set the coin to heads or tails. The king may turn over the coin after a prisoner leaves (and before he brings the next in), but he may only do so a finite k number of times in total. (This is a key similarity to the number of lies in the problem you describe).
The prisoners may discuss a strategy before starting, but the king gets to listen in and learn their strategy. So long as the game continues, every prisoner will be picked inifinte times (i.e. every prisoner can always expect to get picked again).
Is it possible for the prisoners to guarantee t
Being embarrassed about your knowledge is anathema to rational conversation. You can see it in drug policy debates, where nobody talks about how relatively harmless marijuana is, for fear that people might know that they smoke it. You can see it in censorship debates, where no community member is going to stand up and say "hey, this porno doesn't violate my standards, in fact it's pretty hot". We can stand around pretending to be good people, or we can get at the truth.
I'm more willing to admit to lying here, because I trust you guys more than most people to take that admission only for what it is, and no more.
"What do you think the big headlines were in 1666, the year Newton posited gravitation as a universal force, discovered that white light was composed of the colors of the spectrum, and invented differential calculus, or in 1905, the “annus mirabilis” when Einstein confirmed quantum theory by analyzing the photoelectric effect, introduced special relativity, and proposed the formulation that matter and energy are equivalent? The Great Fire of London and the Anglo-Dutch War; The Russian Revolution and the Russo-Japanese War. The posturing and squabbling of politicians and the exchange of gunfire over issues that would be of little interest or significance to anyone alive now. In other words, ephemeral bullshit. These insights and discoveries are the real history of our species, the slow painstaking climb from ignorance to understanding."
On the other hand, those thousands of lives cut short by violence are also the real history of our species — the misery we are climbing out of. The value of the discovery of the spectrum of light lies in its being put to use in ensuring that London never burns again.
I'm tempted to agree but at another level tempted to disagree. The Great Fire, the Anglo-Dutch War and the Russo-Japanese war might not have had such large scale impacts, but the Russian Revolution laid to formation of the USSR and the cold war, leading to one of the greatest existential risk to human ever. Much of the science done in the 1950s and 60s was as part of the US v. USSR general competition for superiority. Without the Russian Revolution we might very well have never gone to the moon.
Also, Newton wasn't the first person to posit gravity as a universal force. Oresme discussed the same idea in the 1300s. Newton wasn't even the first person to posit an inverse square law. He was just the first to show that an inverse square law lead to elliptical orbits and other observed behavior. See this essay.
The quote is indeed imperfect, but I think the sentiment it conveys is accurate.
After all, in a thousand years or so, Russian revolution and the USSR will be as important as the Mongol invasion and the Khanate of the Golden Horde are today. If we didn't get to the moon fifty years ago, there would have been some other conflict pushing some other line of advancement.
It is also, for the actual point of the quote, irrelevant who made the discoveries. The point is that in long range, the importance of those discoveries will always overshadow ephemeral political events.
After all, in a thousand years or so, Russian revolution and the USSR will be as important as the Mongol invasion and the Khanate of the Golden Horde are today.
Which is to say: pretty important. Not that it's important what exacly some boundary was, or who did what to whom...but all these things are part of the overall development of our current state of affairs, from the development of paper money to credit systems, from Chinese approach to Tibet to the extent of distribution of Islam.
I think it's risky to assume that "science", while more easily identified as rational, is in fact more rational than the rational facts of history, and its causal relationship to the present.
Discoveries in science are, in a sense, what "has to be". But while histroy could have been different, itt wasn't, and it simply "is what it is".
Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
André Gide
Don't you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really contradict: that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return; perhaps Strake and I have striven in many shapes, beast against beast and bird against bird, and perhaps we shall strive for ever. But since we seek and need each other, even that eternal hatred is an eternal love. Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all things are but aspects of one thing: a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God?'
'No,' said Father Brown.
-- G.K. Chesterton
That said, I don't quite understand why this constitutes a Rationality Quote.
To me, the lesson is that when someone appeals to your intuitions - you can just say no.
"Don't you feel there must be a supreme being, that everything has a purpose and a place in the grand order of things?"
"No."
(Fun story, incidentally.)
A decision was wise, even though it led to disastrous consequences, if the evidence at hand indicated it was the best one to make; and a decision was foolish, even though it led to the happiest possible consequences, if it was unreasonable to expect those consequences.
-- Herodotus
After some more searching and a pointer on Straight Dope, I think I've found it in Book 7 of the Histories when Artabanus is trying to dissuade Xerxes from launching his ill-fated war against the Greeks, where it is, as one would expect from Jaynes's paraphrase, different:
"1 So do not plan to run the risk of any such danger when there is no need for it. Listen to me instead: for now dismiss this assembly; consider the matter by yourself and, whenever you so please, declare what seems best to you. 2 A well-laid plan is always to my mind most profitable; even if it is thwarted later, the plan was no less good, and it is only chance that has baffled the design; but if fortune favor one who has planned poorly, then he has gotten only a prize of chance, and his plan was no less bad."
Or in another translation:
"Think then no more of incurring so great a danger when no need presses, but follow the advice I tender. Break up this meeting, and when thou hast well considered the matter with thyself, and settled what thou wilt do, declare to us thy resolve. I know not of aught in the world that so profits a man as taking good counsel with himself; for even if things fall out against one's hopes, still one has counselled well, though fortune has made the counsel of none effect: whereas if a man counsels ill and luck follows, he has gotten a windfall, but his counsel is none the less silly."
T-Rex: If I lived in the past I'd have different beliefs, because I'd have nobody modern around to teach me anything else!
FACT.
And I find it really unlikely that I would come up with all our modern good stuff on my own, running around saying "You guys! Democracy is pretty okay. Also, women are equal to men, and racism? Kind of a dick move." If I was raised by racist and sexist parents in the middle of a racist and sexist society, I'm pretty certain I'd be racist and sexist! I'm only as enlightened as I am today because I've stood on the shoulders of giants.
Right. So that raises the question: Is everyone from that period in Hell, or is Heaven overwhelmingly populated by racists?
-- T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics
I think the obvious answer would be that Heaven is overwhelmingly populated by ex-racists. Once they get there, they'd have people around to teach them better stuff.
I believe this was the point EY was trying to make in Archimedes's Chronophone. In short, it's a lot harder to send advice to the past when you can only transmit your justification for believing the advice. If your true reason for holding your "enlightened" views is because they're popular, then the recipients on the other side will only hear that they should do whatever practice was popular for them.
"We know this much
Death is an evil;
we have the gods'
word for it; they too
would die if death
were a good thing"
--Sappho #7; trans. Barnard (seen on http://www.nada.kth.se/%7Easa/Quotes/immortality )
The most valuable acquisitions in a scientific or technical education are the general-purpose mental tools which remain serviceable for a lifetime. I rate natural language and mathematics as the most important of these tools, and computer science as a third.
George E. Forsythe
It would be an error to suppose that the great discoverer seizes at once upon the truth, or has any unerring method of divining it. In all probability the errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one. Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must be many times as numerous as those that prove well founded. The weakest analogies, the most whimsical notions, the most apparently absurd theories, may pass through the teeming brain, and no record remain of more than the hundredth part….
W. Stanley Jevons
Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies — words — and so sank or floated with equal ease. But since truths were carved by the World, they rarely appeased Men and their innumerable vanities.
-- Drusas Achamian, in "The White-Luck Warrior" by R. Scott Bakker
The god we seek must rule the world according to our own will.
Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2
He wanted to find fault with the idea but couldn't quite do it on the spur of the moment. He filed it away for later discrediting
The Magician King by Lev Grossman
Three proposed derogatory labels from Dilbert creator Scott Adams:
Labelass: A special kind of idiot who uses labels as a substitute for comprehension.
