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Rationality Quotes December 2011
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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
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Comments (577)
(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).
Louis C.K., Live at the Beacon Theater
"'...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
--Christopher Hitchens (Dec. 15 December 2011) The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-believer
--Gregory Cochran
-- 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.)
-- Steven Kaas
Old joke, but a good one.
--Heinrich Heine; an early, little-known German contribution to the Evil Overlord List.
After describing an odd subjective experience:
-- Aleister Crowley here
-- Guy Steele, Growing a Language (pdf)
-T.H. White, in The Once And Future King (book III, Le Chevalier Mal Fet)
Related: This comment by Mitchell Porter.
long quote is long.
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
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.
That's the point. The passage is being sarcastic.
--Max Tegmark, asking for some quantitative information in a vague lecture.
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." :)
I believe that both of them also sell sea shells by the sea shore :-)
--Asher Peres
So is this to differentiate the n-dimensional calculus used to model quantum phenomena from the reality of a laboratory?
In some sense, yes. Peres has long been of the view that instead of looking to some kind of 'philosophical interpretation' of what quantum mechanics is, we need to see what quantum mechanics tells us about the experiments we perform. And that questions such 'what quantum mechanics means' makes sense only if they tell us something about the outcome of an experiment.
More broadly, I put that quote here to illustrate the difference between map and territory.
"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
“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
But changing one's behavior often involves switching costs. Going with the flow avoids these costs. Since the benefits from switching are sometimes lower than the costs of switching (including the effort spent estimating the costs and benefits!), going with the flow is sometimes net-beneficial.
Example: Aren't heuristics often adaptive, even in the modern world?
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
I held off reading this series (my children being in their 30s and having no grandchildren) until several months ago when I realized that just because I didn't watch television or go to many movies, I should not be totally left out of modern culture. And so I started the first year. I could not put these books down and more or less inhaled all seven as fast as I could. What an excellent choice of quotations for this thread.
“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” - Sir Francis Bacon
On the difficulties of correctly fine-tuning your signaling:
Kate Fox, Watching the English (quoted here).
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.
Funny in abstract or funny as in hauntingly familiar? ;)
Familiar -- but a little bit of both. It's a commonplace that English/British society is classful in a way that American society is not. That may well be true (I'm not qualified to judge), but America definitely has its own class distinctions. I would have trouble, though, putting them on a "lower, middle, upper-middle, upper"-type scale.
On the other hand, I guess the story struck me mainly as an example of someone using irony as a personality statement, which can be done without reference to class. Just today when I was at the store I was idly playing with the idea of buying a Hello Kitty iPhone cover. (I am a 38-year-old male.)
Edit: I can't think of an American analog of the garden gnome (we have them over here, but if they're as fraught as they are over the pond it's gone over my head), but when I try to think of a home-and-garden decoration that I would only display for irony (or maybe if a dear friend gave it to me), I think of a Thomas Kinkade painting.
The degree of class issues isn't as conscious in the US (although by many metrics there's actually less class mobility in the US) but it still comes across as both funny and insightful.
Someone, (whose identity I can't recall, some commentator or comedian) said that the British have class in the same way Americans have race.
Not sure how true that is, but a middle class Indian person probably has more in common with a middle class white person in the UK.
For a historical perspective, take a look at John C. Calhoun's statements on the need for racial hierarchy precisely to avoid the rise of class divisions among white Americans.
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.
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.
Oh I am so getting my own gnome, just so that I can use that phrase on people.
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
Blaming individuals for their narrow-minded behavior is one way to encourage less narrow-minded behavior.
-- Questionable Content #2072
“To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.” ― Paul Valéry
I occasionally do this as a routine for meditation/reflection/expanding perspective/entertainment/not sure what label to use, and I recommend it because I think members of the community will be able to do it.
I basically go outside and walk around looking around at trees the sidewalk and grass and trying to disassociate what I'm seeing from any notions of 'tree' or 'grass' object classes. Once I can get those I can usually extend it to everything in my perception. A sort of de-object-ification, trying to hold in my mind the notion that there are no boundaries between one thing and the next, and that 'thing' itself is a fundamentally false concept. If you read HPMOR, it's Harry's thought processes when he attempts partial transfiguration.
The effect is somewhat of an exhilarating experience of stepping out of the system and seeing it for what it is, and a peaceful intimate connection with the air around you, realizing that there really is no boundary between self and the world.
If I can point to anything similar, it would be Jill Bolte Taylor's description of her stroke, and drug experiences I've had recounted to me, though I don't have personal experience in either area.
"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.
Upvoted for reading de Solla Price :)
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.
