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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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)
Voltaire
duplicate
Einstein
David Brin
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.)
Different atheists also perform differently with different strategies. Thus, taking into account comparative advantage, unless there is a severe shortage or excess of practitioners of a strategy, or a strategy's usefulness has been severely misjudged, the Right Way is simply for everyone to keep doing whatever they're best at. Hence "don't criticize each others' strategies" rather than "75% of incendiaries should switch to being diplomats".
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.
Isn't that the job description of an apologist? I don't think most apologists are viewed as sinful or disrespectful by others of their faith.
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.
I thought that was the point of his talk! Wasn't he saying, in short, "Singularitarians, even if they're atheists, should quote the Bible when reaching out to Bible-believers?"
Yeah, but I think he was talking more of the "much of this is metaphor and can be interpreted in many ways" crowd. People who are already halfway to thinking life extension might be ok and not an unholy usurping of god's will.
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 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.
~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?
From personal experience, I can say that I hate both those guys, and their bullshit first-turn Ogres as well. Bah ! Bah I say !
Feynman
~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.
Let any one examine the wonderful self-regulating and self-adjusting contrivances which are now incorporated with the vapour-engine, let him watch the way in which it supplies itself with oil; in which it indicates its wants to those who tend it; in which, by the governor, it regulates its application of its own strength; let him look at that store-house of inertia and momentum the fly-wheel, or at the buffers on a railway carriage; let him see how those improvements are being selected for perpetuity which contain provision against the emergencies that may arise to harass the machines, and then let him think of a hundred thousand years, and the accumulated progress which they will bring unless man can be awakened to a sense of his situation, and of the doom which he is preparing for himself... we must choose between the alternative of undergoing much present suffering, or seeing ourselves gradually superseded by our own creatures, till we rank no higher in comparison with them, than the beasts of the field with ourselves...
There is reason to hope that the machines will use us kindly, for their existence will be in a great measure dependent upon ours; they will rule us with a rod of iron, but they will not eat us; they will not only require our services in the reproduction and education of their young, but also in waiting upon them as servants; in gathering food for them, and feeding them; in restoring them to health when they are sick; and in either burying their dead or working up their deceased members into new forms of mechanical existence.
-- Samuel Butler, Darwin Among the Machines 1863
~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.
--Gregory Cochran
Which I would modify to:
Which based on feedback I would modify to:
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?
No; when reading this I had no idea that you had (apparently) added the modified quote specifically in response to the grandparent, and thus I read the grandparent as an objection to the second version. And the objection stands.
(In fact, the grandparent actually says "I would not agree even with the second statement", so now I'm confused: what did you change?)
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.
Overall I now, after feedback and doing some thinking, I feel it was ill thought out of me to post this quote here.
Truthfully, I've thought that of a lot of your recent video game quotes.
I know which jobs my mother worked, but that didn't stop bullies using this line.
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?
~Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Man and Machine", "We must Dissent", fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
~Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Planet Speaks", fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
Seems like a bad strategy of trying to make the planetmind not wipe out humans. It might however preserve some human value in future universe states in those particular circumstances (where the planet mind was awakening and it was going to grow to goodhood and wipe out humans no matter what), since planet mind will probably be infected by some human memes.
~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.
(^_^)
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
Technically, that does count as a rationality quote. Or at least a very rational one.
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.;
A better phrasing might be: "If you're so smart why aren't you fulfilling your Goals/Utility Function"
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.
Effort.
"It takes money to make money."
- Titus Maccius Plautus.
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.)
Sharon Fenick
Repeat.
Bertrand Russell
A common sentiment among the thoughtful, it seems.
Barbarians shouldn't win. At the very least, we shouldn't surrender ahead of time.
Is Bertrand Russell willing to die if he encounters someone with a gun who demands he agree that 2 + 2 = 5?
It's a bit late to threaten Bertrand Russell with anything, particularly a gun, considering that he died decades ago.
He's probably talking about "ought" beliefs, not "is" beliefs. Even so...
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.)
Did you mean that, or did you mean die for not "2+2=5"?
Profess the belief or adopt the belief?
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?
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).
I'm having trouble parsing this sentence.
It's a sort of rebuttal to the Bible, Hebrews 11:1:
This passage is often cited as one of the key passages in the Christian religion; Christians often use it when they debate atheists.
Oh, I see. Thanks.
--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!"
Jerry Fodor
~CEO Nwabudike Morgan, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri...or is he?
--Rhonda Byrne (Author of The Secret) (p. 156)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ip/fake_explanations/
http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical
That's beautiful. Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias.
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. ;-)
Does "Bingo!" count as an emotional reaction? (I mean, energetic?)
Face your fears or they will climb over your back - Odrade in Frank Herbert’s Chapterhouse: Dune
-John Cage
Retracted: More I think about it, the less this quote makes sense.
It makes quite a bit of sense.
~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
Dupe
-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
On precision in aesthetics, metaethics:
-Rolling Stone, Interview with Beavis and Butt-Head
"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
Zach Weiner, SMBC]
Jacob Bronowski
-George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.
-Hans Georg Fritzsche
Jorge Luis Borges, “Another poem of gifts” (opening lines).
~Commissioner Pravin Lal, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
-Nick Szabo
Downvoted. Exchange does not require a common estimate of "value", although reciprocal altruism probably does. Rational agents will undertake all exchanges which make both of them better off according to each agent's utility function. Assuming TDT, agents which are similar to each other will also reach a Pareto optimum in a bilateral monopoly game.
Humans might sometimes be unable to agree to an exchange in a bilateral monopoly, but that need not imply any disagreement about "value": for instance, they might disagree about bargaining positions, or using brinkmanship to extract concessions from other parties.
Austin Bradford Hill, "The Environment and Disease: Association or Causation?"
--Howard Marks, The Most Important Thing p.136 (about investing, but applies to other things)
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.
-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.
John Kenneth Galbraith
-- Mark Twain
A specific instance of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, which in turn is a type of selection bias.
-Terry Pratchett, Jingo
John Adams, Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials
Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire
-- 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.
-Peter Medawar in "Does Ethology Throw Any Light on Human Behavior?"
-Spock, "Court Martial", Star Trek: The Original Series
Heh.
~ Orwell
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.
You could try using "kind of shit" or similar as the only noun in you consciousness used to describe abstract things. E.g. "Those kinds of shit, or those kinds of shit? Hmm...the first kind of shit seems much less bad when I think about it. Pile of shit - I mean, virtue ethics - it is, then!"
Jim Harrison
-Avery Pennarun
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.
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.
Voltaire
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.
"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
— Albert Einstein, obituary for Ernst Mach (1916)
--John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
--Abraham Lincoln
John M. Ford, How Much for Just the Planet?
David Frum
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.
An example for your side:
The link has some added snark in square brackets, but I'm not up for figuring out how to defeat markdown to include it, and anyway the snark isn't part of the original quote.
I have no idea how you'd evaluate the average level of self-delusion.
Yeah, right.
Keyword: "conscious cynicism".
François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes 38
-- John Carmack
-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:
I'm glad Vaniver brought it to my attention.
Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy 1919 ( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-construction/#Hon )
--Thomas Sowell
Is idealism a different state of mind? Surely brain circuitry doesn't change when considering true ideas.
--Thomas Sowell
--Daniel Kahneman
-John Barth, the Sot-Weed Factor
-Jacques Loeb, 1906, on the discovery of the mechanism of glycolysis
"Do you know that a man has only one eye which sees and registers everything; this eye, like a superb camera which takes minute pictures, very sharp, tiny -- and with that picture man tells himself: 'This time I know the reality of things,' and he is calm for a moment. Then, slowly superimposing itself on the picture, another eye makes its appearance, invisibly, which makes an entirely different picture for him. Then our man no longer sees clearly, a struggle begins between the first and second eye, the fight is fierce, finally the second eye has the upper hand, takes over and that's the end of it. Now it has command of the situation, the second eye can then continue its work alone and elaborate its own picture according to the laws of interior vision. This very special eye is found here," says Matisse, pointing to his brain.
--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: