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Rationality Quotes October 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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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Comments (532)
Brandon Watson
Bertrand Russell
Or a mathematician.
http://xkcd.com/263/
He did say "all exact science", a phrasing I think he probably chose carefully, so I'd charitably interpret the remark as being about people uttering purported scientific truths.
I think it's safe to say that Bertrand Russell knew about mathematicians, as he was one himself. :-)
Hydrogen atoms have exactly one proton.
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.
*where you have the authority to tell them (?)
Yep. Sorry.
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:
The answer is yes, and there's a known bound on how long it takes. (Got this from slashdot a long time ago.)
Edit: Found it. Here's the discussion that spawned it, and here's the thread that introduces this problem, and here's a comment with a solution. Apparently, the problem has a name it goes by.
Edit2: This also serves as a case study in how to present a problem as succinctly as possible. The only thing I got wrong about its statement was that the king chooses the order of the prisoners going into the CC (rather than it being random), although given the constraint that each prisoner is eventually brought in infinite times, and the strategy must work all the time, I don't think it changes the problem.
Not that I am implying that it is normal to be honest, haha.
As any decent defense attorney will tell you: if you're accused of something you didn't do, this is still an extremely bad approach.
Definitely. If questions arise you should always point others back to your attorney! ;)
For a defendant, lying is the only thing worse than telling the truth. Telling the truth is still often a terrible idea, particularly for a person accused in the formal American legal system.
(Edited to change meaning to what I originally intended but typed incorrectly. Original words were "For a defendant, the only thing worse than lying is telling the truth," but the above is what I had intended.)
Don't defence attorneys (at least in the USA) heartily recommend shutting up as opposed to lying?
Yes.
"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.
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".
Ran Prieur
-- AJ Milne
Not to be confused with A. A. Milne, who wrote Winnie the Pooh.
For some context, this is a response to allegations of scientism, a word with remarkably overt anti-epistemological connotations.
Really, I see it as describing a family of genuine failure modes that people trying to be "scientific" often fall into. For example:
a) attempting to argue by definition that something is "science" and therefore right.
b) arguing that just because some evidence isn't scientific, that it's not valid evidence.
c) insisting that the results of the latest scientific research should are right, despite results in the relevant field having a very poor replication rate.
In case people try to argue that these errors rarely get made, here is a comment by Yvain with 22 karma that makes errors (b) and (c).
Can you point out where Yvain makes those comments that you think violate b and c? Reading that post it looks to me like Yvain's points are a little more nuanced than that.
Note incidentally that while you might be able to use the word that way, the vast majority of people who use it seem to use it in a way closer to what sketerpot is talking about. If one interacts at all with either young earth creationists or homeopaths for example it often doesn't take long before the term is thrown around.
Here are some excerpts from Yvain's comments that exhibit the problems I mentioned, (as well as others that maybe I should add).
This essentially error (b) with elements of (c). From a Bayesian perspective "saying there are likely flaws in mainstream medical research" does mean one should decrease the weight one assigns to all medical findings, thus one should assign more (relative weight) to other, non-scientific, evidence, e.g., evidence likely to be based an anecdotes.
This argument violates conservation of expected evidence.
[Here follows several paragraphs describing of how much he discourages people from being afraid to take statins along with some references to "good doctors" and "correctly prescribed statin" that seem to be there to help set up a potential No True Scotsman] If my doctor recommends I take statin, I don't care about the base rates for statin "correctly prescribed" by "good doctors", I care about the base rate of statin as actually prescribed by actual doctors.
Then Nancy tells her anecdote
Yvain's reply begins:
Funny how he didn't see fit to mention this it his first post while he spent several paragraphs arguing for why satins are perfectly safe.
I'm not sure but somehow I suspect these numbers assume the statin was prescribed "correctly". Furthermore, they certainly don't take into account the base rate for medical studies being false. Also, he next says:
Somehow I suspect the numbers he gives in the preceding paragraph assumed no drug interactions.
I don't read most of that the way you've read it. For example, Yvain said "Saying that there are likely flaws in mainstream medical research doesn't license you to discount any specific medical finding unless you have particular reason to believe that finding is false." Discount is much stronger language than simply reducing weight in the claim.