-- Wendell Johnson, as quoted in Language Thought and Action
-- Alan J. Perlis, in the foreword to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
--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?")
The quote and comments raise two questions: 1) What was Wittgenstein chastising Malcolm for? and 2) Were their opinions rational?
On the first, I don't think there's enough information to tell. Was Wittgenstein protesting that Malcolm drew too close a connection between national character and state conduct or that Malcolm was victim of an idealized view of British national character? I think Malcolm was "primitive" for both reasons, and it seems fairly plausible that Wittgenstein might have had both in mind.
But there's a third form of primitiveness in Malcolm's remark, and Wittgenstein appears to have shared Malcolm's premise—although that's not completely clear. It is a cached-belief bias: that the assassination of any foreign head of state is immoral. Such formalism is irrational when considering a radically new development (the rise of a Nazi Germany and the degree of its dependence on its fuhrer). Only "primitive" people would assume that "decent" people necessarily eschew assassination, regardless of the despot's international role.
As I think about it, I can't dismiss that this aspect might have been what offended Wittgenstein, who does not appear to have been completely honest; to my ear, he sounds personally offended. What offended him, we might guess, is that Malcolm was insinuating that Wittgenstein's approval of such an endeavor was indecent. (A point on which Wittgenstein was, I think, sensitive and which would offend most people when directed toward them.)
Or you know deontologists and some virtue ethicists.
Seems plausible actually.
I think you are seriously over-thinking that third form, and that is not what is intended at all; you can be mortally wounded that your philosophy has completely failed to teach someone a little critical thinking about how licit it is to argue an assassination attempt did not occur because of 'national character' without any regard to whether you personally approve of assassination or not. (I doubt Wittgenstein was any fan of the Nazis, what with being a secular Jew dispossessed by them and living in England.)
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.
"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"
And when people say "I have free will" it is compatible with their being compatibilists rather than magic black-boxers. But usually they mean the black box sort.
The fact that Wittgenstein, knowing this Malcolm personally, interpreted the remark as he did is evidence in favour of that interpretation.
I was going to say your interpretation is compatible at best. But now that I've checked the quote rather than going from memory I don't think it's compatible at all:
"When Wittgenstein remarked that it wouldn't surprise him at all if it were true, Malcolm retorted that it was impossible because "the British were too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand, and . . . such an act was incompatible with the British 'national character'."
the retort was in response to Wittgenstein saying "it wouldn't surprise him at all if it were true"
"such consensus being strong enough that it can be considered part of their national character." This is the kind of thing Wittgenstein doesn't want you to say. National character isn't just a bunch of syllables. It encodes the idea of character inherently tied to nationality, even if that is not the specific definition used. If the consensus were 100% you'd still be confusing things by calling it the national character.
When you call something disgusting, when asked to define it you can append "causes squicky feelings" or similiar, and you can define national character as "strong enough consensus to pressure government" but people won't use those words that way and that isn't how the second was used here.
"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."
His behaviour being capitalisation of dangerous in a letter to the guy five years later? Maybe the guy is too upset by some normative standard, but we have no reason to believe he's faking being upset. The deception you've implied just isn't there.Especially five years later.
In any case the "to draw attention away from his petty and unreasonable behavior" stipulation is patently false. The rhetoric is what you're calling petty and unreasonable behaviour.
You've given the first guy the most generous interpretation possible and the second the worst interpretation possible.
I get the impression you're just politicking against getting annoyed by specific word choice and against people getting upset about it (and possibly in favour of interpreting things more generously than was meant, though that could just be incidental.)
"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.
Even if the deeds of the secret services are fully secret (a big if), your argument is still incorrect. Assassinations of heads of state are rare and unusual events, and are normally investigated thoroughly. It may be that in every such assassination prior to 1939, the evidence points towards culprits other than the British secret services.
(Whether or not this is actually the case is another question; I am merely demonstrating that your argument doesn't work even if its assumptions are fully granted.)
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.)
Did you also have other examples you were thinking of?
Particular examples? No, not really; but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_assassination is good reading, if a bit short and lacking in less substantiated details.
As far as I see, neither of the examples you linked provides any evidence that in 1939 it was incorrect to consider a British government assassination plot against Hitler as wildly implausible. The Oster conspiracy was an internal German plot, and the Foxley plan was just a proposal that was never approved nor carried out (and even as such, it occurred only after five years of a total war in which nearly all other centuries-old conventions of civilized warfare had been discarded -- a world very different from the one five years earlier).
Also, your Wikipedia link above fails to mention even a single assassination that would have been within living memory in 1939, and which would have matched the pattern of a government conspiring to assassinate a foreign leader. So if anything, it goes against your claims.
Successful assassination? Does that seem like the most relevant standard when it comes to the original question?
(On a side-note, the CIA seems to endorse the claim that Britain's SIS killed Rasputin. Surely we can trust the CIA...)
'a government'? Yeah, it doesn't because it's not a comprehensive list. If you want lists, look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinations_and_assassination_attempts or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_people#Assassinations_in_Europe or heck, for anything to do with Hitler like the Nazi assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss, look in Google Books pre-1940.
If you're going to be mind-killed yourself, Vlad, posting endless nitpicking comments here trying to rebut anything anyone says, you should at least be more precise in your demands, because it is trivial to find attempts, even despite all secrecy and faded memories.
(And I believe the mutual wars of assassination between the British and the Irish, eg. Tomás Mac Curtain, have already been pointed out to you, which would have been well-known to any educated person living through the troubles; feel free to dig through Google Books looking for even more assassinations.)
I am disputing your very central claim, so even if I am wrong, I don't see how this can possibly constitute "nitpicking." If it was in fact reasonable in 1939 to consider the possibility of a British plot to assassinate Hitler as wildly implausible, your original points don't stand at all.
And indeed, I do believe that government-orchestrated assassination plots against a head of a foreign state were indeed considered a wholly separate category of wrongdoing back then, and one that was a particular taboo. You just can't put other sorts of assassinations in the same reference class.
If you insist that things like the assassinations during the sectarian struggles in Ireland fall into the same reference class, then the inferential distances may really be too large for us to have a productive discussion here. But still note that you won't find any examples of the particular sort I asked for. (Except arguably for the killing of Dollfuss, something that it actually took the Nazis to do.)
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.
I think you're underestimating just how horrible the idea of assassinating foreign leaders sounded back then, especially leaders of other nations recognized as major powers. Such a thing was definitely much higher on the relative scale of outrages back then than nowadays. (Though of course things had already changed a lot in practice by 1939, by which political gangsterism had already been running rampant through the Western world for over two decades.)
Indeed, I find it quite plausible that Malcolm was motivated not so much by nationalistic bias, as by a naive and antiquated view of politics, despite his youth. Reading about his reaction, many people nowadays will likely overestimate how unrealistically favorable his opinion of Britain must have been for him to consider this accusation absurd.
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.
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.
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.
You are correct that such fears are unfounded in this case, but not owing to the "national character" of Americans. Rather, they are unfounded owing to the very public nature of the action your fears concern; carrying out such an action publicly would predictably raise an outcry, with hard-to-predict consequences on things like behaviour of the electorate and of the media; from an utilitarian standpoint the US government is better off finding subtler ways of coercing you, and has very little to gain from silencing this particular type of dissent.
But covert action, and covert action taken against leaders of foreign countries, might be a different calculation entirely. So the fallacious nature of the reply would arise from not comparing like with like.
In this case, the "national character" would manifest itself in the public outcry (it's certainly easy to imagine a population that would insted cheer while the seditious traitor is being executed). However, even regardless of that, would you agree that the U.S. government officials themselves are more likely to feel honest revulsion towards this idea compared to their equivalents from various other historical governments, and that they would be less likely to retaliate this way even if they could somehow get away with it?
It is clearly true that "national character," for obvious reasons, provides much more solid evidence when considering public opinion and mass behaviors. However, the amount of evidence it provides about the possible behaviors of small groups of government officials behind closed doors is also not negligible. This especially since secrets are hard to keep.
In Malcolm's case, the argument would be that British government officials are unlikely to conspire to assassinate the German head of state because, being British, they are likely to share intense revulsion towards such an idea, and also to fear the exceptional outrage among the British public should they be caught doing it. Once again, I have no problem if someone thinks that this argument rests on completely wrong factual beliefs and probability estimates. My problem is with attempts to delegitimize it based on lofty rhetoric that in fact tries to mask irrational anger at the fact that nationality indeed gives some non-zero evidence on people's beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.
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.
Would you mind naming those biases for me? I'm having a hard time seeing what you're talking about, and suspect that our disagreement may depend mostly on differing interpretations of limited information.
Basically, I think Wittgenstein was too quick to pattern-match every mention of such things as "national character" with propagandistic nationalist ramblings. I suspect this is just an instance of a bias that's been widespread in the Western world for quite a while now, namely the tendency to write off the use of certain kinds of conditional probabilities about people, including most of those conditioned on national origin, as inherently incorrect or immoral. (With a lot of equivocation about which one of these two is actually meant, and how come that the former category just happens to subsume the latter so conveniently.)
