Rationality Quotes November 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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 (391)
-Persi Diaconis
By the way, Diaconis stayed at Stanford. He's giving a public lecture on Nov. 30.
That's a pretty cool paper; eg.
Or:
Democritus
Certainly more convenient. I mean, you're right there. You don't even have to verbalize your arguments!
One of the strengths of Apollo 13 is that it has only good guys in it, battling together against an unforeseen, mysterious and near-lethal twist of fate.
Apparently he hasn't seen many Cohen brothers movies...
Which isn't to say this undermines his overall point - such movies are the exception, and interesting partly because of that - just that his language was too forceful.
Or movies that are about relationships instead of stuff blowing up. There are plenty of good movies with plots and no bad guys.
There's a mystery novel that left me incredibly angry at the author because I was expecting an interesting complex cause tying all the murders together, but there wasn't. I'm probably a calmer person now, and for all I know, there may have been hints I was missing about what sort of story it was.
Gur Anzr bs gur Ebfr
Nate Silver
From the same post:
-Alan Saporta
[ James Gleick - Genius - The work and Life of Richard Feynman; this is a really chilling passage, which describes the moments just after Feynman's wife has passed away, which devastated him. Somehow, this struck me.]
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, "Los Alamos from Below" (third chapter of Part 3)
Nice. This is probably where mr. Gleick got it from. The strange thing is that (I think), Feynman's wife's first name is Arline, not the more common Arlene. I found Gleick's book nice in that it did attempted to look beyond some of legends/anecdotes.
Alternate explanation: The clock stopped before his wife died, but the nurse recorded 9:21 as his wife's time of death, because she determined the time by checking the clock, not realizing it had already stopped.
Things like this always remind me to doubt clever-sounding explanations of phenomena I wouldn't actually have predicted in advance. Obviously, "not supernatural" is a very strong bet - but the specific hypotheses? Those are less obvious.
John W. Gardner
I agree with the general thrust, but ... even though modern western society does scorn plumbers (compared to philosophers), our pipes do hold water, and I don't have any complaints about the overall quality of plumbing.
Our society may not have much high words of praise for excellence in plumbing (you're more likely to talk about your hobby as a wildlife photographer than your job fixing toilets on your OK Cupid profile, even if you're average at the first and excellent at the second), but good plumbers get more money than bad plumbers, which is enough to get quality plumbing. By contrast, good philosophers get more praise from their peers than bad philosophers do, which is both harder to evaluate and less motivating.
So I don't think it's a matter of humble activity / exalted activity; designing bridges and transplanting hearts are exalted activities too, and we don't tolerate much shoddiness there.
I am thinking of coding up a web app for accumulating, voting, and commenting on quotes. Kind of like bash.org but much fancier.
Is that something you guys would be interested in? If so, what features would you want?
This would be free to use of course, and the site would not lock down the data (ie it would be exportable to various formats).
I am thinking there are a lot of communities that post quotes for internal use, and might be interested in a kind of unified web site for this. My initial thought is that it would be like Reddit, where each tribe/community/subculture/topic/etc gets its own subdirectory.
--Thomas Sowell
-John Barth, the Sot-Weed Factor
Mike Patton
Even if they did, would you believe them?
were getting stupider. :p
There's nothing stupid about "was" there. The subjunctive and indicative are equally grammatical in this context in modern English --- informal contexts might even prefer the latter over the former.
-Jacques Loeb, 1906, on the discovery of the mechanism of glycolysis
-- Odysseus in Odyssey
I'm confused about why it was valuable for him to be able to hear, if he wasn't allowed to act upon information.
The point of the story is that it illustrates the power of precommitment; Odysseus made a choice in advance not to steer towards the rocks even though he knew that when the opportunity would arise he would want to steer towards them.
Why he wanted to be lashed to the mast instead of stooping his ears with wax I guess was because he desired to hear the "sweet singing".
It was implied in myths that if you listened to the Sirens (and survived), you would learn more about yourself. Curiosity about your own true nature, fighting self-deception, etc. Very much a rationalist motivation.
Pure curiosity, probably. It's the same reason that (some) people climb mountains or poke around with rare and special rocks that glow in the dark.
For the same reason a kleptomanic may enjoy visiting a museum even where all the beautiful works of art are securely displayed. Because he could appreciate the aesthetic without knowing that his decisions at the time would destroy him.
Getting hit by basilisks can be very fun.
