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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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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)
George E. Forsythe
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
William Lawrence Bragg
Bertrand Russell
Or a mathematician.
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.
W. Stanley Jevons
Sam Harris, "Lying"
Greater than signs are only necessary at the beginning of the paragraph, by the way.
Thanks, fixed.
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.
Not that I am implying that it is normal to be honest, haha.
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.
Doesn't your comment on Slashdot indicate that there is no solution?
Maybe I wasn't clear. The blockquoted part is (my phrasing of) the problem statement. In the slashdot thread (and this is all from memory), several correct, bounded solutions were posted. I'll try to find the thread. (IIRC the original phrasing had a cup instead of a coin.)
The intuition behind the existence of a solution is that the prisoners can effectively send infinite one-bit messages between each other, while the king can only block a finite number of them, so they just need to choose a leader and run some "message accumulator" protocol that will reach a certain state when all prisoners are certain to have been in the CC.
Edit: Wow, that was actually easy to find. 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.
This is the comment that provoked mine. Your link and this do seem to be solutions, though.
There are some comments I wish I could delete from slashdot ... and this site, for that matter ... such as the parent.
It is customary to add at the end of such confessions, "or so I'm told", which is technically not a lie but merely an implicature.
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.
You sound like you're advocating radical honesty. It seems like there should be a middle ground of making sure relevant information is introduced, but doing it in a way that minimizes derailing self-disclosure (or self-disclosure that could cost you in status).
Also, arguing from personal experience can be form of defection, shifting the conversation to an arena where one's convincingness is proportional to one's willingness to lie. (I think I have some comments saved that say that better than I can.)
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 (?)
For a second I read that as "putrefying."
Should "Lying" be italicized and not in quotes, since it's a book?
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.
Brandon Watson
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.
Were you never religious?
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 theist-viewpoint cache and arguing with that instead of my friend.
I think this is a general rule: we tend to spend fewer cognitive resources on processing ideas we regard as wrong. (Now that I put it that way, it seems trivially obvious). Just like so many religious people have preconceptions regarding what atheists think or believe, that atheists themselves repeatedly have to refute. Same thing. Brains are lazy.
Ex-religious people, who had previously conflated atheism and other religions, might be less prone to being binarians after becoming atheists.
Sample size of one, but I also have to remind myself as MarkusRamikin does. I was openly religious up until about 18, and was only someone I'd consider a serious doubter at 14, with relapses at 16 and 18. Prior to 14 and between the lapses, religiously pretty strong.
I often enough find myself with no plausible theory of mind for why a person says a thing that I don't think I do that much.
Perhaps it's not a question of much. Maybe we're awesome enough to detect even small variations in rationality and be alarmed if they're in the wrong direction. ;)
I mean, obviously I never catch myself being literally "binarian".
Why would that be obvious?
Uhm, because of everything else I said in this thread, before saying that. I should expect that any reasonable reader would by now find it highly unlikely that I literally assume all religious people believe identical things. Were you serious or just being clever?
In case I was genuinely unclear: I see "binarian" as a sort of anti-ideal, a severe case of cached thought reliance. Not something anyone of lesswrong level of sophistication would normally sink to all the way, more like a far away goal towards which you don't want to take even small steps.
That means you understand it.
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!"
Ran Prieur
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.
Agreed. All the things to say that she finds "interesting" and "valid" seem to be shocking to other people. That's not a problem of being too honest, it's a problem of intentionally trying to drive people away (or being someone's bulbous caricature of a "rationalist").
And, of course, rational agents maximize their current utility functions.
Another quote from that source amuses me:
Reminds me of Secular Heaven
Maybe her best chance for happiness would have been with a fellow rationalist, and there's only one way to find him.
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?
If you read the quote in context, then it's coming from a person who may have inherited paranoid schizophrenia from her father. The quote may be an attempt to add credence to thoughts and impulses that, for a while at least, align with rationality-as-we-know-it.
Taken out of context, it's a good mantra that you can apply as politely or impolitely as you like. You can even reword it so that it no longer requires attribution, thus removing the context you don't like.
Out of context, I still get a little red flag when I see the "I can't stop myself" part.
Though perhaps that might be because I didn't quite manage to divorce it from context in my mind...
EDIT: Anyway, I think context matters, the spirit in which a quote was originally made should be taken into consideration. So I downvoted the quote because I don't want people to look up the source and then perceive that kind of smartassery as "rationality" as approved by lesswrongians.
Yeah, I see your point. You won't accept a version with "I can't stop myself" removed?
I suppose... But if we change it and read it as being about something else (than what it was about in the original context) then it isn't really a rationality quote any more, is it?
Can it suffice that I understood where you're coming from and respect what you were trying to say? (even before getting here, I upvoted your previous comment, for clarity and responding well without being defensive.) I just object to that quote, not to the sentiment you're trying to express.
Thanks for the even-handed and accurate criticism. Rationality is awesome!
Fair enough.
Instrumental rationality is served if she likes blindsiding people more than anything else she could get from them, but she doesn't actually seem to, once she thinks about it.