Moreover, from the "wouldn't surprise him at all" comment, it does appear that Wittgenstein had, for whatever reason, a biased unfavorable view of the British government. To the best of my knowledge about the state of the world in 1939, this would have definitely been, by all standards, an event far too surprising and shocking to characterize that way, under any reasonable interpretation of that phrase.
Finally, Wittgenstein's reaction is reported as "furious," and he describes himself as "shocked." It seems clear that the very fact that someone got into a shocked and furious state of mind during a conversation about controversial and mind-killing topics makes it very highly probable that at least some sort of bias has kicked in, even if my above guess doesn't identify it correctly.
(Come to think of it, I don't find it implausible that Wittgenstein could have been intentionally baiting Malcolm, hoping for an opportunity to show off some sanctimonious indignation. But lacking any detailed knowledge of his character, this is nothing more than idle speculation.)
You suspect he's too quick to pattern-match every mention from a single example?
I'm aware this is a common bias now, but I don't think it was that widespread in 1939.
Perhaps this is because I have an unfavorable view of governments in general, but it seems that for an even slightly cynical student of history assassination attempts on rival heads of state by a government should not come as a surprise, especially as monarchies were replaced by democracies. It's not clear he was singling out the British, and even if he were singling out the British, it's not clear if that was the result of bias or cool calculation. (The British did have the best spy network in Europe, although whether or not Wittgenstein would have known that is not something I am able to guess.)
I agree that being biased can lead to fury, but I think for someone as passionately logical as Wittgenstein seeing bias, especially in a friend, could also lead to fury. It's not clear to me that his immediate reaction is evidence between those hypotheses, and his persisting fury strikes me as slightly better evidence for the latter. (Background: Almost twenty years earlier, Wittgenstein was rebuked as a teacher because he would also beat the girls if they made mathematical mistakes.)
That is, it is possible that Wittgenstein was biased in pronouncing Malcolm's bias, but it seems to me unlikely. The evidence seems to point the other way, especially the conclusion he draws- that philosophy should help one with the important questions of everyday life.
Admittedly, this is speculative, but from his tone I did get the impression that he was prone to such matching.
Actually, a very strong taboo against such assassinations follows from a very cynical theory. Namely, it provides for a convenient Schelling point for national leaders, where they can otherwise escalate war as much as they like without fear for their personal safety. (As long as they don't let themselves get totally conquered, of course.)
But more importantly, who are all these heads of state supposedly assassinated under orders from rival governments prior to 1939? Can you name any attempts of such assassinations in the period of, say, one hundred years preceding 1939? Or even just cases where the culprit is unknown, but a plot directed by a rival government seems plausible?
(The closest example I can think of is the killing of Engelbert Dollfuss that kicked off the coup attempt in 1934 by the Austrian Nazis, who were clearly acting in concert with Berlin. But even that was an all-out coup attempt accompanied by an armed Nazi uprising across the country, so not really an assassination plot, and also symptomatic of the new and unprecedented wave of political gangsterism of which the British government was not a part.)
Given this history (or rather a lack thereof), do you think that it was possible for a non-biased observer in 1939 to view the accusation against British government plot to assassinate the German head of state as unsurprising if true?
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...
Tom Lehrer, "That's Mathematics"
(If one were so inclined, one could give a quasi-rationalist commentary on practically every lyric in that song.)
-Probably not Henry Ford
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/08/henry_ford_never_said_the_fast.html
-- 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.
"The Latest Toughs" by Okkervil River http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tziQcj4XIYw
-John Lennon on leaving a line of retreat
You know, in Middle School choir I had hymns alongside this song. It was actually the first time I thought about being an atheist on purpose, not just through neglecting to go to church.
Not actually a dupe, to my surprise. (Personally, I would've linked to 'Joy in the Merely Real' or something; lines of retreat doesn't seem that relevant.)
Well, the leaving a line of retreat article actually gives the example of a religious person imagining the world (even if they don't think it's really possible) where there's no god. Joy in the merely real makes sense too, I guess.
I actually gave it 50% odds that I'd lose karma for this quote, but I like it anyway.
--Hokusai and Hiroshige
It took me a long time to figure out this poem isn't about a recovering alcoholic.
-- Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
-- Bryan Caplan
---"Culture in Economics and the Culture of Economics: Raquel Fernández in Conversation with The Straddler"
Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions - Daniel Kahneman
--The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
This is my father's favorite quote from his favorite movie.
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.
Let's go for two-in-one this time:
-- Road sign in Griffin, Georgia, showing that sometimes it's good to have some distance between map and area.