Binarian: A special kind of idiot who believes that all people who hold a different view from oneself have the same views as each other.
Masturdebator: One who takes pleasure in furiously debating viewpoints that only exist in the imagination.
Binarian: A special kind of idiot who believes that all people who hold a different view from oneself have the same views as each other.
That's something I have to occasionally remind myself not to be, as an atheist.
Oh, I was. Catholic. Why do you ask, do you suppose religious people aren't prone to thinking that the "religious viewpoint" generally means their own?
Well, anyway, I was only religious until about the age of 9 or 10, so that doesn't mean much. What should mean more is that later in life even as an atheist I had a lot of interest in religion and spirituality, and I became familiar with a lot of varied ideas; I'd read the Bible and Bhagavad Gita for pleasure, and debated with my religious friends avidly. It was all rather interesting, since at that time I wasn't a strong atheist by any means and I suspected there might be something to it.
But eventually my views shifted towards strong atheism, and I felt I'd more or less exhausted the topic. Since then I notice my brain got lazier when it came to processing religious ideas. If by some chance I find myself in debate with a religious friend (not long ago I had a big one with a Jewish friend of mine who's very unimpressed with Eliezer ;) and more importantly, has wrong ideas about evolution), it takes effort to actually listen to what he's saying and make sure I understand where he's coming from - rather than accessing my the...
Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Secret Miracle".
The least evil is still evil. The least monstrous is still monstrous
When, as will happen, you are yourself forced to choose between two bad things, then choose the lesser of the evils and choose it boldly. That will be the right choice and, if circumstances are truly as circumscribed as you believe them to be, that will be the right thing to do in that situation.
But it still won't be a good thing. It isn't a good thing and cannot be made good.
Fred Clarke, August 9
Because it's not about food, but the challenge? Without the roadrunner, Wile E. is nothing. He depends on not succeeding. (Just noticed what a great role model he is.)
To quote Warner's famous essay on cartoonialism, "The struggle itself...is enough to fill a character's heart. One must imagine Coyote happy."
According to certain versions, Chuck Jones and his team established a set of rules for the cartoon (such as "The audience's sympathy must remain with the Coyote" and "Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote's greatest enemy"). One of them is supposed to have been:
The Coyote could stop anytime—IF he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: "A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim." —George Santayana).
Jettison politics from your personal life. Jawing about political ideology is worse than useless — it’s a time suck and a trick played by your status-seeking reptilian hindbrain on your frontal lobes that does nothing to bring you more happiness OR status. Your vote really won’t matter.
--Roissy in DC
Except that we are all part of this "doomed civilization", and if it collapses in civil war, nuclear apocalypse or even just a gigantic economic collapse, being at poolside won't keep you safe. So we have to save it, or to fix it. Now you can say that building a friendly AI is a much more efficient way of saving it/fixing it that getting involved in politics. That's something I can fully respect. But saying that you don't care or don't want to try is irresponsible.
For myself, saving it is very close to the thing I've to protect so I won't skip any single way I have under my own power of trying to save it : from understanding the world better to raising the sanity waterline around me to giving to charity to using train or walking instead of having a car to getting involve in politics even if it's "dirty". Because what matter is to win.
I'm very open to any argument about "this would be a more efficient way to save it" that would make me stronger in defending what I've to protect, but "don't try to save it, have fun and if everything collapse too bad" is not acceptable, it doesn't help my terminal values.
It was actually Lesswrong which made me realize politics is mostly bunk, when I saw that we could talk about nearly anything it and it was completely irrelevant. And we often speak of big things. Daily politics, anything shorter than a several decade long trend or a revolution will simply not affect you and is a waste of cognitive resources and often a source of frustration.