J. K. Rowling
Edit: Wasn't expecting downvotes. Maybe the distinction between the attributions is obvious, but I still don't see it.
Edit 2: Downvotes explained; thanks.
I'm not one of the downvoters, but I'd say the quote isn't rationalist because it leaves out what one might be seeking power for. And it makes a wild guess about why everyone isn't in line with the speaker's favorite value.
I'd also say that it's important to think about where cooperation fits into trying to get anything done.
The point is that J. K. Rowling didn't say it.
Yes, I'm very confused. I knew it was Voldemort who said that, but could you perhaps explain your point? I'm unfamiliar with the original quote; were you trying to point out that Scott Aaronson didn't mean what was attributed to him anymore than Rowling meant what you attributed to her?
Even if he meant it (and it's unclear what that would mean in context), the minimum standard for attributing a quotation to someone should be that they said it themselves.
I disagree, I attribute a number of qutoes in my quotesfile to Eliezer, even though they were actually "said" by Harry, in HPMOR. I feel like it's a far more honest attribution, 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.
That's an interesting example when EY has complained himself about people attributing views to him based on the story, and even put disclaimers on chapters 1 and 22 to try to stop it.
I don't see how it's more honest. Are people going to infer that Scott doesn't hold any position that isn't attributed to him?
I've noticed the disclaimers, but I feel fairly confident (p > 0.95) that none of the quotes (They're all said by Harry) he would mind being attributed to him. If the consensus is that I shouldn't attribute these quotes to him, or if he himself actually says so, I will certainly change them:
• “When you put on the robes of a scientist you must forget all your politics and arguments and factions and sides, silence the desperate clingings of your mind, and wish only to hear the answer of Nature.” – Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
• “There is no justice in the laws of nature, … no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to. We care. There is light in the world, and it is us.” - Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
• “So I won't ask you to say that [it] was wrong … just say that it was… sad. We won't talk about whether or not it was necessary, whether it was justified. I'll just ask you to say that it was sad that it happened. … If we start out by saying that every life is precious, that it's sad when anyone dies, then I know we'll meet someday.” – Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
• “I see little hope for democracy as an effective form of government, but I admire the poetry of how it makes its victims complicit in their own destruction.” – Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
• “Tell me something. What does a government have to do, what do the voters have to do with their democracy, what do the people of a country have to do, before I ought to decide that I'm not on their side any more?” – Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
And I see it as more honest because the "character" doesn't exist. He isn't saying it, because he doesn't actually exist. If the author is speaking through the character (and you shouldn't quote the character, otherwise) then he or she is ultimately the speaker.
Ironically, I do have some quotes in my file attributed to characters, usually because they are from movies or TV shows with multiple writers, that you can't have a reasonable attribution to a single writer to.
The first two quotes seem like things that Eliezer would actually agree with. But I'm substantially less convinced about the others.
Nope.
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.
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.
See my other comment.
Also, when I first read the quote my brain inferred that Scott Aaronson had provoked some kind of blog drama kerfuffle and been forced into a backpedaling, self-justifying apology; which lowered its opinion of him.
There's more than one point. One is that it assuredly isn't Rowling's point of view, and another is that regardless of who said it, it isn't a rationalist statement.
I recommend that we have a convention of not just attributing quotes to their authors, but at least mentioning if a quote is the words of a fictional character. Ideally, there would be a link or some mention of context.
I am also not a downvoter (I generally try not to) but I think it's likely due to the hostile, aggressive tone, and the lack of implied values, as NancyLebovitz touched on.
I also might suggest that Rowling probably didn't mean that, since it was said by, ya know, Voldemort. Some may have downvoted because it implied Rowling agreed with it.
It is perhaps not obvious that you are ironically committing a sin in order to point out someone else's unironic sin, rather than just unironically sinning yourself.
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.
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
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 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?
That's a good point, there would be many many exceptions to such a prediction.
So at most, all I can say is that the racists in heaven are unlikely to find much in the way of 20th century ideals until people from the 20th century start dying and showing up there.
Why do they need to be taught? Isn't prejudice one of those human frailties that gets magically cleansed when you go to heaven? I mean, if you believe in that stuff. :)
Above the comic:
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.
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.
Jerky-of-the-month club?
Herman Grassmann, Die Ausdehnungslehre (translation by, I think, Michael J. Crowe)
Professor Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore
Not sure I want to take that from someone who died.
Is all wisdom about living by anyone who is no longer alive made worthless by that fact? That seems rather arbitrary!
-- Discordian saying
Because they only had time to discover three quarters of the recipe for immortality before they died...
The Magician King by Lev Grossman
Ibid.
-- Hans. The Troll Hunter
Kaboom!
Voted up :)
Yeah, well. In the context of the film it was one of the funniest lines, especially since it was delivered completely deadpan. I won't spoil it for anyone by explaining that context.
But as an aside, sometimes a nice big unexpected kaboom motivates and advances knowledge like nothing else. I'm kind of disappointed that the LHC hasn't made a mini black hole (as long as Stephen Hawking is right) or melted a hole through the alps or something :)
Please don't ever work on something truly dangerous. ;)
Don't worry. I promise only to destroy the world if I didn't expect it to happen.
I was thinking more in terms of cooking your own food or something. ;)
Voltaire
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.
Samuel Florman
I'm very confused by the downvotes, could someone explain?
Didn't downvote, but:
Interesting, thanks. And good points. Someone had already PMed me their reason for downvoting though (not mentioned in your list), but didn't want to influence future votes.
I may have edited while you were reading; sorry if so.
(I thought I got the phrase "cool people in lab coats" from a LW comment, but now it's joined the list of comments I can't find with Google.)
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).
No vote, but I've known several engineers who believe in black magic, voodoo, and/or rain dances.
Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, Engineers of Jihad (p.51)
"I can do parkour for the rest of my life without even moving. Just efficient thinking."
Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, via the Doobie Brothers
André Gide
"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."
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".
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.
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.
"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."
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
I've downvoted this for the following reasons. Appearances are deceiving and also people may present false appearances for their own benefit. What cannot be seen is still in effect (Gravity) Etc.
In a practical demonstration, what appears to be a piece of stone. Behind it, It's sand. It's pressed together over time, precipitation of minerals causes binding. Inside there could be some old fossil. Who knows.
I believe the intention of baiter is to refer to vague notions like spiritual domains or qualia that are somehow behind the epistemologically detectable aspects. I don't know the original context but given the sort of thing Sartre said it wouldn't surprise me if it meant something far from that in the original context.
Let's see if we can salvage it into a reasonable statement about epistemology:
-- A woman being shown an amazing horse, upon being informed that the horse will "take you 'round the universe, and all the other places too."
I'll admit, this insight is more impressive with musical accompaniment.
Unknown
-Scott Aaronson, from here
Sam Hughes
Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2
Wow, that one is actually brilliant!
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 ]
Carl Linderholm, Mathematics Made Difficult.
I do not understand.
-- Carl Linderholm, Mathematics Made Difficult
Let me explain why it's not easy to see that 5+4 is not 6.
Earlier, the numbers were defined as
2 = 1+1
3 = 1+2
4 = 1+3
5 = 1+4
6 = 1+5
7 = 1+6
8 = 1+7
9 = 1+8.
Where + is associative.
Consider a "clock" with 3 numbers, 1, 2, 3. x+y means "Start at x and advance y hours".
3
2 -> 1
Then 1+1 = 2 and 2+1 = 3, as per our definitions. Also, 3+1 = 1 (since if you start at the 3 and advance 1 hour, you end up at 1). Thus 4 = 1, 5 = 4+1 so 5 = 1+1 = 2.
So 6 = 5+1 = 5 + 4.
So because the numbers were defined with eight examples, no example explicitly showing associativity or commutivity, it's hard to see why there's no license to arbitrarily choose a modulus for each number?
Or perhaps we only feel like we can do that if that would let us make two sides of an equation equal? As if the implicit rule connoted by the examples was "if two sides of an equation can be interpreted as "equal", one must declare them "equal", where "equal" is defined as amounting to the same, whatever modular operations must be done to make it so? So the definitions are incomplete without an example of something that does not equal something else?
It's not just about 8 examples - with any number of examples it would be perfectly valid to insert something like 6 = 1. And so there's an additional axiom in Peano arithmetic that has to explicitly rule it out (if you're talking about numbers that way). Not super-shocking.
My interpretation of the original quote was to take "see that 5 + 4 is not 6" as "prove that you cannot prove that 5 + 4 = 6", in other words, "prove that Peano's arithmetic is consistent". Maybe I was too influenced by this.
I think that's a way better interpretation :D
Winston Churchill
been done at least once, but it's a good one =)
Oops! For some reason my first search didn't turn it up.
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.
-They Might Be Giants "Science is Real"
They Might Be Giants tries to give their songs merits, not just messages, but that bit doesn't really show it.
Bertrand Russell
-- Drusas Achamian, in "The White-Luck Warrior" by R. Scott Bakker
-- 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.
It reads like the writing of someone with an enormous axe to grind...
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.
Nothing ventured, less lost, however.
Apart from compound interest.
... even "staying the course" can be considered risking something if you have the proper mindset.
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.
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 ^^
-Confucius
That's terrible advice. Far better to spend that time thinking of a better attack plan. Make sure it includes contingencies to deal with anyone who may wish to avenge whoever you are killing.
I think the point of the quote is that it's yet better to spend that time doing productive things unrelated to revenge, given that generating enough such contingencies is pretty costly.
Edit: Actually, wedrifid is right.
No, it isn't. That is another point that could be made in the general area of "Boo Revenge". The most useful point that is conveyed, via assuming it as a premise, is that taking revenge is dangerous.
I argue that quotes don't (or rather shouldn't) get credit for all possible supporting arguments for the general position they are applauding.
-A Softer World
"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
House, episode 2x24, "No Reason"
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 . . .
Or if something doesn't make sense, you may not have learned to think like reality.
Great read thanks!
Fred Clarke, August 9
Tim Kreider, Artist's Note for The Pain
Isaac Asimov
"A scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler."
Einstein
"Perfection isn't when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery