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Rationality Quotes December 2011
Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
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Comments (577)
-- Salman Khan
(Edit: Pretty sure he means "sci-fi book".)
(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 beat me to it! -- I thought when I watched it that this bit would make a good rationality quote.
I can't explain why his attitude/distribution model/whatever for that concert makes so much goddamn sense, but it does.
I like Louis C.K. Many comedians tend to be genuine, but he is consistently so.
"'...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
--Sheldon Cooper, fictional character from the Big Bang Theory
While I kind-of agree, quoting that out of context without an explanation is mere gratuitous name-calling IMO, rather than a “Rationality Quote”.
Consider some of the other rationality quotes in previous threads. I am simply following established precedences.
--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.)
Is this different from the colloquial "But there's still a chance" or "But you can't be sure"?
-- 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
Maybe you are irrational. There's nothing illogical about the process.
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?
Is being satisfied in a local optima rational? A rationalist should recognize that there are costs to change and they might outweigh benefits, but being better at achieving goals is the point.
That is true, people should recognize that. In fact, I don't think I disagree with anything you've said. But I think the wording of the quotation made it sound as though following pre-established behavioral patterns were always suboptimal. Surely that claim is false?
It's an interesting empirical question how much of what we do is sub-optimal. I'm sure it is larger than what most people would guess. For example, I expect that most LWers would agree that unwritten social norms, especially politeness norms, are optimized for status showing, not achievement of material goals.
That part of the quote seems to limit the applicable scope. I read it as rejection of "tradition" as a stand-alone justification. That is, we don't drive on the right side of the street in the US by "tradition," but based on Schelling point type analysis.
Sub-optimal relative to what? To what a hypothetical God/AI with unlimited computing power would recommend? Well, we don't have access to that kind of computing power.
As Nick Szabo points out in this essay, tradition often contains wisdom that would be computationally infeasible recover from first principals. So yes, all other things being equal, you should accept "tradition" as a stand-alone justification. If all other things aren't equal, then you should treat the existence of the tradition as evidence to be incorporated like other.
The problem is that there is no such thing as "tradition". In every society bigger than village there are numerous, mostly incompatible traditions. Even in one family often happens that, if you follow grandmother's way, you anger the other one.
Thanks for the link to that interesting essay. It seems to rely on the possibility of inter-subjective truths (i.e. truths that should persuade) that are not objective (i.e. based on empirical results). Basically, I don't believe in inter-subjective truths of that kind because they are capable of proving too much. For example, "God exists" is a plausible candidate for inter-subjective truth, but there are empirical things I would expect in a world where God exists that do not appear to be present. In short, there seems to be no limit to what can be labeled inter-subjective, non-objective truth.
This asserted fragility of society is inconsistent with historical evidence. You can pick just about any moral taboo (E.g. human sacrifice or incest) and find a society that violated it but continued on, and fell for reasons independent of the violation of the moral taboo. For example, Nazi Germany didn't lose WWII because they were immoral jerkwads. Germany lost WWII because it picked a fight with a more powerful opponent (who happened to also be an immoral jerkwad).
I don't think "truths that should persuade" is a good definition of what Szabo (or others) mean by "inter-subjective truths".
Wikipedia is not very helpful, but I understand it more as "things whose truth-value depends of how many people believe in them", i.e. "children are expected to obey their parents", "you should drive on the left side of the road", etc.
Only if you think of them as incontrovertible evidence, rather than merely another type of evidence to be incorporated.
Ok, it's clear that I don't understand what is meant by the concept of "inter-subjective truth." Why use the word truth? Especially when there is the perfectly appropriate word "evidence" for the concept of believing based on the fact that others believe.
Evidence and truth are not pointing to similar concepts at all. Something can be true even if I have no evidence to believe it to be so. Contrarily, I can have evidence in support of a belief that is, in fact, false.
Would be more interesting had author defined what he means by "highly evolved tradition" and added some real world examples.
Genocide is usually (and traditionally) fate of traditional society that meets more modern one. And as for mass poverty, starvation and plagues, these were traditional part of life for all recorded history and were abolished by modernity. I'm afraid the author disproves his own thesis...
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Because... it's not real?
Just sayin'.
What Harry should've asked isn't where the experience was taking place but whether the Dumbledore he was talking to was the model of Dumbledore in his head, which only knows things that Harry knows, or enough of the actual Dumbledore to know things that Harry doesn't know. That is, what's relevant isn't the location of the experience but the source of the information feeding into that experience. That would also be the relevant criterion for distinguishing between, for example, a message from God and a hallucination.
That's like saying is depression real, or is it just happening inside the patient's head?
The correct answer is yes and yes.