Voltaire
Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy 1919 ( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-construction/#Hon )
--Thomas Sowell
-Peter Denning
Technically true, but that's a horrible analogy. Bullys are still a problem if you don't notice them. An ugly picture is completely not a problem if no one sees it, so in a way it is worse.
Isn't this opposed to Lovecraft's claim that nothing he could describe would be as scary as the unknown / the reader's fears?
As well, there are a lot of shock pictures out there that were worse than what I could imagine before having seen them, and looking at them is worse than remembering them. If "worse" refers to subjective experience, then it seems obvious that closing your eyes can help.
Care to name an example? I've been so desensitized, I think the worst any picture could do for me is to be somewhat depressing. Lovecraft, however, is still horrifying.
You actually find Lovecraft horrifying? I read a bit (color out of space, a short about ancient lizard people being wiped out by a vengeful god, and a bunch of descriptions) and found it peculiar and sad, but not horrifying. Too much Poe as a baby, I guess.
Lovecraft directly taps into my own madness and fears. He is psychologically quite similar to me and manages to actually express how bad xenophobia and the utter indifference of the cosmos feel. Worst of all, his more madness-focused stories like The Dreams in the Witch-House directly remind me of my own periods of insanity and paranoia. So it's really horrifying through its realism, at least for a certain kind of person.
(And he is the only one I know who does that, though I'm (intentionally) not very familiar with some related authors like Ligotti.)
Plus, violations of the natural order are much worse than anything in traditional horror. A color that doesn't fit in the light spectrum is more terrifying and disgusting to me than serial killers, torture or 2girls1cup. Not sure I can explain that one.
Pfft. Even magenta doesn't fit in the light spectrum. Are you terrified yet? :)
This reminds me of an experiment I've wanted to do for some time, but don't have the necessary equipment for. I'd love to see it tested by someone who do.
*Take multiple light sources each shining in only one frequency, that can be dimmed, in specific triplets. Quickly eyeballing it I'd suggest [420nm, 550nm, 600nm] and [460nm, 500nm, 570nm]. *using a normal white light source as a reference, first adjust the relative intensity of each triplet so the combined light appears white, then scale the combined light (probably by simply altering the distance) to the same intensity. *Both lights should now appear identical. if they don't make further minor adjustments. *Look at them side by side, until you can see the colour out of space. :)
rot13 hint url: UGGC://RA.JVXVCRQVN.BET/JVXV/SVYR:PBAR-ERFCBAFR.FIT
Why do you want to do this?
Because seeing tetracromaticaly would be awesome, even if it's only possible in contrived settings.
Please don't taunt the basilisk.
Search Google Images for "teratoma".
I do not have a very visual imagination, and so find it easy to forget the details of disturbing pictures, even if I saw them moments ago (forget meaning not be able to recreate in my mind, rather than not be able to recognize). Of the time when I was frequenting 4chan, I think my least favorite picture was ybghf gvg.
As always when we hear the word "worse", we need to ask ourselves, "worse on what metric?"
This reminds me of Lojban, in which the constructs meaning "good" and "bad" encourage you to specify a metric. It is still possible to say that something is "worse" without providing any detail, but I suspect most Lojban speakers would remember to provide detail if there was a chance of confusion.
-- Sir Humphrey Appleby
Theodore Dreiser
-Avery Pennarun
-- Randall, XKCD #971
I noticed this too, but they're fake homeopathic pills. They're not really homeopathic - they have active ingredients in the same quantity as the original brand-name products they are knock-offs of, but with the word "homeopathic" added as a marketing ploy. They're lying about lying.
Jim Harrison
~ Orwell
"Politics and the English Language", 1946.
This is the exact opposite of my experience- I think wordlessly with both abstract and concrete things, and hunting for words might work for the concrete things occasionally, since they are mostly the same, but for almost all abstract things there simply does not exist any word even close to what I want to say, so surrender - the hard kind, accepting defeat and humiliation, like that class scene in MoR - and making do with unbearably clumsy, confusing and muddled metaphor is exactly what I have to learn in every case I don't know the exact mathematical notation to formalize my thoughts.
-Spock, "Court Martial", Star Trek: The Original Series
Heh.
John M. Ford, How Much for Just the Planet?
--Daniel Kahneman
From the new book, I take it, based on http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-24/bias-blindness-and-how-we-truly-think-part-1-daniel-kahneman The full quote offers an interesting debiasing strategy:
Kahneman gave a talk at Google about how and why intuition works well for us on 10 November. I am about halfway through it and so far it is marvelous.
Link.
edit The same talk (very close) at Edge transcribed plus discussion after with Cosmides and Tooby and Pinker. Link to transcript.
-- The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas.
Hmm, not sure I agree. The living now can cause great harm for the people in the future. In that regard at any given time the dead are creating harm in some sense. But the basic point seems valid. The dead at least can't alter their activity to help more or reduce harm, the living can.
It's the other way around: in timeless view, nether living not dead can "alter" anything, the relevant fact is that you can influence activity of the living, but not of the dead (not as you said whether the dead themselves can alter things vs. the living can alter things).
-Peter Medawar in "Does Ethology Throw Any Light on Human Behavior?"
-Terry Pratchett, Jingo
— Albert Einstein, obituary for Ernst Mach (1916)
--Daniel Kahneman
Henry St. John
Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire
Gloria Steinem
This doesn't need to be true. Accepting the truth without getting pissed off is a learnable skill.
I think, in terms of truths that "set one free," there is a high probability of being in bondage to some delusion or malformed anxiety, and that the wrenching effect of having to overturn a lot of one's prior beliefs is quite likely to have some anger component, even if only at whatever forces kept one in ignorance previously. In many cases it means coming to terms with the degree to which one had been used and manipulated up until the new perspective arrived. At least this mirrors my experience leaving the church, as well as in some other emotionally loaded topics.
John Adams, Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials
-L'Hote on Kate Bolick's "All the Single Ladies"
This sounds good out of context, but I think it was actually confused. The context was a complaint that '"marriage market" theories leave love out of the equation'. But this is a false dichotomy. It could well be that people marry out of sincerely felt love, but fall in love with "older men with resources" and "younger women with adoring gazes”, as the original article had it. The cues that cause you to fall in love are not easily accessible to introspection.
More to the point, the original article was speculating about how a demographic shift that makes women wealthier than men would affect dating culture. What does it even mean to account for human emotion here? The way the problem is set up, the abstract model is the best we can hope for. In general, when discussing big trends or large groups, we don't have detailed information about the emotions of everyone involved. In that case, leaving those out of the model is not a failure of empiricism, it's just doing the best with what's available.
I think there are different contexts where this same quote makes more sense: for example you probably won't get a very good understanding of eBay auctions by assuming that everyone involved follows a simple economic model.
"If you think a weakness can be turned into a strength, I hate to tell you this, but that's another weakness."
-- Jack Handey
Alexander Pope
David Frum
Yeah, right.
Keyword: "conscious cynicism".
Ekman's studies on lying nurses found about half of them leaked nothing when lying about the emotional content of films they were watching. ("Oh, these are pretty flowers, not a gruesome surgery on a burn victim.") I don't think 'few' is the way I'd put it.
I hadn't known someone had decided to study that specifically...
Based on my experience of nursing school, I would say this ability not to leak emotional reactions is true of nurses in particular, because you do get used to seeing a lot of really gross or upsetting stuff and reacting matter-of-factly. I basically don't experience disgust anymore. (Specification: in certain situations where most people would be disgusted, I experience pretty much no emotions, i.e. cleaning up diarrhea or changing bandages on infected wounds. There are some situations where I wouldn't previously have been grossed out and I am now, i.e. by the idea of doing CPR without a pocket mask.) Even in the case of empathy in others' pain, I've had to learn to control my emotional reactions so that I can, you know, get my work done and not be totally useless.
This is the study. A few more details (I don't have access to the full study):
One of the reasons they decided to study it was because it was a case where they were fairly confident that the liars actually wanted to lie well and be believed. The subjects were nursing students, and were all told that their ability to keep their calm and not present disgust is necessary for nurses. They watched a pleasant film about flowers, and narrated their reaction to it while being videotaped, and then watched an unpleasant film about surgery on a burn victim, attempting to react the same way as they did to the flower film.
The thing you're describing sounds different, though- whereas Ekman thought he had found people who hid their disgust well, perhaps he found people that didn't actually feel disgust in the disgusting situation. The full study may have more details.
That is a belief that I recommend people consciously choose to endorse in most social contexts. I wouldn't say it is true though, unless spoken by a three year old with respect to his peers.
John Kenneth Galbraith
-- Mark Twain
A specific instance of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, which in turn is a type of selection bias.
--Howard Marks, The Most Important Thing p.136 (about investing, but applies to other things)
-George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.
I think navigators (maybe orienteers?) would be a better model than than warriors or dancers.
Would you (or anyone else) please explore this further? How would we change the way we talk about discourse?
War is something we do to win. Dance is something we do either to entertain others, or for our own enjoyment. Debate teams work like this - you're assigned a position which you must argue, even if you don't believe it. The performers/debaters do it some for their own pleasure, and they attract audiences who come to be entertained. My husband and I do a lot of arguing/debate for amusement, which is more like social dance in that it's playful and designed to entertain us rather than to accomplish any other goal.
But neither of these metaphors deal with objective truth. If I win a war, a debate, or a lawsuit, it doesn't prove my point is correct. It just means I fought or argued more skillfully or impressively. In navigation, both skill and objective truth are involved. Imagine two people who are trying to reach a destination (representing truth). They need skill to figure out how to get there, and can even compete for who gets there first (as in the sport of orienteering). Or, they can collaborate to find it together. If I confidently and stylishly navigate in the wrong direction, I won't reach my destination. I can only get there by reading the signs correctly.
I would prefer serious argument to be more about truth-seeking and less about showing off or defeating the opponent.
On precision in aesthetics, metaethics:
-Rolling Stone, Interview with Beavis and Butt-Head
Jorge Luis Borges, “Another poem of gifts” (opening lines).
Austin Bradford Hill, "The Environment and Disease: Association or Causation?"
Zach Weiner, SMBC]
--Abraham Lincoln
-- John Carmack
~Commissioner Pravin Lal, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
-Nick Szabo
Jacob Bronowski
-Hans Georg Fritzsche
"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it."
-- Jack Handey
--John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
--Rhonda Byrne (Author of The Secret) (p. 156)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip/fake_explanations/
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical
That's a good irrationality quote - but that's a different thing.
It was too epic not to post. I wonder what people's emotional reactions to it are.
My rational reaction is to be sceptical of whether Rhonda Byrne's claimed understanding of quantum physics extends to passing a finals exam.
Presumably her passing a finals exam in quantum mechanics would depend on her wanting to pass rather than her understanding. ;-)
That's beautiful. Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias.
Sharon Fenick
Bertrand Russell
A common sentiment among the thoughtful, it seems.
I would never die for my beliefs because... screw that I would rather lie.
I would die if I believed that would save the world, does that count?
Is Bertrand Russell willing to die if he encounters someone with a gun who demands he agree that 2 + 2 = 5?
Profess the belief or adopt the belief?
I am willing to lie if I encounter someone with a gun who demands I agree that 2 + 2 = 5.
Deceptively clever.
Russell would have liked that one, I think.
Why? (Can you explain?)
At first glance, it looks like a misunderstanding. "I would never die for my beliefs" is unambiguous, and the "because I might be wrong" is merely a bit of explanation in case you're wondering why he'd take that stance. So obviously, Russell would not be willing to die for "2+2=4".
Russell, while a Philosopher of any sort, is perhaps best known for his contributions to math and logic. He is the sort of person who would have insisted that he can't be wrong that 2+2=4.
In the case that "X because Y", it is generally assumed that ~Y would have counterfactually resulted in ~X. It was a popular-enough way to approach the problem in the early 20th century, anyway. Thus the statement seems to imply that for any beliefs Russell can't be wrong about, he is willing to die for them. And thus he seems to be saying that he would die for "2+2=4", and we're left to ponder what that would mean.
In what way is it "dying for one's beliefs" to refuse to capitulate to a gunman about a trivial matter? I'd guess that in that situation, Russell would have perfectly good reasons left to not die for "2+2=4".
So we might conclude that there are a lot of reasons not to die for a lot of beliefs, other than that we might be wrong about them. So that's not Russell's true rejection of dying for one's beliefs.
Ah, got it. Thanks for the explanation.
Since Russell said he wouldn't be willing to die for his beliefs because of X, it seems logical to conclude he would be willing to die if not-X. But that is absurd (as highlighted by Eliezer's question) so Russell hadn't given his true rejection.
... I'll add that Russell didn't give his true rejection but a clever one, so he does prefer cleverness over truthiness, so he would appreciate Eliezer's rhetorical question, which was more clever than accurate (because 2+2=4 is something Russell could still possibly be wrong about.)
He's probably talking about "ought" beliefs, not "is" beliefs. Even so...
It's a bit late to threaten Bertrand Russell with anything, particularly a gun, considering that he died decades ago.
Barbarians shouldn't win. At the very least, we shouldn't surrender ahead of time.
Repeat.
(^_^)
Rule three of Quote Thread: You don't quote yourself on Quote Thread.
"GLaDOS can do whatever she wants, just don't eat me."
-- Baughn
A propos:
Thales of Miletus was a philosopher - so committed was he to thinking carefully that once he was walking along contemplating deeply and thus fell into a well. The locals made fun of him, commenting that philosophers were so busy attending to the stars that they could not see what is in front of them.
Since coins were recently invented (or recently brought to Asia Minor), Thales was involved in a discussion over the power of money. His interlocutors didn't believe that a philosopher could become rich, but he insisted that the power of the mind was paramount. To prove the power of having a reasoning mind, he devised a way of predicting weather patterns. He used this knowledge to buy up everyone's olive presses when the weather was bad and managed to corner the market, becoming quite wealthy when a very good season followed soon after.
In "Self-poisoning of the mind" Jon Elster uses the Thales olive incident as an example of a perverse cognitive bias:
What Elster is pushing is that, since we are aware we edit reality to suit our self-images, we constantly suspect ourselves of doing so, and perversely believe the worst of ourselves on very flimsy evidence.
I don't buy that Thales indeed predicted any weather patterns so well, that he became rich be cause of those pattern predictions of him. Just an urban legend from those times.
While I agree that this is the more probable explanation, I'm not sure one needs to predict the weather particularly well to know "it'll likely be different at some point soonish", which seems to be all he needed for the above story.
I agree. With the strong incentives for people involved in the olive trade to be as good as possible at predicting the weather, it's hard to believe a philosopher could become better than the subject matter experts of his time; especially with the armchair methods popular at the time, and especially^2 since we still can't predict the weather very well. Also, the story switches from "the power of money" to "the power of thought" abruptly.
Thales was arguably the first Western philosopher, and despite the 'well' story, he was noted for being particularly observant and empirical. The primary distinction between Thales and earlier philosophers was that where other philosophers made explanations based on supernatural forces and agents, Thales preferred explanations referring to the natural properties of objects. Notably, he was the first recorded person to study electricity.
If you're so rich, why aren't you smart? -- Traditional reply. (I'm not sure it makes much sense, but then neither does the original question.)
"It takes money to make money."
- Titus Maccius Plautus.
Because my utility function includes moral constraints.
is that your true reason or is it a reason that allows you to assert status over those wealthier than you?
If so, then my utility function places status/morality above wealth. Which also answers the question.;
all of the economic analysis I've seen indicates it is more efficient to maximize wealth and then buy what you value directly. Forgoing money because it would harm someone is probably less efficient than making money and donating to givewell.
A better phrasing might be: "If you're so smart why aren't you fulfilling your Goals/Utility Function"
Effort.
~CEO Nwabudike Morgan, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri...or is he?
~CEO Nwabudike Morgan, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri...or is he?
"It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy, it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either."
-Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
-Carl Rogers
Less redundantly,
I tried to devise a similar maxim recently: "To the honest inquirer, all surprises are pleasant ones."
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, p. 98
-Amos Tversky
Jerry Coyne
Cute, but false. Scientists have been positing "things" for centuries that a consensus of modern scientists no longer believe exist. Also, most of the controversial parts of science don't have anything to do with what can been "seen", but things that are only observable using specialized equipment (which would seem equivocal to the non-scientist) or when interpreted from inside an elaborate theoretical framework (which the non-scientist would likely not even understand).
--James L. Kugel, In the Valley of the Shadow pg 156-157 (doesn't provide any further reference)
The conclusion happens to be correct but the argument looks invalid to me. A man can smash a clock or a compass just as easily, but that doesn't prove that these defenseless devices cannot provide useful information.
The real argument may have went something like this: "I am a very busy and violent man, who, as I have just demonstrated, is quite accurate with a deadly projectile weapon. In light of this, would you perhaps prefer to rethink your policy of holding up my entire army ?"
Similar to Solomon's classic legal argument: "Don't bother me with petty crap like this or I will slice your baby in half!"
--Gregory Cochran
Which I would modify to:
Which based on feedback I would modify to:
Just don't believe it. It's a convenient thing to say when the reaction to your accusation happens to be anger. If they don't get angry it must be true also because, um, they knew already and it isn't surprising, etc. Also, if they run away that means they are a witch and if they stay they are a witch.
That is certainly true. Taking such a saying to heart can basically make you just another crank ranting about how this is just like what happened to Galileo.
But it is often useful to remember that making a more moderate statement can actually get you in more trouble, precisely because it seems more believable to someone who's far away from you on the inferential chain. Thinking about it again, I see that the original quote will be more often employed in the first meaning than in this one.
Does anyone have a good quote that captures the spirit I wanted to convey?
Check the rules: "No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please."
I think you're over 10 quotes already. Better exclude yourself from next month's quotes as well.
I know which jobs my mother worked, but that didn't stop bullies using this line.
I would not agree even with the second statement. Do Holocaust survivors fear Holocaust deniers are telling the truth? (or insert some even more offensive and unpopular belief)
Good point.
Better?
Jerry Fodor
Face your fears or they will climb over your back - Odrade in Frank Herbert’s Chapterhouse: Dune
Feynman
This is a duplicate: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7e1/rationality_quotes_september_2011/4rj0
~Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Looking God in the Eye", fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
~Academician Prokhor Zakharov, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. God I wish Zakharov was real.
David Brin
I'm all for appropriating religious language for fun, but the kind of argument David Brin makes strikes me as unhygienic. Inventing a strained interpretation of the Bible in order to support a conclusion you've decided on ahead of time is sinful, and I feel would actually be seen as disrespectful by most Christians. Jews like Brin do it all the time, but they're a minority.
Compare the Creationist who writes that the theory of evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. She literally doesn't care whether she's right, since it's not her true rejection, and that makes her paper more annoying to scientists than if she'd just quoted her own sacred text.
I don't think it makes much sense to get too sensitive about Bible quotes; the context seems more like quoting poetry to me, along the lines of trawling Shakespeare for phrases to use as a title or chapter heading. There's plenty of precedent for doing so, both theistic and nontheistic: so much so, actually, that I think the text of the Bible might be more important as a work of literature than it is as religious doctrine. After all, most of the points of any particular Christian denomination (even nominally fundamentalist ones) are derived not from a clear "thou shalt" but from one or two lines of the text filtered through a rather tortured process of interpretation, and there's way more text than there is active doctrine.
This all goes double for the Old Testament, and triple for anything like Revelation that's usually understood in allegorical terms.
Inventing a strained interpretation of the Bible in order to support a conclusion you've decided on ahead of time is sinful, as it is written: "And in the eleventh year, in the month Bul, which is the eighth month, was the house finished throughout all the parts thereof, and according to all the fashion of it. So was he seven years in building it."
http://www.randombiblequotes.com/
That's sloppy, even for a random quote. The immediately preceding verse is "The foundation of the temple of the LORD was laid in the fourth year, in the month of Ziv."
11 - 7 = 4.
Whatever the flaws of the book of First Kings, failures of basic arithmetic in the literal text isn't one of them.
I feel like this would be a bad thing if there was some truth or reality that was being distorted. But simply retelling a story in a new light to make a new point is not new, nor do I see a problem with it. For example, "Wicked" is a great retelling of "The Wizard of Oz" from the Wicked Witch of the West's point of view. It takes the opportunity to make commentary on society, as well as the nature of story-telling.
For that matter, Methods of Rationality is a retelling of the Harry Potter cannon to tell a story that supports a particular conclusion drawn ahead of time. That's the nature of stories. As long as one doesn't confuse "story" with "reality", the "telling" with the "drawing the conclusion", then there shouldn't be a problem.
I think this could only be called unhygienic if people took the story to be literal truth. I don't think anyone here is in danger of that, and I suspect anyone who does think that way is unlikely to be swayed very far with Brin's clever turn of phrase.
It always bother me when atheists argue about the right way to argue with believers. This presupposes that there is a single Right Way. Personally, I'm happy that I live in a world where there are blunt and uncompromising people like Richard Dawkins, and people who take a gentler approach. And I'm happy that there are people using David Brin's clever Bible-quoting tricks. The combination of multiple approaches is more effective than picking one and using it consistently.
You're just arguing that a "mixed strategy" (rather than a "pure strategy") is better, which might well be true, in which case we should figure out which mixed strategy is the Right Way...
(I'm not sure how your comment was relevant.)
~Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
--Thomas Sowell
Richard Feynman, "Cargo Cult Science"
Progress in reducing recidivism rates.
Teacher tests clever idea, fails.
Sometimes authorities are right.
Voltaire
duplicate
Einstein
~Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Man and Machine", "We must Dissent", fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
~Caretaker Lular H'minee, "Sacrifice : Life", fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
vs.
~Usurper Judaa Marr, "Courage : To Question", fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Where do you stand?
~CEO Nwabudike Morgan, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri...or is he?
"Don't sell yourself to your enemy in advance, in your mind. You can only be defeated here." He touched his hands to his temples.