You are not living in a hunter gatherer tribe where your voice matters, the pay-offs are so low that how your country is run could be about as influenced by your actions as are plate tectonics and you probably couldn't tell the difference. Social interactions will inform you of change which specifically requires you to change behaviour, no need to watch the news.
Really following this advice in the past two years has saved me hundreds of hours that I've been able to spend on leisure and productive endeavours. This is ignoring the emotional investment, that I would have also wasted. If I'm going to waste that, I may as well root for my favourite sports team rather than political party! More entertaining and at least that won't cause me to cut myself from interesting people or career opportunities or leave me vulnerable for silly beliefs with repercussions beyond being mistaken about my team "deserving" to win.
Lesswrong, please listen, it is OK to put on your cynic hat when that is the best thing to do!
Ironically being apolitical people will assume your politics match theirs or at least fall somewhere on the spectrum of respectable consensus, so the difference between this and consciously maximising your opinions might be smaller than seems at first glance.
I agree, though in societies that are ideologized to a high degree, it takes non-trivial knowledge to recognize all topics and opinions that will be taken as political, so that paradoxically you need some knowledge of politics to be safely apolitical. Similarly, in such societies, the range of professions that don't require at least some expression of ideological rectitude can be surprisingly narrow, and it may exclude practically all high-status professions, even those that are supposed to be strictly technical. It seems to me (though it would of course be a controversial question in its own right) that Western societies have been moving in this direction for quite a while now.
Now, people, especially smart people, usually have an instinct to synchronize unconsciously with the respectable opinion (or rather with some particular position within the range of the respectable opinion). They will obtain the necessary knowledge w...
It is trivial to predict the correct position on nearly anything following a few simple rules.
Could you please state these rules.
Rule 1: assume all judgments that things are [ETA: or are] not of equal value are due to motivated thinking by people writing their bottom line according to a weighted primeval in-group/out-group equation, and in response one should compensate along necessary opposite vectors [ETA: or find an ingroup member to inform you about their group].
Rule 2: Rule 1 does not apply to the extent the in-group in question is constructed around complying with these rules.
Note 1: There will not necessarily be unique solutions to these rules, for example, evidence that men and women think differently in important ways can either be dismissed entirely or have its interpretation arranged so that the tasks women are better at are more important.
Note 2: These rules only apply to conclusions in line with primeval in-group/out-group thinking, for example, no one cares if their non-African scientists discover that all modern non-Africans are descended from Neanderthals, because the in-group is allowed to say things that some perceived moral systems would see as making them inferior. The opposite would have been a different situation.
Note 3: Any conclusion that results from compensating more than one ...
In fact since you bring up ideology, I will say that taking an outside view of dominant Western ideology one can conclude it is remarkably easy to figure out its result, compared to the extensive processing one must do within the framework provided by this ideology to get the same result.
No argument there, however getting to the point where you have an outside view is by itself a vast and difficult project in political and ideological self-education, which requires successful grappling with many extreme mind-killing issues without getting mind-killed yourself. You make it sound much easier than it really is!
Politics as in the politics that most obviously triggers this is useless.
What I meant by this was things like idle speculating about the election. Indulging in off hand remarks about Gawddamn Liberals and Bible Thumping Conservatives. Frowning seriously and speaking about some politicians misconduct. Debating the particularities of certain laws. Endorsing candidates, criticizing candidates. Taking the parties stated platform seriously, ad hominens on the demographics that support a certain position, various other Dark Arts, ect.
In short everything that immediately triggers tribal feelings in those who are basically politically active average Joe "good citizens".
The "real" mechanism would be perhaps controversial but mostly not covered under the "no mind killers" rule.
These are of course ideological mind-killers. I would argue that currently there is some room for intelligent debates on LW about various such issues, the sore thumb being gender relations/sexual conduct. People are not obviously mind-killed by discussing say group differences or questioning Democracy (ok many are, but a substantial and not at all fringe fraction of LWers who have ...
Please note: thinking politics is bunk is not the same thing as not being interested in politics.
Or, to use a line I've always dreamed of using, after shocking somebody with unexpected political knowledge: "I said I was apathetic. I didn't say I was ignorant."
(And no, the Pericles quote is not a good rationality quote. It's blatant propaganda from the mouth of a politician.)
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
William Lawrence Bragg
This is one of those occasions when it would be wise to translate back into respectable gene language, just to reassure ourselves that we have not become too carried away with subjective metaphors.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, ch. 8
Whether their motives were righteous or venal, highminded or base, noble or ig-, in retrospect the obvious verdict is that they were all morons--yes, even the distinguished fellows and visiting scholars at think tanks and deans of international studies schools. They were morons because the whole moral, political and practical purpose of their scheme depended on its going exactly according to plan. Which nothing ever does. The Latin phrase for this logical fallacy would be Duh. Some of them were halfway intelligent; some of them may even have been well-intentioned; but they lacked imagination, and this is a fatal flaw. What we learn from history is that it never turns out like it's supposed to. And the one thing we know for sure about the future is that it won't be like we think.
Tim Kreider, Artist's Note for The Pain
"-but I think it would probably kill you."
"Comforting to know. Well, more comforting than not knowing it could kill you," I remark pointedly.
A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.
--Thomas Carlyle
"Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else--a stranger in the street, for example." -Lemony Snicket
If you want a truly amoral reason to care, it is this: most other people do, and these are the people you will have to convince of any proposal you want to make about anything, ever. If you propose something unfair, and are called on it, you will lose status and your proposal is unlikely to be adopted.
I would be deeply surprised if you did not care at all about fairness. I tend to think that at least some regard for fairness is part of the common mental structures of humans (there's a sequence post about this but I can't find it)
Agreed, but I don't think the quote necessarily disagrees with you. I interpreted it to mean, "If you want to know if something is fair, you can't just consult yourself." This says nothing about whether fairness is helpful or desirable, it's just warning against committing the typical mind fallacy with respect to fairness.
My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse—and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth of—a proposition that I don't understand. So far, my faith is not unlike religious faith, but I am not in the slightest bit motivated to go to my death rather than recant the formulas of physics. Watch: E doesn't equal mc2, it doesn't, it doesn't!
--Dan Dennet: Breaking the Spell
You are not a special little snowflake, but you should act like you are. If people are going to form impressions of you it’s better they make false positive ones than true negative ones.
-- Roissy in DC
"Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good."
--#122 Assorted Opinions and Maxims, Friedrich Nietzsche
"Real magic is the kind of magic that is not real, while magic that is real (magic that can actually be done), is not real magic."
-Lee Siegle
Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. It is a faculty that man has to exercise by choice. Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one’s consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.
Ayn Rand
It does not do to dwell on dreams... and forget to live.
Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore
"I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look."
--Principia Discordia (surprisingly, not quoted yet)
"As soon as we look at the nature of inference at this many-moves-ahead level of perception, our attitude toward probability theory and the proper way to use it in science becomes almost diametrically opposite to that expounded in most current textbooks. We need have no fear of making shaky calculations on inadequate knowledge; for if our predictions are indeed wrong, then we shall have an opportunity to improve that knowledge, an opportunity that would have been lost had we been too timid to make the calculations.
Instead of fearing wrong predictions, we look eagerly for them; it is only when predictions based on our present knowledge fail that probability theory leads us to fundamental new knowledge."
E.T. Jaynes's "Bayesian Methods: General Background"
"It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs."
I've read the source and context of that and it's really not impressing me as a rational thing to do... it's a clever/smartass thing to do, but in what way did Ilyssa win? Surely she didn't expect Eric to enlighten her on the subject in some way she hadn't thought about before, and now she is "miserable about Eric", and didn't get to enjoy Hamlet.
The "I can't stop myself" says it all - she can't choose not to defect. That's not a strength.
Maybe, but there's nothing to support the idea that that's what's motivating Ilyssa there. It seems more like an excuse to blurt out anything contrarian that comes to mind, without having to exercise any impulse control or consider the actual, you know, effect of the words.
Maybe I'm committing the typical mind fallacy, but I think I see what's going on here because there's a part of me that likes that quote - the part of me that is clever and contrarian and enjoys throwing wrenches into arbitrary social scripts and customs, because the arbitrariness combined with the expectation of being conformed to offends me. I think many of us here can identify with that and perhaps that's what's causing people to mistake that quote as a rationalist one?
If not, then answer me this: was either instrumental or epistemic rationality served there in any way?
provided you are able to ascertain which characters are actually the voice of the author, which for the vast majority of literature, is quite obvious.
This sounds like illusion of transparency to me. I've never written a character whose arbitrary lines I'd like quoted as though I'd said them sans fictional mouthpiece.
Why not use "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, by Eliezer Yudkowsky", rather than "Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"? My intuition is that putting the title of the work of fiction first makes it more clear that you're citing the author's words rather than necessarily the author's own opinions.
"Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf."
--William James, "The Will to Believe" (section VII)
With a few brackets it is easy enough to see that 5 + 4 is 9. What is not easy to see is that 5 + 4 is not 6.
Carl Linderholm, Mathematics Made Difficult.
Thus I make no apologies for focusing on income. Over the long run in- come is more powerful than any ideology or religion in shaping lives. No God has commanded worshippers to their pious duties more forcefully than income as it subtly directs the fabric of our lives.
-- Gregory Clark, A farewell to Alms
[ In his interesting book on economic history, Gregory Clark follows Adam Smith ]
Now, a symbol is not, properly speaking, either true or false; it is, rather, something more or less well selected to stand for the reality it represents, and pictures that reality in a more or less precise, or a more or less detailed manner.
Pierre Duhem The aim and structure of physical theory
"The role of art is to serve the rational man's need for a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther. Art gives him that fuel; the pleasure of contemplating the objectified reality of one’s own sense of life is the pleasure of feeling what it would be like to live in one’s ideal world."
-- Ayn Rand
Everything is revealed to he who turns over enough stones. (Including the snakes that he did not want to find.)
Anon
...And the simple reason why it is so easy to fool psychiatrists with words like "atypical" and "tricyclic" is that most psychiatrists are stupendously ignorant of even kindergarten-level pharmacology and have barely any idea about how to interpret a study-- I don't mean p values, I mean looking at the y-axis; I mean the introduction. Much, much easier to base all of their arguments on empty terms that are nothing other than branding choices. Never mind the senseless term "atypical". Gun to head, is Seroquel an "antipsyc
From the first episode of Dexter, season 6:
Batista: "...it's all about faith..."
Dexter: "Mmm..."
Batista: "It's something you feel, not something you can explain. It's very hard to put into words."
Dexter smiles politely, while thinking to himself: Because it makes no sense.
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
Isaac Asimov
If something doesn't make sense, one of your assumptions has to be wrong, because if something doesn't make sense, it can't be real.
House, episode 2x24, "No Reason"
The ones who do are a proper subset of the ones who think they can, and there are serious costs to being in the difference between the two sets.
Not every change is a catastrophe, but every catastrophe is a change.
-What the Wise Master might have said, if he were making a different point.
Roughly true, but downvoted for being basic (by LW standards) to the point of being an applause light. Good Rationality Quotes are ones we can learn from, not just agree with.
From the film The Maggie. The quote is excerpted from here.
Background: Earlier part of the 20th century, the west coast of Scotland. Marshall, an American, is in a small chartered aircraft chasing a Clyde puffer captained by Mactaggart, with whom he has business. He and the pilot have just caught sight of her in the sea below. Night is approaching.
Marshall: Where do you reckon they're making for?
Pilot: It looks like they're putting into Inverkerran for the night.
Marshall: Tell me, if they thought I thought they were going to Inverkerran, where do you r...
But what a fool believes ... he sees
No wise man has the power
To reason away
What seems ... to be
Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, via the Doobie Brothers
"I can do parkour for the rest of my life without even moving. Just efficient thinking."
There is an ironic but highly valuable quality to AI in all its forms. The e ffort to simulate or surpass human intelligence is uncovering subtleties and paradoxes about the human mind we might never have imagined. By way of heroic failures, AI is teaching us how truly strange [human] intelligence is.
Theodore Roszack
All the limitative Theorems of metamathematics and the theory of computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Church's Undecidability Theorem, Turing's Halting Problem, Tarski's Truth Theorem-- all have the flavour of some ancient fairy tale which warns you that "To seek self- knowledge is to embark on a journey which . . . will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described."
--Douglas Hofstadter
"We don't gotta just accept the way things are, just like we don't gotta let ourselves be lessened by death or any other damn thing. Just like we don't need no God to shape the world for us. We can make or lives the way we want them."
-- Jesse Custer, Preacher (Garth Ennis)
Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them…there is nothing.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
Lives of quiet desperation paradoxically may surface as ebullient market bubbles.
Peter Thiel, The Optimistic Thought Experiment
We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think — in fact they do so.
Bertrand Russell
The engineer does not believe in black magic, voodoo, or rain dances. The engineer believes in scientific truth, that is, truth that can be verified by experiment.
Samuel Florman
engineers turn out to be by far the most religious group of all academics – 66.5 per cent, followed again by 61.7 in economics, 49.9 in sciences, 48.8 per cent of social scientists, 46.3 of doctors and 44.1 per cent of lawyers, the most sceptical of the lot.
Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, Engineers of Jihad (p.51)
First off, it's easy to cheer "yay science!" and rag on low status beliefs, but does this quote tell us that this person is good at determining truth value in cases of controversy? If an experiment returns a particular result, do they feel compelled to believe it? What would they think, for example, about the OPERA measurements?
Second, a cheer for the epistemic rationality of engineers is particular is likely to be unpopular because engineers are somewhat famous for standing on the frontiers of crank science, and have a reputation for being more likely than others with "scientific" backgrounds to overestimate their own understanding and throw their credentials behind bad science.
At sea once more we had to pass the Sirens, whose sweet singing lures sailors to their doom. I had stopped up the ears of my crew with wax, and I alone listened while lashed to the mast, powerless to steer toward shipwreck.
-- Odysseus in Odyssey
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
They say when you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.
They underestimate me.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill
It does not do to dwell on dreams... and forget to live.
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.
-Schopenhauer
"Perfection isn't when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
For truth is eternal and divine, and no phase in the development of truth, however small may be the region encompassed, can pass on without leaving a trace; truth remains, even though the garment in which poor mortals clothe it may fall to dust.
Herman Grassmann, Die Ausdehnungslehre (translation by, I think, Michael J. Crowe)
...The following story is true. There was a little boy, and his father said, “Do try to be like other people. Don’t frown.” And he tried and tried, but could not. So his father beat him with a strap; and then he was eaten up by lions. Reader, if young, take warning by his sad life and death. For though it may be an honour to be different from other people, if Carlyle’s dictum about the 30 million be still true, yet other people do not like it. So, if you are different, you had better hide it, and pretend to be solemn and wooden-headed. Until you make your fo
A scientific theory
Isn't just a hunch or a guess,
It's more like a question,
That's been put through a lot of tests
And when a theory emerges
Consistent with the facts,
The proof is with science
The truth is with science.
Science is real (4x)
-They Might Be Giants "Science is Real"
Robert A. Heinlein
So very true (in reality) and so very wrong (morally) at the same time. It's my sincere hope that work on Raising the Sanity Waterline will eventually annihilate the relevance of this quote to modern society.