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Rationality Quotes December 2011
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- 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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
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Comments (577)
On the difficulties of correctly fine-tuning your signaling:
Kate Fox, Watching the English (quoted here).
Oh I am so getting my own gnome, just so that I can use that phrase on people.
And on the same theme, "Why Can't Anyone Tell I'm Wearing This Business Suit Ironically?" from The Onion.
Perhaps he's ultra-high-class, and is only defending the object-level irony of his garden gnome ironically.
I upvoted this half because I laughed and half because I now want a gnome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
Amusing illustration through a 1950s sociolinguistic study.
(Damn, I swear there was a far longer discussion on signaling and countersignaling around here, can't find it.)
Out of interest, how does this read from a non-uk perspective?
I'm American and I thought it was quite funny.
Maybe the story should be captioned "on the ease of fine-tuned signaling"? After all, the gnome-owner very effectively did communicate his class. On the other hand, deceiving people about your class is hard. But it's hard partly because there are so many way for people to send credible signals, so an absence of signaling becomes evidence on its own.
Hmm, what I had in mind when I wrote the caption was something like this:
The man's social model had three classes: lower class (owns gnomes non-ironically), middle class (would never own a gnome), upper class (can own a gnome "ironically" as a joke on low-class tastes), and he aimed for signalling upper-class status. He failed at fine-tuned signalling because he did not realize that his "upper class" behavior is actually upper-middle; true upper classes are allowed to own gnomes and genuinely like them, and don't need to defensively plead irony because they have no lingering anxiety about being confused with lower classes.
But how do we know that he aimed at signalling upper-class membership?
The alternative I'm proposing is that middle-class people will not try to deceive others about their social position (because that would never work in the long run), but they are adopting lots of signalling about their true position, in order to not get mistakenly perceived as being lower than their true position during short encounters.
I think this is consistent with common folk-wisdom about classes. I have often heard claimed that the primary concern of the lower-middle class is to distinguish themselves from working class. I have never heard it claimed that their primary concern is to pass as middle-middle class.
From "If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right" by Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert, Timothy D. Wilson in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. (http://dunn.psych.ubc.ca/files/2011/04/Journal-of-consumer-psychology.pdf)
The title of the book is a good candidate for a December quote, in and of itself.
(article)
Interesting article, thanks. Reposting the abstract here:
Is the article useful to someone having money and seeking to spend it right?
It's more general, but I still think it has practical guidelines for spending. Read it and see for yourself: http://dunn.psych.ubc.ca/files/2011/04/Journal-of-consumer-psychology.pdf
Thank you, reading.
I suggest including that link in the original comment. I had assumed the article was paywalled, as most academic publications are.
-- Road sign in Griffin, Georgia, showing that sometimes it's good to have some distance between map and area.
-- Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
-- Bryan Caplan
-Probably not Henry Ford
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/08/henry_ford_never_said_the_fast.html
--I.J. Good (as quoted in "The Problem of Thinking Too Much" by Persi Diaconis)
-- Alan J. Perlis, in the foreword to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions - Daniel Kahneman
"If a theory has a lot of parameters, you adjust their values to fit a lot of data, and your theory is not really predicting those things, just accommodating them. Scientists use words like “curve fitting” and “fudge factors” to describe that sort of activity. On the other hand, if a theory has just a few parameters but applies to a lot of data, it has real power. You can use a small subset of the measurements to fix the parameters; then all other measurements are uniquely predicted. " Frank Wilczek
"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."
John von Neumann
-- Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
And they'll be beaten in turn by people who were in the right place at the right time, or won the genetic lottery. A little luck can make up for a lot of laziness, and working hard and learning things can just leave you digging ditches and able to quote every Simpsons episode verbatim.
Thankfully for Mr. Pratchett, you can't influence the genetic lottery or the luck fairy, so his is still valid advice. In fact, one could see "trust in yourself" et al. as invitations to "do or do not, there is no try", whereas "work hard, learn hard and don't be lazy" supports the virtue of scholarship as well as that of "know when to give up". Miss Tick is being eminently practical, and "do or do not", while also an important virtue, requires way more explanation before the student can understand it.
Yeah. "Do or do not" / "believe in yourself" should either be administered on a case-by-case basis by a discerning mentor, or packaged with the full instruction manual.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/01/geeks-lose-minds-recreate-first-level-of-super-mario-land-with/
And the worst thing is they don't use a piston array! Making a scrolling wall of blocks is fairly easy within Minecraft and would've saved them the trouble of manually shifting all their blocks every single frame. That's easily an order of magnitude less work, and can be re-used for other stop-motion movies.
Their excuse? "We dont have the smarts"(sic). Sigh.