Within the perspective of a fantasy world it certainly can be. It isn't just Harry imagining things. Magic is involved.
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
-- Terence McKenna, Culture and Ideology are Not Your Friends
If you would ask members of the present US culture whether the legal way gays are treated is optimal I doubt you will get that answer.
One the one hand you have people who disagree with state laws that allow homosexual marriage. Some of them disagree with laws that forbid discrimination. On the other hand you do have people who would want equal marriage rights for homosexuals.
Neither side believes that their position will get cultural consensus in five years.
We should implement a filter that changes the above phrase to "The USA in the 1950s". Because then the statements that include the phrase would generally become true.
I think you're being a little to harsh on the OC. You can at least use the phrase "Western Culture in the 20th century". (;
You can delete the duplicate comments now that they are retracted.
Don't believe it.
Cultures, to the best of my knowledge, differ somewhat significantly with respect to their attitude to moral and ideological progress or decline. It doesn't even seem particularly likely that every culture in history has even had an attitude such that it can be said to be operation with an assumption one way or the other.
I don't really disagree with the point he's trying to make there, and if we restrict ourselves to talking about post-Enlightenment Western cultures the argument might be largely accurate; but over all cultures in all times and places he's simply wrong.
It's actually fairly unusual for a culture to be consistently forward-looking at all, let alone to assume that the solutions to all its problems and the answers to all its open questions will arrive in a few years or decades. Most seem to have assumed that the present world's unusually debased and that things will only get worse, usually culminating in some sort of cataclysm; compare Hesiod's Ages of Man, the Kali Yuga, et cetera. This sort of thing might seem like a reactionary fantasy to us here and now, but that or a cyclical viewpoint or some combination are part of the bedrock of myth in essentially all the traditional cultures I know anything about.
This strikes me as dreadful advice on pretty much all fronts that matter.
To the extent that I want to improve my status, I want to focus on the stuff my opposition is least compelling about. (It would be nice if this were also the stuff they were most wrong about, but that ain't necessarily so. That said, it's unlikely to be what they are least wrong about.)
To the extent that I want to solve important problems, I want to focus on problems I consider important, regardless of whether the opposition agrees with me or not.
Focusing on what they are least wrong about only makes sense if what I want is to maximize cooperation. This can be a good idea if cooperation is a viable intermediate goal to something else, which is often true, but in the situation implied by this example doesn't seem likely.
Excellent points. On the other hand, cooperation seems like a good way to help your opponents learn about you and see you as an ally in at least one community. Depending on what you want, this may be at least 34% of the battle.
First of, 90% of the reason I posted this was become it ended with "whatever they're least wrong about." I do not think it necessarily stands up to intense scrutiny.
That said, cooperation is only valuable as an intermediate goal, yes, but I think it's a pretty damn important intermediate goal. If both sides are defecting, nothing gets done. Don't forget your most important goals, but go for them strategically in a way that doesn't burn all your good will.
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.
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.)
Yes, many of those words and their role as class shibboleths are discussed in Fox's book as well. IIRC, according to her in some cases there are three levels; either three different words for one thing used in lower, middle and upper classes, or (matching the counter-signaling in the gnome story) the same word being used in the lowermost and the uppermost classes.
Out of interest, how does this read from a non-uk perspective?
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.
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.
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.
-- Questionable Content #2072
Saw this today, and wanted to yell at Marigold.
Why?
Sure, discounting the value of understanding is bad, but so is the Straw-Vulcan excessive attention to detail irrelevant to the current situation.
Well, flippantly trivializing other people's passions in conversation with them is generally assholish behavior.
Besides which, glass houses, unless she's dying to be asked why keeping up with her guild raids in World of Warcraft is so important.
“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.
Could someone offer an explanation for this quote?
My interpretation: humans have a tendency, upon creating a node in their minds that represents a given object (or event, or class of object, or class of events, or other representable thing), to thereafter stop paying much attention to the object (or whatever) itself. For example, I've seen a U.S.quarter thousands of times, but I would have a very hard time drawing one from memory, or even selecting the correct face from a set of plausible alternatives, because I really don't pay attention to what a quarter looks like... I merely examine the object for long enough to identify it as a quarter, and then I pay attention to other things instead.
One way of describing this behavior on my part is to say that, upon "remembering the name" of the thing I'm seeing (that is, on identifying it as a quarter) I give up actually "seeing" it (that is, actually attending to the particulars of the thing).
And so Paul observes that, by contrast, if I am to actually "see," I must in so doing suppress the act of "remembering the name."
Verbal overshadowing.
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.
"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 :)
-- Wendell Johnson, as quoted in Language Thought and Action
-- Alan J. Perlis, in the foreword to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
This works as long as you think information is outside the purview of physics.
