Are you saying that it actually didn't help Nash manage his scizophrenia or are you just inserting the uncertainty back into that statement?

Always liked that last one. There are memes out there I'd rather not get infected with.

Though don't listen to me; I find it impossible not to like anything said by Isador Akios.

Knowledge is power. Guard it well.

Is there some research corroborating this quote?

If this is a question about causality, I would assume not. Sherlock Holmes was eccentric to the point of insanity and made up all sorts of funny wrong things.

In reality, it seems like in general exercising the brain improves its function on several dimensions. Also, relevant silly article about brain memory capacity

I read this as concerning organization instead of capacity.

relevant: Your inner Google

I had a different interpretation. To me, this sounded more like a warning against bad personal epistemic hygiene and about the tradeoff between epistemic and instrumental rationality, not what happens when you reach the upper bound of your memory capacity. Now that I think about it, your interpretation is probably closer to what Doyle had in mind (what with his 19th century pop-psychology and all).

I would take it to be about art in general rather than music specifically. It's socially acceptable for works of art to support a particular viewpoint - and try to convert their consumers to it - without supplying much evidence to show that it's actually true.

One example that will probably ring true with LWers is the strong lesson in lots of fiction that following one's "heart" is a better (more moral, or more likely to lead to success) course of action than following one's "head".

A similar principle might be: any popular game with poor plot, balance, gameplay, etc. has good graphics.

Not only is "actual preferences" ill-defined, but so is "accurately represent." So let me try and operationalize this a bit.

We have someone with a set of preferences that turn out to be mutually exclusive in the world they live in.
We can in principle create a procedure for sorting their preferences into categories such that each preference falls into at least one category and all the preferences in a category can (at least in principle) be realized in that world at the same time.
So suppose we've done this, and it turns out they have two categories A and B, where A includes those preferences Cato describes as "a fit of melancholy."

I would say that their "actual" preferences = (A + B). It's not realizable in the world, but it's nevertheless their preference. So your question can be restated: does A or B more accurately represent (A + B)?

There doesn't seem to be any nonarbitrary way to measure the extent of A, B, and (A+B) to determine this directly. I mean, what would you measure? The amount of brain matter devoted to representing all three? The number of lines of code required to represent them in some suitably powerful language?

One common approach is to look at their revealed preferences as demonstrated by the choices they make. Given an A-satisfying and a B-satisfying choice that are otherwise equivalent (and constructing such an exercise is left as an exercise to the class), which do they choose? This is tricky in this case, since the whole premise here is that their revealed preferences are inconsistent over time, but you could in principle measure their revealed preferences at multiple different times and weight the results accordingly (assuming for simplicity that all preference-moments are identical in weight).

When you were done doing all of that, you'd know whether A > B, B>A, or A=B.

It's not in the least clear to me what good knowing that would do you. I suspect that this sort of analysis is not actually what you had in mind.

A more common approach is to decide which of A and B I endorse, and to assert that the one I endorse is his actual preference. E.g., if I endorse choosing to live over choosing to die, then I endorse B, and I therefore assert that B is his actual preference. But this is not emotionally satisfying when I say it baldly like that. Fortunately, there are all kinds of ways to conceal the question-begging nature of this approach, even from oneself.

I would instead ask "What preferences would this agent have, in a counterfactual universe in which they were fully-informed and rational but otherwise identical?".

As a 911 Operator, I have spoken to hundreds of suicidal people at their very lowest moment (often with a weapon in hand). In my professional judgment, the quote is accurate for a large number of cases (obviously, there are exceptions).

I think this quote is objectively accurate:

"of all would-be jumpers who were thwarted from leaping off the Golden Gate between 1937 and 1971 — an astonishing 515 individuals in all — he painstakingly culled death-certificate records to see how many had subsequently “completed.” His report, “Where Are They Now?” remains a landmark in the study of suicide, for what he found was that just 6 percent of those pulled off the bridge went on to kill themselves. Even allowing for suicides that might have been mislabeled as accidents only raised the total to 10 percent."

In other words, if you ever think you want to kill yourself, there's a 90% chance you're wrong. Behave accordingly.