-- 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.
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.
[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?
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.
Some years ago I would have agreed with you, but nowadays I believe this attitude is mistaken. In most cases, quick answers will at least miss some important aspects of the problem. I think de Maistre is quite right to emphasize that it's safe to rely on quick answers only when the person raising the concern is otherwise known to be extremely foolish.
“Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” - Zen saying
A warning that not all hyperrationality is beneficial.
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.
This is obviously a different sense of the word "enlightenment", and a different intended connotation of "chop wood, carry water". Downvoted.
(I always thought that, like TheOtherDave said below, this quote means "it all adds up to normality".)
I disagree; I think that the saying is straightforwardly mistaken in exactly the way Eliezer states.
I read it as something like "enlightened or not, you're still made of atoms".
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.
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."
Anatole France, Le livre de mon ami (1885)
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.
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."
Fritz Zwicky, Morphological Astronomy
--PZ Myers
-- 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.
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)
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.
--I.J. Good (as quoted in "The Problem of Thinking Too Much" by Persi Diaconis)
Thomas Carew
"Clear language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education." - Richard Mitchell, The Graves of Academe
(McKay & Dennett 2009)
Gerry Spence (emphasis his)
-- Finn's Note, from "The Real You"
An example of working precommitment (to a plan that may involve forgetting the plan).
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.
-- 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.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/01/geeks-lose-minds-recreate-first-level-of-super-mario-land-with/
I suspect it can be done programmatically, by wiring MC server to emulator, in less than 50 hours.
Its almost a new type of super-stimulus, where rather than being extraordinarily entertaining its extraordinarily difficult.
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.
Pistons can only push rows of 12 blocks; the Game Boy screen is much wider than that. I can imagine building a system to push groups of 12 separately without any exposed mechanism when idle, but I think that is likely to be impossible.
You could divide the screen into rows 12 blocks wide, each powered by an array, with a 2 block gap. You put the arrays one level below the display level and push the blocks up (via sticky pistons) each turn. You'd still have to manually fill in the gaps, but that's only 22 out of 160 lines.
You can combine the arrays like a big stair and only have a 1 block gap, but that requires some manual working of the pistons each turn (because you can't hide the wiring). Not sure if it's worth it. I'm 30% confident it can be automated without exposed wiring.
I have been thinking about a gapless way on-and-off over the last 2 days. I don't have one yet, but I'm 70% confident I can figure one out without the help of the r/redstone hivemind in less than 50 hours of thinking. I've put building a working implementation on my Minecraft todo list. There's no way this is impossible.
... and I've build a working prototype. Took about 3 hours to figure it out, 2 hours to get the wiring to work (first big redstone project), another 1-2 hours for the array and timing. It's trivial to scale and can be easily extended to push in both directions. The whole mechanism is hidden. I think there is a delay of ~8 seconds per 12 blocks, so scrolling the gameboy screen should take ~1.5 minutes. I'm sure you can get this below 1 minute if you try.
Here's the video. Here's the save. Here's a bunch of screenshots instead of a blueprint or explanation.
...why we can get people to do this but not our open volunteer tasks...
What effort have you applied to making your volunteer tasks this catchy and rewarding?
Volunteer tasks? I wasn't aware you (I'm assuming that means Less Wrong or SIAI) had any; perhaps you have a visibility problem?
Or maybe they're just not as engaging as an open-ended engineering environment with no arbitrary entry requirements and no visible resource constraints. . .
http://www.singularityvolunteers.org/opportunities Less engaging and visible, yes. I was going to quote http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_western/ back at Eliezer, but I don't think he's actually surprised, just lamenting the phenomenon.
Some exposed mechanism seems okay; it works for LCD displays (and some older ones had a pronounced screen-door effect). You could scale it up, but it is an unfortunate fact about Minecraft that mechanisms far away have no effect.
Wow. That's absolutely bonkers. And impressive. XKCD almost seems realistic now!
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.
-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."
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 ...
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2005.
But they are observable later. For example, we can observe now the predictions from 2005, when this quote originates.
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.
--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...
-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.
I thought seriously about whether or not to post it, for that reason. And I myself have commented a few times in the past on quotes that espoused libertarianism, or transhumanism, or singularitarianism, but didn't have some sort of rationality message. While I do in fact think that AI is possible in the way Drexler wrote, the part I was actually thinking about was the definition of impossible. I actually tried to come up with a way of "censoring" the quote, while still leaving the passage readable, but I didn't see a way to do it.
Which of course doesn't mean that it's impossible ;)
PS. Upvoted