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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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)
-Hans Georg Fritzsche
-Terry Pratchett, Jingo
-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.
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.
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.
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.
Please don't taunt the basilisk.
Or just appropriately encode the text/label the link/add appropriate warnings?
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.
Same here, though I do enjoy (some of) Lovecraft's writing. I just don't find it as frightening as he apparently did. When I was little, Poe's Fall of the House of Usher and Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains literally gave me nightmares for weeks, so I must have developed some powerful mental antibodies.
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.
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.
Do you expect that setup to feel much different than say, putting florescent and incandescent bulbs next to each other?
I think you need some special equipment to actually see tetrachromatically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Possibility_of_human_tetrachromats
My neurology intuition has proven useful in the past, and I trust it a lot more than that wikipedia article.
Pfft. Even magenta doesn't fit in the light spectrum. Are you terrified yet? :)
Good point. No wonder it has such a negative association.
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.
Nate Silver
From the same post:
-John Cage
Retracted: More I think about it, the less this quote makes sense.
It makes quite a bit of sense.
I know, but aren't there valid rational reasons to be frightened of new ideas as well? It's like neophilia.
Maybe, but it isn't valid to be frightened of an idea purely because it is new.
Isn't it valid to be somewhat frightened of a new medicine purely because it's yet untested on humans?
You have additional information about the idea; you are frightened of it because it is new and it is a medicine.
Can you explain your reasoning in more detail as to why it's "valid" to be wary of a new medicine, but it's not "valid" to be wary of a new idea?
Keep in mind that reversed stupidity is not intelligence. That some people are stupidly afraid of new ideas doesn't automatically make it intelligence not to be afraid of them.
I didn't say that being wary (i.e. being careful of it) wasn't valid (and of course it is perfectly valid). I said that being frightened (i.e. not going near it) wasn't valid.
So I think we were just using those words slightly differently.
The vast majority of untested chemicals-that-would-be-medicine are harmful or at least discomfiting. The vast majority of untested words-that-would-be-ideas are nonsense or at best banal.
(That is, part of knowing it's medicine vs knowing it's an idea is our prior for "this is harmful", and the relevant properties of ideas, medicine, human bodies, and human minds play a part here.)
There's two components to it, really:
People perceive exposure to a bad medicine as being much harder to correct than exposure to a bad idea. It feels like you can always "just stop beleiving" if you decided something was false, even though this has been empericially been demonstrated to be much more difficult than it feels like it should be.
Further, there's an unspoken assumption (at least for ideas-in-general) that other people will automatically ignore the 99% of the ideaspace that contains uniformly awful or irrelevant suggestions, like recomending that you increase tire pressure in your car to make it more likely to rain and other obviously wrong ideas like that. Medicine doesn't get this benefit of the doubt, as humans don't naturally prune their search space when it comes to complex and technical fields like medicine. It's outside our ancestoral environment, so we're not equiped to be able to automatically discard "obviously" bad drug ideas just from reading the chemical makeup of the medicine in question. Only with extensive evidence will a laymen even begin to entertain the idea that ingesting an unfamiliar drug would be benefical to them.
Should you be frightened of an idea purely because it is old?
No.
-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.
Fine.
And? Isn't this just the standard definition of realism?
Mike Patton
Even if they did, would you believe them?
One of the grislier consequences of Alzheimer's disease is that it places its victims in almost precisely this position. Yes, their minds are going. It isn't so much that they don't believe the diagnosis as that, by the time it can be made, they cannot understand it.
That would seem to apply only if the diagnosis is made very late. Plenty of people know about their condition and must watch as their minds steadily deteriorate. See, for example, Terry Pratchett's "Living With Alzheimer's" documentary.
Many Thanks! I was relying on Sherwin B. Nuland's description of it in a chapter in his "How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter " . That was published in 1994. I guess earlier diagnosis is feasible today.
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.
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.
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.
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
...I think it's a sign of the times that I can read rot13 to the extent that I know what book you said. Dammit, I was going to read that book one day.
Apologies. I've seen a post with a link to a rot13 page-- I'll see if I can make that work for future spoilers.
You still might want to read the book-- it had a lot of engaging detail and characters.. That's why I was so angry at not getting the sort of ending I wanted.
I read Sbhpnhyg'f Craqhyhz before Gur Anzr bs gur Ebfr, so the nature of the ending was no surprise to me; but I still enjoyed the book.
On precision in aesthetics, metaethics:
-Rolling Stone, Interview with Beavis and Butt-Head
Voltaire
Jorge Luis Borges, “Another poem of gifts” (opening lines).
Richard Mitchell, The Gift of Fire
Jim Harrison
Sharon Fenick
Repeat.
Aye, sorry. It's a good quote.
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.
I would never die for my beliefs because... screw that I would rather lie.
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.
I am willing to lie if I encounter someone with a gun who demands I agree that 2 + 2 = 5.
Profess the belief or adopt the belief?
He's probably talking about "ought" beliefs, not "is" beliefs. Even so...
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.
Did you mean that, or did you mean die for not "2+2=5"?
Seems ambiguous. I'm not sure which I meant to write. I'll fix it to be consistent.
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.)
Feynman
This is a duplicate: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7e1/rationality_quotes_september_2011/4rj0
Henry St. John
> Our civilization is still in a middle stage: scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly ruled by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly ruled by reason.
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser
Very much like Alexander Pope's:
Or Terry Pratchett:
It seems like Terry Pratchett is explicitly contradicting Theodore Dreiser (IN ALL CAPS, no less).
Pratchett: "Humans need fantasy to be fully human."
Dreiser: "Fantasy is an atavism, humans need reason to be fully human."
Though it's possible that Dreiser was reflecting on cognitive bias, not on fantasy.
The ALL CAPS are because it's the character Death who is speaking here, in a voice like two concrete blocks being rubbed together, or the slamming of coffin lids.
That's what I figured, but it still looks weird without context.
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.)
To which, of course, the reply is that they don't need to be, and so why waste the effort? That is, they are smart, on the level that's important.
Oddly, this reply works equally well for the original quote.
Exactly.... to me this is always a sign of a strawman argument..
Or rather, a fully general counterargument.
Or maybe both statements are equally ridiculous.
If the only thing that's important is money, yes.
Or if money were fungible.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed a likely explanation - Aesop in particular was fond of writing about the exploits of Thales, and we know how often he drifted from fact for his subjects.
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.
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.
This being markdown, begin the first line of that blockquote paragraph with a greater-than sign and replace the italics tags with asterisks.
Also, Welcome to Less Wrong, apparently. Your handle looks familiar for some reason, so I didn't notice you were new.
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.
~ 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.
[ 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.
I recognized it from Mr. Gleick's remarks. As for the name, I copied the text from the free preview on Amazon.com - they spelled it Arlene in the book. Guess there was an overambitious proofreader.
If you are up to a harder read, Jagdish Mehra's biography The Beat of a Different Drum does a better job of covering Feynman's actual work.
Thanks -- I'll put that on my reading list. Will read some other books in between though!
-Spock, "Court Martial", Star Trek: The Original Series
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"
Heh.
-Nick Szabo
-Peter Denning
-Peter Medawar in "Does Ethology Throw Any Light on Human Behavior?"
-Avery Pennarun
-- Sir Humphrey Appleby
John W. Gardner
-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!
-- 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.
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.
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".
Getting hit by basilisks can be very fun.
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.
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.
-- Randall, XKCD #971
-- 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).
-- Mark Twain
-Alan Saporta
"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.
Democritus
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
Jerry Coyne
David Brin
--Daniel Kahneman
-Amos Tversky
Jacob Bronowski