Its almost a new type of super-stimulus, where rather than being extraordinarily entertaining its extraordinarily difficult.
Wow. That's absolutely bonkers. And impressive. XKCD almost seems realistic now!
-- Joseph de Maistre (St. Petersburg Dialogues, No. 7)
I have on numerous occasions presented problems to others, after giving them careful thought, and had them reply instantly with the correct answer. Usually the next question is "why didn't I think of that?" which sometimes has an obvious answer and sometimes doesn't.
My favorite remains Eliezer asking me the question "why don't you just use log likelihood?" I still don't have a good answer to why I needed the question!
I don't think that de Maistre's "quick answers" category is supposed to include answers based on sound expertise.
People are often confused about questions to which an expert in the relevant area will give a quick and reliably correct answer. However, an expert capable of answering a technical question competently is not someone who has "considered [the question] only briefly or not at all": he is in fact someone who has spent a great deal of time and effort (along with possessing the necessary talent) on understanding a broad class of questions that subsumes the one being asked.
[citation needed]
It doesn't seem at all uncommon for someone from domain A to present a problem and for someone from domain B to immediately reply "Oh, we have just the perfect tool for that in my field!".
A lot of things don't seem too uncommon
What's missing is indication that the physicist is wrong. Cows are spheres, right?
This gives, by implication, a detector for absolute folly: the condition of believing that something is a very problematic question, when in fact it has a quick, consistent, explanatory answer available to those who have considered it only briefly or not at all.
It doesn't necessarily follow that it's a highly accurate detector, though. If only a small minority of reasonable people are in this condition, while complete fools are commonly in this condition but their number is still much smaller than this minority of reasonable people, then the above quote would be true and yet your proposed test would be very weak.
A fascinating question would be how strong this test actually is, and how it varies with different subjects.
In my experience this is true given a definition of "complete fool" that encompasses a majority of the population, provided the person supplying quick answers isn't also a fool.
Aretae
There's also the subjectivism of taste, sometimes known as consumer sovereignty (the idea, from David Friedman's <i>The Machinery of Freedom</i>, that a person's own good is defined as whatever he says it is). Not believing in that leads to outbreaks of senseless and counterproductive nannyism, whether carried out alone or with the help of authorities.
I assume that what you mean by "whatever he says it is" is whatever preferences his choices reveal, not literally what he says it is.
Believing that a person's good is literally what they say it is can just as easily lead to "nannyism", if we decided to prevent people from acting against their own good.
---"Culture in Economics and the Culture of Economics: Raquel Fernández in Conversation with The Straddler"
--The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
I never thought I'd see a reference to my favorite movie on Less Wrong. Although...the decision theory involved in navigating a Mexican standoff could be interesting.
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
--Hokusai and Hiroshige
It took me a long time to figure out this poem isn't about a recovering alcoholic.
--Gregory Cochran
Fritz Zwicky, Morphological Astronomy
Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2005.
In the absence of observations of future events, observation of the past performance of your model is advisable (and rare). If your confidence in the current accuracy of your model is much higher than the past performance of your models... you may be optimizing for something other than accuracy.
"'...You are now nearly at childhood's end; you are ready for the truth's weight, to bear it. The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcomes resolve all-- all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience. An audience.' He made a gesture I can't describe: 'Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality-- there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth-- actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.'"
"'Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsquence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui-- these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.'"
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King, p. 232
-- Steven Kaas
Old joke, but a good one.
Well, that makes sense. They've panicked earlier, when the plan was announced.
Not necessarily. The human race wasn't around when "Everyone dies" was announced, so we never had the opportunity to panic properly.
Each individual was around when it was announced to them.
And each individual panics! Witness the common existential crisis: execute a head-first dive into mild depression and loudly proclaim your conversion to pure hedonism. But since nobody else is currently panicking, the individual comes to mimic the standard mental state. Which may not be the correct mental state...
Thomas Carew
-Tooby and Cosmides, emphasis theirs. It occurred to someone on the Less Wrong IRC channel how good this is an isomorphism of, "You have asked a wrong question."
The conversation in question.
The width. Changing the width makes a bigger change in the area than changing the length does. (By convention, the width is defined as the smaller of the two dimensions of the rectangle.)
Only if you're augmenting/cutting by a fixed length.
If you're using a proportion (e.g. cut either the length or the width in half) then they're equivalent.
You have resolved the question to the nearest available sane question but that isn't the answer to the question itself and does not make the question valid.
Come to think of it I am somewhat dubious with answering "is the area of this 1km by 1m rectangle more the 1km or the 1m?" with "the 1m". That just doesn't seem right.
Hmmm...
"No."
Is that better?