I see it as taking the Outside View on impossibility. Of course, in real life it usually takes more than a few minutes, but in the Whoniverse it is not unreasonable. Also, asking "How impossible?" seems to me like a good question in some cases.

I assume that what you mean by "whatever he says it is" is whatever preferences his choices reveal, not literally what he says it is.

Believing that a person's good is literally what they say it is can just as easily lead to "nannyism", if we decided to prevent people from acting against their own good.

The quote denies the possibility of Progress or Improvement.

Well, I liked the quote, and you have my upvote. It says to me, stop wasting time hoping things will turn out right (and contrapositively, worrying that things will turn out wrong) and get down to fixing the problems.

Am I reading too much into it? I don't think so. I don't care, either. It made me smile because it showcases a big part of my world-view.

(article)

Just reading that maxed out my GDA for fuzzies.

What made it real was (among other things) Randall posting that comic. He wanted the meetup, and chose that method to publicise it.

Wanting something isn't sufficient: desire is a force that acts upon you, not on the universe.

you can trade money for goodness of instruction by e.g. hiring tutors

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.

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/

There's homage and there's homage. And then there's three guys spending over 500 hours to recreate the first two minutes and twenty seconds of Super Mario Land using more than 18 million Minecraft blocks. The movie, made by carpenter James Wright, Joe Ciappa and a gamer known as Tempusmori, had the guys running the classic monochrome platformer in an emulator and replicating it pixel-for-wool-block-pixel inside a giant Minecraft Game Boy. The team spent approximately four weeks, working six to seven hours a day with no days off...

Grognor: chelz: is the area of a rectangle more the length, or the width?

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.)

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.

The organism needs to successfully thrive and reproduce within that range. Sometimes this means tailoring its phenotype to the environment it finds itself in.

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.

Each theorem is grounded in axioms (although, one is often working many, many levels above the most basic axioms). And each axiom is independent of physical reality, so it doesn't have a definite truth value (as long as it is not inconsistent with itself).

For blockquotes, put a > at the beginning of the paragraph.

I found it in a book about rethinking aid to sub-Saharan Africa (Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo). If you google the quote it's either identified as a proverb or African proverb, so that's about as specific as I, or anyone else for that matter, can be. But I do appreciate the concern.

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.

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 read the quote as remarking on the problem of implementation - people often can enunciate the optimal course of action for themselves in their present situation (e.g. I should be working on my paper right now) without this enunciation having the slightest effect on their behavior. Therefore, since the benefits of rationality only accrue to those whose behavior is rational, no art of rationality is complete that does not deal with implementation.

I actually have a mild distrust of cognates - I don't think the connotations are necessarily preserved.

A lot of things don't seem too uncommon

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.

I actually expected to see this one.

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.

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.

Thank you, edited. Is this the reason for the downvoting, or is there something else?

...or another way of saying "it all adds up to normal."

The downvotes this comment has received probably indicate that the downvoters either don't understand the quote or perhaps think I was quoting myself.

I didn't downvote it, but other possibilities are that it wasn't attributed, and that people just don't consider it a very good rationality quote.

I understand it fine; I object to it on literary grounds (healed/heal breaks the rhythmic symmetry) and a general suspicion that this is the kind of New Agey sentiment that seems correct initially but breaks down catastrophically when one finally finds some empirical evidence relating to it and is revealed to be nothing but a platitude.

The downvotes this comment has received probably indicate that the downvoters either don't understand the quote or perhaps think I was quoting myself.

No. I downvoted (now) because it is a terribly inelegant and inaccurate way to express the slight grain of truth in the concept space.

The quote is speaking to emotional truths that, in all likelihood, can't be understood without life experience.

It isn't complicated at all. Someone raised in a bubble could understand given either a rudimentary education about animal behavior or a couple of sentences explanation.

I would point out that it is perfectly possible to be a worse predictor than a random or max-ent predictor; if all economics does is - per the quote - remove our (Marxist/Communist/socialist/Keynesian/mercantilist/Maoist/Catholic/...) delusions that we can improve on the normal workings of the economy, it will have done us a useful service indeed. Aside from the very simplest predictions relating to supply-and-demand, obviously.