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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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)
--Gregory Cochran
Which I would modify to:
Which based on feedback I would modify to:
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.
Ah thank you I had forgotten about that rule. Up voted.
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.
Hey I didn't start the Sid Meier's Alpha Centuari quote fad!
Just kidding, updating on your feedback, please don't ever hesitate to give it since I value your opinion a bit above the average rationalist.
What about my other posts and quote posts?
None of them have been bad enough to form a cluster in my thoughts like 'those video game quotes are getting annoying'; was there any one in particular?
Note to self: start a Warhammer 40K fad on the next month's thread.
"Success is commemorated, failure merely remembered."
Sadly, my copy of Rogue Trader is back at my mother's house, but "Pain is an illusion of the body, despair an illusion of the mind" springs to mind, even though I haven't looked at the rulebook in years.
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?
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?)
Better?
For anyone having trouble following, it is a question as to whether this edit makes things clearer.
To which I would answer (having seen an earlier version): yes, better.
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?
"If you think a weakness can be turned into a strength, I hate to tell you this, but that's another weakness."
-- Jack Handey
"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
Alexander Pope
— Albert Einstein, obituary for Ernst Mach (1916)
Jerry Fodor
--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.
Love it.
(And for reference, if something seems to be getting confused with markdown you can almost always fix it by throwing a "\" before the offensive character.
Yeah, right.
Keyword: "conscious cynicism".
Markus's cynicism trumps your conscious!
/bows
His kung fu is best.
--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!"
I don't think the implicit argument is anywhere near as simple as 'anything which provides information cannot be destroyed; this bird was destroyed; QED, this bird does not provide information.'
What is it, then? A more complicated implicit argument can still fail. (I can easily imagine a situation where the behavior of birds does provide information about the enemy army over the next hill, or something.) To rule out divination you really need to bring out the big guns and rule out all mysticism. I'm not sure any participants in the story could do that.
I imagine the argument would go something like 'Creatures usually act to preserve themselves; if the bird knew the future actions of the army, it would know about being shot by that Jew; if it knew about being shot, it would not be there (since it wants to preserve itself); the augur's interpretation is true only if the bird knows; it was shot, so it did not know; it did not know, so the augur's interpretation is false.'
There are ways we can rescue this if we want to make excuses for augury and I'm sure you can think of 3 or 4 counter-arguments, but why bother? It's a good story - 'physician, heal thyself!'
The argument was wrong even by the standards of the time. You just misunderstand the concept of divination :-) It doesn't rely on the bird consciously knowing anything. In fact, instead of watching the bird, you can kill it and inspect its entrails. Divination works (or doesn't) because the will of the gods leaks into the pattern of visible things (or doesn't).
You can patch the argument easily; either the gods want their will known or not. If they don't, then the augur is screwed; if they do, then they want the bird to survive (to the point where the augur can figure out what was meant); and so on.
It seems that any wrong argument for a correct conclusion has a decent chance of being patchable into a correct argument by a sufficiently smart patcher, so arguing about patchability of such arguments doesn't make much sense.
Such runs an argument against the principle of charity, indeed, that it licenses special pleading or endless special-casing.
Nice connection! I see we had a post about that recently.
The gods are not required to be helpful, especially to the sacrilegious.
Deorum iniuriae Diis curae. This was not sarcastic or mocking in the slightest bit, as Marius points out and a reading of Herodotus will remind one.
No, but the people who believed in the Greek deities also typically believed those deities were heavily invested in immediate mortal conflicts and highly sensitive to slights. Those Greeks would have expected some protection for the bird or retaliation against Meshullam. Seeing none would provide evidence that the bird was not a favorite of any of their deities.
I'd just shoot the bird and carry it with me. Then whichever way I went was the right one!
Voltaire
duplicate
Huh. Weird that my Google site search didn't turn it up, then.
Probably the different translations for "saying"/"quote".
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.
~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?
From personal experience, I can say that I hate both those guys, and their bullshit first-turn Ogres as well. Bah ! Bah I say !
~Commissioner Pravin Lal, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
~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.
I thought you were going somewhere else with that.
I thought any argument or transmittable piece of information that could convince someone to change their values was a meme.
~Chairman Sheng-ji Yang, "Looking God in the Eye", fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy 1919 ( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-construction/#Hon )
~CEO Nwabudike Morgan, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri...or is he?
Relevant video.
~CEO Nwabudike Morgan, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri...or is he?
Damn you beat me to that one! I loved that quote as a kid.
My favorite quotes were always the Deirdre ones.
~CEO Nwabudike Morgan, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri...or is he?
~Academician Prokhor Zakharov, fictional character from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. God I wish Zakharov was real.
--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?)
Einstein
Face your fears or they will climb over your back - Odrade in Frank Herbert’s Chapterhouse: Dune
"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."
"We've taken too much for granted And all the time it had grown From the techno seeds we first planted Evolved a mind of its' own"
-Judas Priest 'Metal Gods'
--Thomas Sowell
Is idealism a different state of mind? Surely brain circuitry doesn't change when considering true ideas.
--Thomas Sowell
--Thomas Sowell
--Daniel Kahneman
Richard Feynman, "Cargo Cult Science"
Progress in reducing recidivism rates.
Teacher tests clever idea, fails.
Sometimes authorities are right.
--Howard Marks, The Most Important Thing p.136 (about investing, but applies to other things)
(^_^)
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.
Austin Bradford Hill, "The Environment and Disease: Association or Causation?"
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.
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, p. 98
Zach Weiner, SMBC]
-John Barth, the Sot-Weed Factor
John Kenneth Galbraith
-Jacques Loeb, 1906, on the discovery of the mechanism of glycolysis
John Adams, Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials
"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.
Check out "The Ecological Theory of Visual Perception" by James Gibson. The fact that it deals with visual sensory perception is merely coincidental with your quote. The real issue is that homunculus theories of perception just don't cut the mustard. Everything about you is part of your sensory perception. I highly recommend that book; as a grad student in machine perception myself, it helped me really realize that there's no special, sequestered perceiver inside of an entity. It's just data mashing up against matter that filters data.
Jacob Bronowski
-Amos Tversky
--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:
Klein's proposal can also be used on arguments: suppose your argument will be found unconvincing (alternatively, suppose it's actually wrong). What were its weak points? Unfortunately my weak point forecasting is ... weak, so when back-and-forth is an option I much prefer that.
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.
Yes, it is from the book "Thinking, fast and slow".
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".
On re-reading, I agree with you. I'm pretty sure that a reasonable argument can be made that closely resembles what I said, so I'm just going to post this instead of strikethrough-ifying that comment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Democritus
Certainly more convenient. I mean, you're right there. You don't even have to verbalize your arguments!
"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.
-Alan Saporta
-- Mark Twain
A specific instance of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, which in turn is a type of selection bias.
-- 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).
-- 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.
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.
Are you aware of my Best of Rationality Quotes post? I'm not saying that it is directly relevant for you, but there is stuff there that might give you some inspiration, especially the weird aggregate statistics at the end.
Thanks, I was not aware of this. I would like to create something like this, but generic so every online community can use it.
-- 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.
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.
Huh. Never got that. Cool.
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.
Getting hit by basilisks can be very fun.
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".
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.
This makes sense, but I never felt it was really implied by the story. It always sounded like there was supposed to be a practical reason for sailing the ship.
To get to the other side?
:P
Practical reason (with respect to sailing the ship) for lashing yourself to the mast.
I don't think so - I mean, he was lashed to the mast so he couldn't influence the sailing of the ship. And it's not like he could shout orders, what with everyone else's ears plugged.
When he stopped thrashing about trying to free himself so that he could go to the Sirens, the crew could know the danger had passed.
Ooo, nice!
Although potentially vulnerable, if the song left him with sufficient reason to pretend.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Which is why "X Rays" still don't have an actual name, just a letter.
What? I thought they were Xtreeeeme Rays!
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.
-- Sir Humphrey Appleby
-Avery Pennarun
-Peter Medawar in "Does Ethology Throw Any Light on Human Behavior?"
-Peter Denning
-Nick Szabo
This seems like anthropomorphic pessimism.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stotting#Purpose, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory, http://www.cracked.com/article_19456_8-things-you-wont-believe-plants-do-when-no-ones-looking_p2.html (especially #1) and http://lesswrong.com/lw/st/anthropomorphic_optimism/.
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.
-Spock, "Court Martial", Star Trek: The Original Series
Heh.
The universe of Star Trek could get pretty weird.
Wait...theory trumps data?
If Spock wasn't looking then he has no data. The theory makes predictions. That's the point of theories.
EDIT: See "Belief in the Implied Invisible"