No it doesn't. It only violates that if in the alternate case where Yvain knew that almost all new studies turn out to be right he would point this as a success of the method. I suspect that in that counterfactual, he likely would. But that's still not a b or a c type violation.
Most of the reply to Nancy while potentially problematic doesn't fall into b and c. But I don't think you are being fair when you say:
The standard of safe is very different than listing every well known side-effect, especially if they only happen in a fraction of the population. I don't see a contradiction here, and if there is one, it doesn't seem to fall under b or c in any obvious way.
It's not clear what Yvain indented to mean by "discount"; however, the rest of his argument assumes he can disregard the base rate unless there you have specific evidence.
In my experience scientists arguing with creationists (I haven't looked at arguments with homeopaths) frequently make the mistakes I list above, as well as a few related ones. In particular using the AJ Milne quote ciphergoth cited in an argument against creationism is itself at best a straw man, after all the creationist also cares about getting the facts right, in fact that's why he's arguing with the scientist, because he believes the scientist has his facts wrong.
In any case the underlying argument in the AJ Milne quote is: all people are about truth; therefore, you should believe what science has to say about subject X.
This is an example of either (1) or (2) depending on how the implicit premises are made precise.
Actually, the underlying argument is not: 'all people are about truth; therefore, you should believe what science has to say about subject X'.
The underlying argument actually is: attacking someone else's argument on the basis that said argument is apparently unreasonably concerned with something so naive as the actual facts of the matter, and smearing this as 'scientism' is purely misdirection, and utterly without logical basis. It's a culturally-based ploy that works only if one has been convinced that determining the actual facts of the matter are an exclusive and unreasonable obsession that only follows from one being afflicted with this apparent disease 'scientism', and, apparently, reasonable people not so obsessed really don't worry about such trifles as factuality.
It's a mite peculiar, to me, that you can read a comment that merely specifically says, in fact, that concerns with factual correctness are not the exclusive domain of science (and it was, in fact, a comment on a false dichotomy of exactly this nature--again, the context is at the link), and assume that what it means, apparently, is 'science by definition is right'. This assumption is utter nonsense. I've no idea where you pulled that from, but it sure as hell wasn't from my quote.
Speaking of which, lukeprog discusses the idea of "reclaiming" the word scientism on his blog.
André Gide
-- G.K. Chesterton
I so adore cliches. They create an expectation to subvert.
Do that too much and you'll end up with a "high brow" piece that's incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with the cliches you're subverting.
The short story in question is "The Dagger with Wings", originally published in The Incredulity of Father Brown.
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.)
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.
Who would teach them? The more severe racists from periods even further back?
Maybe the dead of other races, provably ensouled and with barriers to communication magically removed.
I think the assumption is that divine beings would be there.
Are you assuming people from the past are always more racist for any given time period?
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.
All that's needed is a belief in purgatory.
We'd probably all end up there too, based on the near certainty that we're doing things that people in the future will correctly consider as obviously immoral.
Obligatory SMBC
I intend to anticipate as many of those harsh-judgement-of-future-generations things as possible, do the right thing now, and breeze through purgatory so much faster than the rest of those chumps. Bwahaha.
On that note, does anybody want to speculate about what people in the future will correctly regard as immoral that we're doing now? The time to think about this is before we get to the future and/or purgatory.
Some low-hanging fruit, for example, would be the widespread mistreatment of people with gender identity disorder, or squandering money on forms of charity that are actually harmful, e.g. destroying poor countries' textile industries by flooding the market with cheap donated clothes.
I can't tell whether this is deadpan humor or not.
I think closed borders will be considered a great evil in the future, but that's probably another way of saying that not enough people are agreeing with me now.
That's an interesting interpretation of "we". Unless you do those things...?
I meant "we" as in "we, as a society", or more specifically "we, the society that I happen to find myself in." Please pardon the ambiguity.
I was being facetious. Please pardon the ambiguity.
Seems to imply, at least to me, a function of "we" that includes "I". Plus, it seems a more interesting question to ask what you're doing that might come to be considered immoral - it's rather unlikely that you're really perfect, isn't it?
It's easy to say "that thing that all those other people are doing, and which I already think is immoral, will come to be considered immoral by our descendants." That's just saying "I'm better than you, neener neener."
Ah, I misread DSimon's use of "we", and the misunderstandings cascaded from there. My mistake. To clarify, I would like to hear things that I may be doing that future generations may be justified in disapproving of. It's an interesting and relevant question. Gloating about my own supposed superiority (neener neener) hadn't even crossed my mind.
Like the vast majority here, I aim to improve myself.
-- Herodotus
The problem with that quote is that human biases often go the other way, i.e., we'd rather blame bad consequences on bad luck then admit we made a bad decision.
The quote may still have some use when applied to humans other than oneself.
I tried to track this down, and this seems to be Jaynes's paraphrase of Herodotus; pg 2 of "Bayesian Methods: General Background". (I looked through one translation, http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.mb.txt , and was unable to locate it.)
I got it out of "Data Analysis A Bayesian Tutorial" pg 4 where it is attributed to 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:
Or in another translation:
George E. Forsythe
Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2
-- Hans. The Troll Hunter
Kaboom!
W. Stanley Jevons
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Secret Miracle".
"Like every human" would be more correct.
See:
Kruger, J., & Gilovich, T. (2004). Actions, intentions, and trait assessment: The road to self-enhancement is paved with good intentions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 328-339. pdf
Is that actually true? A lot of authors are their own toughest critics; they're so close to what they write that they see all its imperfections, and tend to obsess over flaws that aren't actually that noticeable to most of their readers.
--Sappho #7; trans. Barnard (seen on http://www.nada.kth.se/%7Easa/Quotes/immortality )
Combine this with Nietzsche's "God is dead."
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.
-- Drusas Achamian, in "The White-Luck Warrior" by R. Scott Bakker
The Magician King by Lev Grossman
Ibid.
Adolph Hitler
What misfortune for all that those in power don't either.
An alternate, and perhaps even more frightening hypothesis: the people in power do think, and they're doing their best.
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:
Can't get refrigerated shipping out there in the desert.
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.
That's something I have to occasionally remind myself not to be, as an atheist.
What's the word for someone who sees errors as defining character attributes that only occur in "idiots" and not decent, sensible people like theirself and their friends and readers?
I don't think Adams thinks highly of himself or his readers.
Indeed. He often describes his motivation for posts as "Dance, monkeys, dance!"
-Scott Aaronson, from here
Fred Clarke, August 9
Sam Hughes
Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore
--Thomas Carlyle
I love this quote, but it really isn't true. People frequently forego the first one.
I just ran into a surprisingly candid example of Richard Feynman talking about when he did that. He worked on the atomic bomb to make sure that Nazis didn't get it first, but then he kept working on it even after the Nazis had been defeated.
I don't think the first one ever gets generated unless someone else asks them why they did that something.
it must be nice to be clever enough to generate good reasons in real time, rather than having to spend all your spare cycles preemptively coming up with justifications for your actions.
I interpret "good reason" as "'good' reason".
I love it too and I like to have an evil reason as well. That keeps things in perspective. And a right reason - which balances the 'good' with the 'evil' according to my ethical sentiment. But that's just a (morally ambiguous) ideal. The real reason, that which Carlyle mentions, is something else again.
I have a different angle - I like to have a stupid reason, to amuse my friends with.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, ch. 8
"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
William Lawrence Bragg
-- Roissy in DC
--Roissy in DC
Surrendering to the barbarians are we.
Wondering why people are down voting this, considering I and other LWers have advocated political disengagement in the context of live in first world (and other) states as a recipe for personal happiness and improved productivity, and such comments have been up voted in the past.
That could have used anonymity.
If other people think political ideology is highly relevant to status, doesn't that make it probably at least somewhat so?
I was actually searching for your thread, but didn't find it among articles tagged by quotes. I would have used it if it was so.
Some pretty low status people have been quoted in rationality threads in the past, including people with really odious ideologies. Are downvoters convinced that Roissy is even lower status than those individuals or are they rather concerned that since Roissy (as the blog was back in 2007-2009) was read by quite a few members of the OB/LW community (including Robin Hanson who still links to him)!
Basically is this a fear that while Roissy's beliefs pay rent in anticipated experience they are evil (as in espousing different values) and thus shouldn't be allowed to influence fellow LWers who are clearly not good enough thinkers to handle this?
If this is so this may be a confirmation of Vladimir_M's take on the state of gender related debates on LW.
Or it could just be a bad quote.
It isn't low status as much as it is "out group". Low status doesn't warrant that kind of attention.
Posters like dedalus2u (if I recall this right) have argued that out group is basically just lowest possible status.
I disagree with posters like dedalus2u. Practically speaking I would far prefer to be the out-group villain that people desperately try to lower in status than the person that actually has low status within the group who gets treated with utter indifference.
I think I agree.
So, I am sure, would that Roissy fellow. :)
Not a downvoter (and I doubt this is why people are downvoting, but I suppose it could be) but I somewhat disagree. There is a (very small) group of friends with whom I can discuss political topics without them becoming mind-killing. Frequently this is due to admitted information gaps between us, and it's about learning the specifics of an issue. It's certainly not easy though, and often involves us switching sides on each other when we see one of us using dark arts. Similarly, I would expect most LWers to be able to (somewhat) rationally discuss politics. Which is not to say that they would enjoy it/should just that I would expect them to be far more able (moreso than my friends) to do it productively.
If I had to guess why people are downvoting, though, it would be because discussing politics can bring you more happiness, and indeed does for many people, even if it's just yelling at each other. Although I feel very uncertain (p = 0.35) that this is actually the reason for downvotes.
"Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else--a stranger in the street, for example." -Lemony Snicket
Why? How does knowing about this 'fairness' thing help me? (This was the line I was expecting the quote to go after the first sentence.)
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)
There is enough neuroatypicality here that I am only barely surprised when someone deviates significantly typical human morality.
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.
Tim Kreider, Artist's Note for The Pain
Ayn Rand
It's too bad this has already dropped off the front page. Someone should request sticky threads here, although I don't care enough.
This view is much too binary. There are a myriad variety of choices of what to focus on, what aspect of it to focus on, and how much effort to apply to the focus. Someone can be purposefully aware of a very specific task, say a high speed race, with the bulk of their thinking down at the level of pattern matching. Someone can do highly abstract symbolic manipulations while half asleep and still recognize when they bump into the right set of manipulations to solve the problem.
--Principia Discordia (surprisingly, not quoted yet)
Maybe because it has little to do with rationality?
--#122 Assorted Opinions and Maxims, Friedrich Nietzsche
Upvotes for irony if anyone can find an earlier version of the quote from a European source.
Scott Aaronson
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.
Another quote from that source amuses me:
Reminds me of Secular Heaven
--Dan Dennet: Breaking the Spell
--William James, "The Will to Believe" (section VII)
Voltaire
Anon
E.T. Jaynes's "Bayesian Methods: General Background"
Pierre Duhem The aim and structure of physical theory
Carl Linderholm, Mathematics Made Difficult.
I do not understand.
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 ]
Sharon Fenick
"A scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler."
Einstein
Sounds good, but may not be meaningful outside of physics, where by "theory" you usually mean model, and a model can be made simpler or more complex as the occasion demands.
Considering my brain is too small for the universe, making the theory as simple as possible sounds like a good strategy when dealing with hard problems.
-- The Last Psychiatrist, "The Rise and Fall of Atypical Antipsychotics"
I went and read the original article and was massively entertained, mainly because I just studied for weeks to memorize all those drug names. I remember it saying in our textbook that the second-generation "atypical" antipsychotics had fewer side effects...and I was surprised because my friend is on a second-generation antipsychotic (Zyprexa) and at some point has had pretty much every possible side effect.
I read TLP with a giant grain of salt, because sometimes the things he says about the psychiatric profession just seem downright implausible.
Speaking as a person in the field - while true in general, in this particular case he is completely correct. Atypical antipsychotics have turned out to be massively misrepresented by the pharmaceutical companies. To avoid misunderstandings: I am a great supporter of pharmacological interventions, and I don't think that "Big Pharma" is an evil force, but this case has been one of the darkest spots on the image of the profession in the last decade.
The excellent and highly recommended "Mind Hacks" blog has been following the slow crash of the atypicals for a while. Latest can be seen here.
It reads like the writing of someone with an enormous axe to grind...
"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."
What is unbelief?
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 reckon they would make for then?
Pilot: Strathcathaig, maybe.
Marshall: This sounds silly, but if they thought I'd think they were going to Strathcathaig because it looked as if they were going to Inverkerran -- where would they go then?
Pilot: My guess would be Pennymaddy.
Marshall: If there's such a thing as a triple bluff, I bet Mactaggart invented it. Okay, Pennymaddy.
--Cut to aboard the puffer--
Mactaggart: Aye, he'll have guessed we're making for Inverkerran.
Hamish: Will he not go there himself, then?
Mactaggart: Oh, no. He'll know we know he's seen us, so he'll be expecting us to head for Strathcathaig instead.
Hamish: Will I set her for Pennymaddy, then?
Mactaggart: No, If it should occur to him that it's occurred to us that he's expecting us to go to Strathcathaig, he would think we'll be making for Pennymaddy.
Hamish: Well, then, shall I set her for Penwhannoy?
Mactaggart: No. We'll make for Inverkerran just as we planned. It's the last thing he's likely to think of.
-- Ayn Rand
--Douglas Hofstadter
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.
People put plenty of things into words that make no sense. Words are only words; that's why humanity invented mathematics.
Apple
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.
Traditional saying.
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.
Apart from compound interest.
... even "staying the course" can be considered risking something if you have the proper mindset.
At which point the saying becomes equivalent to "don't exist, nothing gained." Not a very informative interpretation.
Nothing ventured, less lost, however.
There's a nice quote from George Bernard Shaw on the same subject: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
It's more demonstrative imho ^^
--Thomas Carlyle
Indefinitely, anyway. I am reminded of another Carlyle quote that Moldbug quoted with approval (but then doesn't he always):
Theodore Roszack
David Hume
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.
Isaac Asimov
"I can do parkour for the rest of my life without even moving. Just efficient thinking."
James Burke
That guy needs to train his gut instincts more. Because I find mine damn useful and seldom 'dangerously wrong'.
In order to train gut instincts, wouldn't you already have to understand the thing that you were having gut instincts about, in order to know whether or not your instincts were telling you the right thing?
In some contexts one can just see what the consequences are and judge the instincts without understanding.
Yeah, but you don't exactly represent the average person. Still, I'm having second thoughts about this quote, and another quote I posted in this thread. Too inexact, they are. Apparently October is an off-month for me.
I like this quote, myself. It reminds me that when you're being affected by a difficult-to-correct-for cognitive bias, what "feels" correct is wrong, and the correct answer doesn't feel right. Quoting Eliezer:
Inexact sounds about right. There is certainly a point behind the quote (so I didn't downvote and can see why you would quote it) but perhaps it is a little overstated or slightly missing the problem of using the gut at the right time.
House, episode 2x24, "No Reason"
Or if something doesn't make sense, you may not have learned to think like reality.
Isn't possible that you've just asked a Wrong Question? Although I guess you could claim that you have then made an assumption that the question could be answered . . .
Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, via the Doobie Brothers
--Thomas Carlyle
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
Samuel Florman
Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, Engineers of Jihad (p.51)
No vote, but I've known several engineers who believe in black magic, voodoo, and/or rain dances.
I'm very confused by the downvotes, could someone explain?
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.
This is in fact, what the other person I mentioned commented, which I agree with, in retrospect. I had the advantage of context though - the author didn't specifically mean to laud engineers - this statement was made in the context of an engineering ethics textbook (essay? It's hard to remember, it was awhile ago).
Didn't downvote, but:
-- Jesse Custer, Preacher (Garth Ennis)