Mathematical systems are outside the purview of physics. I can make true statements about infinite series and n-dimensional spaces all day long and never have to actually go point at any in the real world.
Except... the decidedly non-trivial exception to this rule is that whatever is actually implementing the mathematical reasoning is constrained by physics, whether it's my brain or an i5 quad core.
Which is how I interpret the quote: the internal rules of abstract systems are not subject to physics, but the systems themselves sooner-or-later are. This is particularly relevant to programming because you can use non-physical abstractions if and only if you (or the people who wrote your tools) can explicitly represent them with physical processes.
My point was merely that some would consider the laws of Information Theory to be contained within "the laws of physics", and programs cannot violate the laws of Information Theory.
--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.)
There nothing radically new about getting heads of state in Europe that want to wage wars. European's in that time aren't like modern American's who have no concept of honor and no respect for international law. European's fought their wars according to a honor codex that allow certain form of violence but forbids other forms.
Given the morality of the time it is indecent to violate the laws of war and go and assassinate a foreign head of state. Neither side of WWII fully followed international law and principles of honorable behavior at all times but when they didn't followed those principles they still were indecent.
You shouldn't forget the fact that Germany started WWI because of an assassination of a head of state by a government that was allied with Germany. That assassination wasn't done by France of Great Britain. Even when the British still considered Germany to be responsible for WWI they didn't thought to highly of that assassination.
Or you know deontologists and some virtue ethicists.
Seems plausible actually.
They would still have to be 'primitive' deontologists and virtue ethicists.
I suppose.
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.
By common usage (and probably definition) "is known" means that the subject is factual and people are aware of it. If people want to make a claim where the subject may not be factual but is still believed then they say 'is widely believed'.
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.)
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?
This is not evident in the quote you talk about. Malcolm didn't use probablities, he called it "impossible". He didn't merely condition his guess partly on the nationality, he seems to have based it entirely on said nationality and on nothing else.
Do you know of any act, no matter of how great charity or barbarism that is so incompatible with "national character" that you can find not one person of that nation willing to commit it?
That is not the relevant question here. The relevant question is whether we can think of acts that are so incompatible with the "national character" that it would be inconceivable (i.e. p~0 can be assumed for all practical purposes) that any institutions of a given country's government would commit them, although such acts have been committed by governments in other places and times. The answer is obviously yes.
I can think of only such acts as wouldn't benefit such governments in question. E.g. it wouldn't benefit the US government to cook alive suspected terrorists and use their flesh to feed its troops. Cannibalism isn't part of the American national character -- and it doesn't benefit the US government either, so it doesn't do it.
But I can't think of any acts that would be effectively impossible to be committed by an institution of any government though it would benefit it, merely because it's "not in the national character" to do so. If something is not in the national character, then said institution merely does it in secret.
For example, given the American national character, it would be inconceivable for the U.S. government to kidnap its subjects' daughters to serve as concubines in the president's harem. (Something that many historical governments in fact did openly.) Do you therefore conclude that this is in fact being done in secret? Or maybe that the only reason why it's not being done is the difficulty of keeping it secret?
Primarily the latter. Consider this:
North Korea abducts women for the president's harem.
South Korea does not (neither openly nor secretly, with p~0).
And yet it's people of the same nationality on both sides of the border. Therefore such things don't seem to me to be primarily dependent on "national character". They seem to be primarily about what each leader can get away with doing. South Korea and America are semi-democratic capitalist states. North Korea is a totalitarian regime.
To get back to my comment where I explained what I consider to be a reasonable interpretation of "national character," I defined it thus:
In this discussion, I am not at all interested in the exact connection that these norms have with ethnicity or any other factors. I merely claim that for whatever reason, there is variation in such norms across governments, which sometimes gives very strong information on what they may be capable of doing.
(And anyway, several decades of life under radically different regimes imposed by foreign conquerors, one of which practices extreme isolation, will cause cultural divergences that run deeper than the immediate structure of clear incentives. Moreover, this one example is not conclusive proof that all such differences in governments' behaviors in all places and times are caused by the same factor.)
They have different citizenships, different cultural messages from birth, different access to such messages from the rest of the world (such as the US). They cannot accurately be described as having the same nationality.
Which governments did so? I can only think of some that politely asked families to send them their daughters.
Reread that phrase with a cynic's mind in the context of a power struggle.
How would that benefit the US government?
Well, to be fair the proposition that the assassination attempt had British backing implicitly means that it had systematic approval in at least some government division, so it's a rather stronger claim than saying that at least one British person was willing to commit resources to backing the attack. But it did seem to me that Wittgenstein was criticizing his student for naive and sloppy thinking (which he was indeed guilty of) not for having the belief that there can be prevailing trends in national character.
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 think that the examples you cited didn't support your claim for the same reasons Vladmir_M gave.
I specifically asked if you had other examples in mind, rather than if they existed, to avoid making a claim that could be refuted by some one of the endless historical facts unknown to me. Your claim was far too strong if you didn't have specific examples in mind, regardless of their existence.
The cases of assassination all seem distinguishable, for example, the premise of the Anglo-Irish war was that Britain did not consider Ireland an independent nation, the assassination of Dollfuss weakens Vladimir_M's claim about the inconceivability of assassination without damaging it overmuch, as it was Nazis who did it, etc.
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.
The fake explanation. What does the claim of 'civilization' and 'decency' add to the assertion? (Recall that Wittgenstein specifically objects to "dangerous phrases".) Does it help you predict that, eg, child-molesters could die painfully in prison, out of the public eye but not out of mind? What does it tell you about the public use of pain in other cases? Seems to me the meaningful part of your hypothetical reply ends with "in this case," since you've already drawn a line around the USA by saying that it differs from "many other places and times".
It also seems like (when you speak of "probability") you're defending a statement that Perloff does not record Malcolm making, while criticizing Wittgenstein for traits this particular passage does not clearly show.
I added these word specifically to parallel the paraphrase of Malcolm's claim. The rationale for their use is that there exists a specific (if somewhat vague and, on some dimensions, disputed) cluster in the space of all possible systems of social norms that is commonly associated with these words in modern English. Among other things, this includes a negative attitude towards public judicial torture and open repression of (some kinds of) anti-government speech (relevant for my example), as well as towards assassination plots against foreign leaders (relevant for Malcolm's example -- and possibly a matter of greater outrage back in his day).
So it's not a fake explanation, because it points to a real existing cluster of norms that have been dominant in the Western world in recent history. This can in turn be used, for example, to point to other norms in this cluster and predict that they are correlated with the listed examples across societies.
Note that here I'm merely using these words with their customary meaning, not to express unreserved approval of this entire cluster of norms.
As I already pointed out, we are not judging Malcolm and Wittgenstein as two equal participants in a debate. Rather, we are discussing whether the latter's criticism really is up to such high standards that it deserves being extolled as a sterling example of rational thinking. Hence my sticter scrutiny of him, and my tendency to give maximally charitable interpretation to Malcolm.
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.
I don't think the phrase "national character" does refer to the belief of the general public in this context. It refers more to the character of the British elite.
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.
Not necessarily. I don't know to what extent government officials of all countries are more like the typical citizen of their own country than they are like other government officials of any other country. It's not clear to me which reference class would dominate in assigning priors.
Just to avoid misunderstanding, the question is whether the views of a typical U.S. government official about what criticisms of government are permissible are more similar to the average U.S. citizen, or to the views of government officials averaged across the whole world, or even across all governments that ever existed. Am I understanding correctly that you see this as a highly uncertain question?
Yup. The dynamic I have in mind is this: to become a government official, one must first pass a certain set of filters, which are likely to select for the kind of person who'll view anyone criticizing their government as scum who deserve no better than a public beating.
This is definitely not the only dynamic in play; but if you want to deny that this dynamic exists, you will have to bring evidence to bear to overcome its strong plausibility.
Malcolm doesn't make that claim if the description of the argument is a fair one. It's not the word "unlikely" but the word "impossible" that is used; and the fear of an outrage by the public isn't discussed.
It may be a good thing to correct an opponent's argument before you defeat it, but we're not obliged to actually call it a good argument.
In this situation, Malcolm's statements were only briefly paraphrased by his opponent, and the criticism of Malcolm is being presented as a great and commendable example of rational thinking. In such a context, I believe it's only fair and reasonable to give Malcolm's reported statements maximally charitable reading.
In particular, I think it's reasonable to interpret "impossible" in its casual meaning (i.e. merely vastly improbable, not literally disallowed by the laws of logic and physics). Moreover, I also think it's reasonable to interpret "national character" in a way that makes his statements more sensible, i.e. as including all factors that determine what behaviors are a priori more or less likely from a given government and its officials and subjects.
Tom Lehrer, "That's Mathematics"
(If one were so inclined, one could give a quasi-rationalist commentary on practically every lyric in that song.)
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...
Do you really think that panic is in response to the (perceived) inevitability of death? The arguments (and sensibilities) for and against hedonism don't change if people stop dying. I think.
-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.
-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.
"The Latest Toughs" by Okkervil River http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tziQcj4XIYw
~ Girl Genius
(They're actually talking about fantasy fiction, but the principle applies to real life as well.)
(Duplicate and not verbatim)