I could also meaninglessly answer that the length is more important, as it will always be equal or bigger.
the key to finding a wrong question is finding that the answer doesn't help the person who asked it.
That sounds like less of a wrong question and more of a "right question with surprising (low prior) answer". As far as the asker knew, the answer could have turned out to be, "Genes produce the same organism phenotype across virtually all environments, so genes are more important because changing them is much more likely to change the expressed phenotype than changing the environment." (and indeed, life would not be life if genes could not force some level of environment-invariance, thereby acting as a control system for a low-entropy island)
I don't see what's wrong with answering this question with "neither [i.e., they're equal], because they jointly determine phenotype, as independent changes in either have the same chance of affecting phenotype".
An example of a wrong question, by contrast, would be something like, "Which path did the electron really take?" because it posits an invalid ontology of the world as a pre-requisite. The question about phenotypes doesn't do that.
Since my sibling reply got voted up a lot, I want to follow up: it seems that not only is the question not wrong, the "dissolving" answer is itself wrong, or at least very misleading. (Naturally, I have to tread cautiously, since I'm not an Expert in this area.)
As I said in my other reply, the defining characteristic of life is its ability to maintain a low-entropy island against the entropizing forces of nature. So there must be some range of environments in which an organism (via genes) is able to produce the same phenotype regardless of where its environment falls within that range. In effect, the genes allow the phenotype to be "screened off" (d-separated, whatever) from its environment (again, within limits).
A thing that truly allows the environment equal influence in its final form as the thing itself (as suggested by the T&C answer) is not what we mean by "life". It's the hot water that eventually cools to a temperature somewhere between its current temperature and that of its initial environment. It's the compressed gas molecules in the corner of a chamber that eventually spread out evenly throughout the chamber. It is, in short, not the kind of self-replicating, low entropy island we associate with life, and so has no basic units thereof, be they genes or memes.
The organism needs to successfully thrive and reproduce within that range. Sometimes this means tailoring its phenotype to the environment it finds itself in.
Of course.
But imagine a world in which environment truly was more determining than genes. Every animal born in a swamp would be a frog (no matter what its parents were) and every animal born in a tree would be a bird. Perhaps coloration or some other trait might be heritable — blue birds who move to swamps give rise to little blue tadpoles — but the majority of phenotypic features would be governed by the environment in which the organism is born and develops.
In our world, all we know about X is that it is a phenotypic feature, then we should expect it is more likely to be stable under different environments than to be stable under different genotypes. Features must owe more (on the aggregate) to genes than to environment. If it were otherwise, then we would not talk about species! We know we are not in the swamp-birds-have-tadpoles world.
When people talk about genes vs. environment, they usually aren't really talking about all features. They're usually talking about some particular, politically interesting set of features of humans ...
"I did not think; I investigated."
Wilhelm Roentgen, when asked by an interviewer what he thought on noticing some kind of light (X-ray-induced fluorescence) apparently passing through a solid opaque object. Quoted in de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon, expanded edition, p. 146.
Anatole France, Le livre de mon ami (1885)
Anatole France is probably better known for saying, "La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain" - or, in English, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
I love how English/French translations have so many cognates! (You could even up that one a little more by using "sagely" instead of "wisely".)
I actually have a mild distrust of cognates - I don't think the connotations are necessarily preserved.
Also true of translated terms in general...
I agree, especially with French. (I've seen people translate "dialogue" from French using the cognate, and it sounds like middle-manager-speak.) Didn't mean to criticize your choice, just something I've found neat.
--Arthur Schopenhauer
This seems obviously true, but why is it true?
There's not point being annoyed at nature, but a precommitment to revenge is useful.
Incidentally, I would point out that I'm pretty sure I've read of psychology experiments where self-inflicted pain is rated as less painful than the same electrical shocks inflicted by another person.
Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2008). The sting of intentional pain. Psychological Science, 19(12), 1260-1262. pdf
Many thanks for the reference!
I wonder what would happen where the pain is something like a needle-stick in a blood donation: Inflicted by someone else, but with the consent of the person experiencing it. Presumably the element of malice wouldn't be present...
-- Questionable Content #2072
-John Nash, A Beautiful Mind
In other words, recognizing that politics is the mind-killer helped Nash manage his paranoid-scizophrenia.
Or, at least, he believes it did.
Are you saying that it actually didn't help Nash manage his scizophrenia or are you just inserting the uncertainty back into that statement?
The latter. I don't think Nash is a reliable narrator.
EDIT: And not merely because of his schizophrenia. Without hard data, I'd be hard-pressed to evaluate whether or not learning a mental habit increased or decreased my sanity, and that's assuming I'm sane to begin with.
More like a causation, I'd say: causation causes correlation.
But correlation only correlates with causation.
The way I like to put it is this: "correlation correlates with causation because causation causes correlation." :)
Thomas Jefferson, to John Adams, August 15, 1820.
I had thought that Jefferson and Adams were bitter political rivals and so was very surprised to read this. With a quick check from Wikipedia, I learned that, "[after being] defeated for re-election by Thomas Jefferson and retir[ing] to Massachusetts, he later resumed his friendship with Jefferson."
Anyway, I like the quote for rationality purposes as well as for the fact that I now have a start on quote-mining if I ever need to write terrifying Jefferson/Adams shipping fanfiction. Why I would need to do so is nonobvious to me right now, but it is one of many contingencies for which I am now prepared.
Tom Lehrer, "That's Mathematics"
(If one were so inclined, one could give a quasi-rationalist commentary on practically every lyric in that song.)
-Randall Munroe, xkcd
~Epictetus
Better to leave them well-instructed and rich, surely?
This is rather self-serving: the Stoics in general were renowned (and well-paid) teachers. (More practically, I've seen some articles suggesting that, in the US, the cost of some majors now outweighs the monetary benefits. The cost of education should at least be considered.)
~ Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book
~ Randall Munroe, xkcd #240: Dream Girl
Except that in this case it did.
What made it real was (among other things) Randall posting that comic. He wanted the meetup, and chose that method to publicise it.
Wanting something isn't sufficient: desire is a force that acts upon you, not on the universe.
(I can't give the exact quote, as it's hearsay, and I'm translating it back into English from Russian)
During WW2, British aircraft engineers had to reach a compromise between an airplane's structural durability and other uses of weight such as armor, defensive armament, etc. The odds of losing a bomber due to its structure falling apart were much less than those of it simply being shot down; 1:10000 and 1:20 respectively. Yet when the designers proposed sacrificing some structural integrity to improve the bomber's armor plating or machineguns, the pilots were adamant. They hated the thought of their plane breaking up on its own so much that they passed up the opportunity to reduce a MUCH more likely risk.
(I suspect that the bias here had to do with risks somewhat dependent on the subject seeming much more controllable and less abhorrent).
--Christopher Hitchens (Dec. 15 December 2011) The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-believer
-- Wendell Johnson, as quoted in Language Thought and Action
-Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation
This is just reinforcing what people (on LessWrong) already think about non-narrow AI; you could just as easily have someone say that:
I remember reading on LessWrong (though I can't find the link now) about how if folk wisdom/sayings can be reversed and applied to the situation, it means that neither is capable of giving real insight to the problem.
-- Dutch proverb
Can someone please explain this one to me? I'm just getting "living things shape their environment", which while inspirational doesn't have much to do with rationality.
It looks to me like a more pacifistic version of "God made man, but Samuel Colt made them equal". Which could be taken to mean "faith might have its place, but science and hard work are what solve problems". Both proverbs are open to other interpretations of course.
Possibly it's making a subtle equivocation between "earth" and "land", that is, the Dutch obtained a lot of what is now the Netherlands by extracting underwater land from the sea (or used to, something like that). It's not just saying that the Dutch "created their nation" in the sense of laws and whatnot, but actually "made" the land for it.
My guess, anyway.
That's the interpretation given in this French children's book, where I first encountered the proverb.
That's also how this Dutchwoman interprets it. But of course, while it literally refers to the creation of polders, the figurative meaning is 'faith might have its place, but science and hard work are what solve problems', like PhilosophyTutor said. (With a little bit of 'Gee, aren't we Dutch GREAT?' thrown in. ;p)
“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.” ― Paul Valéry
Gerry Spence (emphasis his)
--Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein's Ladder; apparently of the many attempts, the one referred to did not actually have British backing, although some did eg. the Oster Conspiracy or Operation Foxley.
(This is the full and original quote; the emphasis is on the section which is usually paraphrased as, "What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic...if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?")
I don't understand what exactly is supposed to be so shockingly "primitive" or illogical about Malcolm's statements. The remarks about the national character of the British and their level of civilization and decency can be interpreted as a reasonable belief that conspiring to assassinate a foreign head of state would be a violation of certain norms that the British government is known to follow consistently in practice, and expected to follow by a broad consensus of the British people -- such consensus being strong enough that it can be considered part of their national character.
Now, one may argue that Malcolm had mistaken beliefs about some of the relevant facts here, but Wittgenstein's reaction looks in any case like a silly tantrum. He also seems to be using the Dark Arts tactic of throwing exalted and self-important rhetoric about general intellectual principles to draw attention away from his petty and unreasonable behavior.
"a violation of certain norms that the British government is known to follow consistently in practice"
What does "what is known" have to do with what is in fact? The suppressed premise is that citizens know what their governments do, even those parts of the government termed its "secret service." That governments don't operate by ordinary standards of "decency" has been known at least since Machiavelli.
Malcolm was one of Wittgenstein's most promising students; yet even he fell - unquestioningly - into the vapid jingoistic idea that there are intrinsic 'national characters' (aggregates over millions of people of multiple regions!) which carry moral qualities despite the obvious conflict of interest (who is telling him the English are too noble to assassinate), that they exist and carry enough information to overrule public claims like that, and all his philosophical training which ought to have given him some modicum of critical thought, some immunity against nationalism, did nothing. And in point of fact, he was blatantly wrong, which is why I linked the British-connected plots and assassins.
Uh huh. And if a Tea Partier tells you that Abu Ghraib was just youthful spirits and black sites don't exist, well, obviously that's a reasonable interpretation of the facts based on that non-chimerical 'national character' or a broad consensus of the American people... Whatever.
In retrospect maybe I should've rewritten the anecdote as a German saying it (about Churchill claiming a German attempt on his life) and an English rebuking him later, just to see whether there would be anyone trying to justify it. (It's not that famous a Wittgenstein quote, I don't think anyone would notice.)
With all due respect, you are getting seriously mind-killed here.
Do you agree that the probability of a person accepting and following certain norms (and more generally, acting and thinking in certain ways) can be higher or lower conditional on them belonging to a specific nationality? Similarly, would you agree that the probability of a government acting in a certain way may strongly depend on the government in question? Or are these "vapid jingoistic idea[s]"?
For example, suppose I'm an American and someone warns me that the U.S. government would have me tortured to death in the public square if I called the U.S. president a rascal. I reply that while such fears would be justified in many other places and times, they are unfounded in this case, since Americans are too civilized and decent to tolerate such things, and it is in their national character to consider criticizing (and even insulting) the president as a fundamental right. What exactly would be fallacious about this reply?
Note that I accept it as perfectly reasonable if one argues that Malcolm was factually mistaken about the character of the British government. What I object to is grandstanding rhetoric and moral posturing that tries to justify what is in fact nothing more than a display of the usual human frailty in a petty politicking quarrel.
I agree, but I don't think that you're describing Malcolm's position - Wittgenstein was the one expressing uncertainty on the issue ("When Wittgenstein remarked that it wouldn't surprise him at all if it were true, Malcolm retorted that it was impossible"), so for Malcolm to disagree with him he must be quite confident, not merely think that the British are less likely to assassinate than others.
And when someone has undue confidence in how good his group is, beyond what evidence mandates - than yes, it seems correct to say that he was mind-killed by his "primitive" jingoism, and Wittgenstein is correct to rebuke him.
If I read about an assassination attempt on Hitler and about how some said it was mandated by the British, then my position would be Wittgenstein's - that it wouldn't surprise me if that was true (even before reading Gwern's post). It may be that hindsight is 20/20, but I think Malcolm, who had much more information about the times than I do, should have been able to see more clearly.
Malcolm spoke about the British national character (not the character of the British government) and from this he arbitrarily leaped to thinking that it binds the actions of the British government; as if the British government is somehow a random or representative sample of the British population.
The assumptions and leaps of logic necessary for this flawed logic are obvious to those who've managed to avoid thinking of whole nations as if they're homogeneous groups. Wittgenstein was correct to call it primitive. Malcolm was not saying anything more intelligent or subtle or deep than "Our monkey tribe good! Therefore nobody from our monkey tribe ever do bad thing!" If the representation of the conversation is a fair one, Malcolm wasn't wise enough to be able to even distinguish between government and governed, and consider the differences that might accumulated to each.
Such an absurd assumption is not necessary. It is sufficient that the way government officials are selected from the British population doesn't specifically select for traits contrary to the "national character," or that their behavior is constrained by what the general public would be outraged at, even when they act in secret. (Note also that this isn't necessarily due to rational fear of being caught -- people are normally afraid and reluctant to do outrageous things even when rational calculations tell them the probability of getting caught is negligible. With the exception of certain things where hypocrisy is the unspoken de facto norm, of course, but that's not the case here.)
Malcolm may well have been guilty of such thinking, but at the same time, Wittgenstein clearly had a fit of irrational anger at the suggestion that probabilities of monkey behaviors are not independent of their tribe. (I won't speculate on what part his own residues of tribal feelings might have played here.)
And nobody here is claiming that Malcolm was correct -- merely that Wittgenstein's reaction was hardly the paragon of rationality it's presented to be.
Don't forget Wittgenstein may have reacted as he did out his own emotional attachment as well.
"Who you to say your monkey tribe so much better than mine!"
Which is not to imply that he was identifying with Nazis, which he obviously wasn't, but you would be surprised how many historic accounts of those of say Jewish descent that fled the National Socialist regime still overall held German and Austrian culture and "national character" in higher esteem than that of say the British, Russians or Americans, we have.
"If my monkey tribe can do horrible things, well yours isn't that different!"
Agreed. Or from e.g. feeling betrayed that Malcolm didn't consider him and Wittgenstein to belong in the same monkey tribe for all intends and purposes. I've not read any of Wittgenstein, but if he was of internationalist ideology, he might have been disappointed to see nationalist sentiment in Malcolm (which would put Malcolm and Wittgenstein in different tribes) rather than whatever ideological/political/racial/religious/class distinctions would have put them in the same tribe.
I don't make the same tribal distinctions that a Greek nationalist would make, or a white nationalist would make. For someone to put much weight on such distinctions would mark him as a different tribe according to my distinctions, even though I'm Greek and white too.
This makes me think of one of those intellectual hipster Hegelian dialectic thingies.
Idiot: My monkeys are better than your monkeys. (Blood for the blood god, etc; Malcolm.)
Contrarian: My monkeys are better than your monkeys, because they don't say things like "My monkeys are better than your monkeys." (Secular Western cosmopolitanism, faith in progress, etc; Wittgenstein.)
Hipster: My monkeys are better than your monkeys, because they don't say things like "My monkeys are better than your monkeys, because they don't say things like 'My monkeys are better than your monkeys.'" (Postmodernism, cultural relativism, etc; Vladimir.)
It amuses me that I can think of a few trendy Continentals right now who base their appeal on working at level four.
People can get very upset when those they like, "suddenly" turn out not to be "part" of the same tribe.
Emphasis mine. That's the part that's the result of bias (i.e. primitive and illogical).
However, Wittgenstein is not criticizing Malcolm just for supposedly having wrong factual beliefs, but for mere willingness to use probabilities about beliefs and behavior of people that are conditional on their natonality. He is objecting to the very idea that the probability of the British government commiting a certain act may be different from the probability of some other government committing it, or that certain broader norms that also prohibit such behavior might be a matter of exceptionally strong consensus among the British, which would by itself provide strong evidence that their government is unlikely to exhibit it.
I think we are interpreting Malcolm's position very differently. Malcolm isn't saying "I would be surprised; I put a low probability that the British government would do that." Malcolm appears offended- it is impossible because the British are too decent. You are right that one could, say, be less surprised by an American assassination attempt than a Canadian assassination attempt based on past actions of the governments, but that's not what Malcolm is doing here. He's exhibiting a nationalistic, self-serving bias, which Wittgenstein is right to object to.
I am not concerned with whether Malcolm was correct, and I'm not saying that Wittgenstein had nothing to object to. This is not a situation where we're judging them as symmetrical parties in a debate, but a situation where we discuss whether Wittgenstein's position deserves to be pointed out as an outstanding example of rationality. And it seems tome that even if one takes a much less favorable view of Malcolm, Wittgenstein is still displaying a fair amount of mind-killing biases.
"The Latest Toughs" by Okkervil River http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tziQcj4XIYw
"Clear language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education." - Richard Mitchell, The Graves of Academe
(McKay & Dennett 2009)
-- Paul Graham, "The Age of the Essay" (http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html)
But its not true. (well, under the most reasonable interpretations that come to mind)
Rivers do meander "frivolously" due to instabilities.
Even if it didn't carve into the earth, it wouldn't be true, since it's a simple gradient descent.
Euripides, Helen
We practice rationality because we don't have a "sense" of what not to believe, or at least not a reliable one. The closest thing is the absurdity heuristic, which is very hit-and-miss.
“If you follow the ways in which you were trained, which you may have inherited, for no other reason than this, you are illogical.”
--Jalaluddin Rumi
-Voltaire, Cato
Relevant discussion.
But which of these more accurately represents his "actual preferences", to the extent that such a thing even exists?
Not only is "actual preferences" ill-defined, but so is "accurately represent." So let me try and operationalize this a bit.
We have someone with a set of preferences that turn out to be mutually exclusive in the world they live in.
We can in principle create a procedure for sorting their preferences into categories such that each preference falls into at least one category and all the preferences in a category can (at least in principle) be realized in that world at the same time.
So suppose we've done this, and it turns out they have two categories A and B, where A includes those preferences Cato describes as "a fit of melancholy."
I would say that their "actual" preferences = (A + B). It's not realizable in the world, but it's nevertheless their preference. So your question can be restated: does A or B more accurately represent (A + B)?
There doesn't seem to be any nonarbitrary way to measure the extent of A, B, and (A+B) to determine this directly. I mean, what would you measure? The amount of brain matter devoted to representing all three? The number of lines of code required to represent them in some suitably powerful language?
One common approach is to look at their revealed preferences as demonstrated by the choices they make. Given an A-satisfying and a B-satisfying choice that are otherwise equivalent (and constructing such an exercise is left as an exercise to the class), which do they choose? This is tricky in this case, since the whole premise here is that their revealed preferences are inconsistent over time, but you could in principle measure their revealed preferences at multiple different times and weight the results accordingly (assuming for simplicity that all preference-moments are identical in weight).
When you were done doing all of that, you'd know whether A > B, B>A, or A=B.
It's not in the least clear to me what good knowing that would do you. I suspect that this sort of analysis is not actually what you had in mind.
A more common approach is to decide which of A and B I endorse, and to assert that the one I endorse is his actual preference. E.g., if I endorse choosing to live over choosing to die, then I endorse B, and I therefore assert that B is his actual preference. But this is not emotionally satisfying when I say it baldly like that. Fortunately, there are all kinds of ways to conceal the question-begging nature of this approach, even from oneself.
Thanks to all the pushback against my initial complaint, I've retracted my downvote. I announce this here so that I can signal what a wonderful rationalist I am.
I think this quote unfairly trivializes the subjectively (and often objectively) harsh lives suicidal people go through.
I think this quote is objectively accurate:
In other words, if you ever think you want to kill yourself, there's a 90% chance you're wrong. Behave accordingly.
All this data says is that between 90% and 94% of people who are convinced not to jump did not go on to successfully commit suicide at a later date. It would be a big mistake to assume that whether or not you would come to regret your choice is 100% independent of whether or not you can be convinced not to jump and that therefore the fraction of people who came to regret commiting suicide is the same as the fraction who would have come to regret commiting suicide if they had failed their attempt.
"Apprehended" isn't synonymous with "convinced not to jump", but there does seem to be a sampling bias here, yes. (And can I say how refreshing it is to hear someone point that out and not be ignorantly insulted for it by dozens of people? Hyperlink to a "More Wrong" website omitted in the name of internet civility, but take my word for it that I'm describing an actual event.)
I think even "convinced not to jump" wouldn't necessarily change the decision calculus here, though. To the extent there is a selection bias it's because some subset of suicidal people behaved in ways which caused them to avoid opportunities to have their minds changed. That's so irrational you could practically write a book about it.
One old study about one bridge is not the whole body of evidence regarding suicide, either. Read a few more bits from just that one news article.
Suicide rates reduced by a third in Britain merely because one easy method became unavailable? In other words, a large minority of would-be suicides didn't even need to be convinced by someone else, they just needed less time to convince themselves than it would have taken them to find a slightly less convenient way of killing themselves. Even "very slightly less convenient" can provide enough time: 4 bridge jumpers per year were all deterred by one new barrier at the Ellington bridge, the local suicide rate went down by 4 jumpers per year, and the suicide rate at the unprotected, easily visible neighboring bridge only went up by 0.3 per year?
I personally wouldn't have predicted any of this, but I don't think there's any major flaws in the data now that I've seen it. The biggest selection bias here may be one for those of us who naturally try to predict how people will rationally respond to changing incentives: applying such predictions to a tiny fraction of the population which has already self-selected for irrationality is not going to work well.
Not that I don't think that most people who plan to kill themselves will tend to think better of it as time passes, but it's a mistake to assume that trivial inconveniences only prevent people from doing things they don't really want or believe are good for them.
That isn't what the quote tells you. It is evidence that you could be wrong but certainly doesn't make you 90% likely to be wrong.
Well, yes, it just establishes a prior. But a remarkably hard prior to update, don't you think? "I'm probably in worse shape than all those people who tried to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge" would demand some exceptional new information.
If you ever think you want to kill yourself, there's a 90% percent chance that, either you're wrong, or you will be after surviving the attempt.
As a 911 Operator, I have spoken to hundreds of suicidal people at their very lowest moment (often with a weapon in hand). In my professional judgment, the quote is accurate for a large number of cases (obviously, there are exceptions).
I have read that a majority of people who survive suicide attempts end up glad that they did not succeed (although I can no longer remember and thus cannot vouch for the source.) A somewhat alarming proportion of my own acquaintances have attempted suicide though, and all except for one so far have attested that this is the case for them.
There are many people who want to die. There are few who are willing to commit suicide to do it.
From what I understand, it's accurate. Whether waiting a week would result in a more or less responsible decision is an open question.
When it is subjectively and not objectively harsh, what needs to happen is that their malfunctioning brain be fixed.
And what needs to happen, for the others, is that their objective reality be fixed.
--Max Tegmark, asking for some quantitative information in a vague lecture.
-- Guy Steele, Growing a Language (pdf)
Louis C.K., Live at the Beacon Theater
-Pierre de Beaumarchais (and usually incorrectly attributed to Voltaire)
Is this about the seductive power of music to fool people into believing implausible things? If not, what is its rationality?
I would take it to be about art in general rather than music specifically. It's socially acceptable for works of art to support a particular viewpoint - and try to convert their consumers to it - without supplying much evidence to show that it's actually true.
One example that will probably ring true with LWers is the strong lesson in lots of fiction that following one's "heart" is a better (more moral, or more likely to lead to success) course of action than following one's "head".
A similar principle might be: any popular game with poor plot, balance, gameplay, etc. has good graphics.
~ Mencius Moldbug
Saruman, in this image at A Tiny Revolution.
That doesn't seem like the right pair of characters for making the intended point. Here is the context:
Boromir himself was an example of a character who was doing bad but thought (until just before the end) that he was doing good. So, to consider oneself to be a Boromir is to consider oneself to be fooling oneself in just the way that Moldbug describes. Boromir already is just the kind of self-deluded person that Moldbug is saying that powerful people are. It would have made his point better to say that "Every Boromir considers himself a Faramir". Or, "Every Sauron considers himself a Gandalf".
You let an evil magic artifact of unimaginable power sway you for literally two minutes and that's the only thing people remember you for, for the rest of eternity.
The problem is that Gandalf explicitly refuses the ring for fear he would find it useful and thus be corrupted by it. Whereas Moldbug's point is about how Sauron would rationalize taking the ring. Perhaps a better phrasing would be, "Every Sauron starts out as a Boromir."
Like Gandalf, then, except smart enough not to pass up such an awesome opportunity to do so much good :D.
Incidentally, there's an essay by Tolkien where he explores the differences between the motivations of Morgoth and Sauron: Notes on motives in the Silmarillion. Some excerpts:
-T.H. White, in The Once And Future King (book III, Le Chevalier Mal Fet)
We have never yet found a single illogical thing. Things, by and large, are pretty ordinary. If something is hard to teach and hard to learn, it's more likely that humans just suck at teaching and learning it. Alternately, some of this stuff sounds like it would really suck to learn, so active avoidance could be part of it too.
Really well written though :D
That's the point. The passage is being sarcastic.
Of course. What he's describing isn't rationality, it's dysrationalia - and especially the ability to compartmentalize. The rational ones in this passage are the young, who are "intimately and passionately concerned" with the existence of God, Free Love versus Catholic Morality, and so on. More than anything I see this quote as a caution against losing the fire in your belly.
-- Daniel Shelton, re-founder of the Flat Earth Society
(We're looking for good illustrations of motivated uncertainty, insistence that no conclusion can be drawn from overwhelming data. Shelton may not be a good example because he is probably a deliberate troll who does not really believe the Earth is flat. Also, religious examples are excluded, but examples from e.g. astrology and homeopathy would not be. Daily-life examples are best.)
Let's go for two-in-one this time:
--PZ Myers
After describing an odd subjective experience:
-- Aleister Crowley here
Seeing how individual decisions are rational within the bounds of the information available does not provide an excuse for narrow-minded behavior. It provides an understanding of why that behavior arises. Within the bounds of what a person in that part of the system can see and know, the behavior is reasonable. Taking out one individual from a position of bounded rationality and putting in another person is not likely to make much difference. Blaming the individual rarely helps create a more desirable outcome. – Donella H Meadows
-Doctor Who, Season 5, Episode 5
I love the quote. The Doctor is badass. But ultimately this seems to be a quote about misusing the word 'impossible' - totally out of place in this thread!
I see it as taking the Outside View on impossibility. Of course, in real life it usually takes more than a few minutes, but in the Whoniverse it is not unreasonable. Also, asking "How impossible?" seems to me like a good question in some cases.
So long as it is kept in mind that "How impossible?" is merely a more polite and less coherent way of replying "Bullshit. How difficult is it really?".
--Heinrich Heine; an early, little-known German contribution to the Evil Overlord List.
“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” - Zen saying
A warning that not all hyperrationality is beneficial.
Or a warning that the Zen notion of enlightenment won't let you automate menial tasks you dislike.
...or another way of saying "it all adds up to normal."
Or at least, that at some point, if you want to improve your lot, you need to leave off thinking long enough to build, buy, or improve some gadget or agreement that will actually help. Labor-saving tech really does equal progress.
How strange; I live in an Enlightened civilization and I haven't chopped wood or carried water in a good long while. It would seem that someone has, once again, underestimated the potential of the mind because their own method did not suffice to achieve it.