Rationality quotes January 2012
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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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 (462)
Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 83, Article 1
Is this down voted because it has the word "God" in it?
Well, I downvoted it because it essentially replaces one ungrounded assumption (or rather, the answer to a wrong question,) with another ungrounded assumption. It's an exercise in rationalization, not rationality.
It doesn't really have the form of a "rationality quote". It's too long to be quotable, not directly bearing on rationality, and doesn't give rationality-warm-fuzzies like "that which can be destroyed by the truth should be".
That said, probably yes.
I think it is hard to dispute that several such statements have been upvoted in recent rationality quote threads.
-- David Hume
If he didn't use the word "merely," this would be an even more amazing rationality quote than it already is.
I don't think it's very good either way. It's just a flat statement - presumably it was the thesis or conclusion to some long chain of arguments proving it. But as a quote? It is not very memorable, or witty, or a novel argument or any of the usual criteria I judge our quotes on.
Bolesław Prus, "The Pharaoh" (translation mine)
"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool." -- Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander from the book "Wizard's first rule" by Terry Goodkind.
This is a useful quote when one remembers to apply it to oneself. "You know how transparently full of shit everyone else is? Guess how stupid you are yourself."
In case this gives anyone the false impression that the Sword of Truth series is good, let me advise you: it isn't. What starts out as a decent premise devolves into the most convoluted argument for Objectivism since Rand herself.
I'd have to confirm that. It started out decent but I tired of the series a few books in.
I didn't notice the Objectivism, since the S&M and scat play drove me away first. The first book was enjoyable.
See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ev/rationality_quotes_july_2010/28gb
— Bertrand Russell History of Western Philosophy (from the introduction, again.)
Generalization'd.
Human behavior is predictable if sad. As much as we like to delude ourselves we are rational thinkers we usually tend to fall back on habit and mental shortcuts. You can easily train your brain to overcome this but it does take some work on your part. So it probably isn’t going to happen. But I’ll do my part trying to point out your many and varied shortcomings and you can go along, nodding wisely and congratulating me on my benevolent teachings while all the while planning to ignore me and do things the same way as before. [...]
The family house you grow up in is what you see as normal. That is the definition of shelter in your life. If you encounter a new product, that first price is what you use as a “normal” one. So everything can suffer from your first encounters ( or look better in comparison ). This is why most people won’t look for shelter. They look for a house. Or an apartment. Whatever they are used to. They are not used to finding a way to keep the elements out, they are used to finding a house or apartment. This is the way it is done and any suggestion otherwise is ignored. They might pretend to be open to new ideas but once they find fault with any way other than their own they can claim to be objective while remaining safely cocooned in their normal world.
People don’t look at how to get from one point to another. They don’t look at the need for transportation, they look at the need for a car. So by comparison shopping for cars they ignore scooters or bicycles or public transport or even carpooling. They are used to having a car and that is the only way to do it. People don’t look at how to become secure, they look at how to make money. To them money equals security and there is no other way. They ignore being out of debt, they ignore decreasing dependence on a paycheck ( note I said decrease, not eliminate ). They ignore all but getting money. This is how it was done before and it is how they are going to continue to do it.
~James Dakin, throwing the anchor overboard
There is something to be said for the wisdom of crowds. Information cascades are a thing, but the reason they happen is that it's rational for each individual to go along with the crowd, and you're not going to form a new equilibrium by yourself.
Edit: authorial instance specified on popular demand.
The next sentence is
Skeptics will tell you that yes, it did. Belief that the Sun needs human sacrifices to rise in the morning killed their beloved big brother, and they've had a terrible hatred of it ever since. And they must slay all of its allies, everything that keeps people from noticing that Newton's laws have murder-free sunrise covered. Even belief in the Easter bunny, because the mistakes you make to believe in it are the same. That seems like a pretty good reason to be concerned with it.
Indeed. In fact there's a website: What's the Harm? that explains what damage these beliefs cause.
More accurately, Yvain-2004
-- Democritus
"When The War Came", by The Decemberists
(from memory, will fix any errors later)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov
"While developing his theory on the centres of origin of cultivated plants, Vavilov organized a series of botanical-agronomic expeditions, collected seeds from every corner of the globe, and created in Leningrad the world's largest collection of plant seeds. This seedbank was diligently preserved even throughout the 28-month Siege of Leningrad, despite starvation; one of Nikolai's assistants starved to death surrounded by edible seeds."
Thank you kind sir.
It's clear to infer what he's getting at, but this reminds me of nothing quite so much as Timecube.
Former U.S. Presidential Candidate Herman Cain who was quoting from the movie Pokémon 2000.
A Pokémon quote Cain didn't repeat:
Perhaps he needs a new direction. Is SIAI hiring?
Never work against Mother Nature. You only succeed when you're working with her. --Cesar Milan, quoting his grandfather in Cesar's Way, a book about rehabilitating dogs
Professor: So, the invalidation of the senses and cognition as a means of knowing reality is a common thread through eastern mysticism and platonic philosophy. We will study the resurgence of these ideas within secular western philosophies starting with the explanation of how it's impossible to know things "as they are" versus things as they are within the bounds of our minds.
Phone: Beep Beep Beep ♪
Professor: See you on Monday.
(He answers)
Professor: Yes?
Wife: Honey, Angelica is having trouble with her vision. I'm going to use some of the rainy day account to take her to the optometrist.
Professor: Hahah! Actually, vision is merely a sense that supplies the mind with perceptions, interpreting with all biases and forming only-
Wife: Honey.
Professor: Oh. Yes dear. Go ahead.
~Jay Naylor, Original Life
'withing'. Also, I don't entirely understand - is the point that the professor, contra his students, argues in the reliability and objectivity of vision and then turns around and argues the opposite against his wife?
I think the point is that the professor's stated philosophical beliefs (that sense-perceptions are an invalid means of knowing reality) contradict his commonsense desire for his daughter to have good vision, and thus his elaborate arguments are shown to be disconnected from reality.
I'm not sure who originally said this but I vaguely remember the quotes from law school.
A latin proverb, and I think part of Roman law, it means no-one should be a judge in their own cause.
Dan Dennett
To explain: a "nominal essence" is just an abstract idea that humans have decided to use to pick out a particular type of thing. This is contrasted with a more Aristotelean view of essence.
-Stephen Crane
-Gene Ray, The Wisest Human
http://www.timecube.com/timecube2.html
-Kvothe, The Name of the Wind
They often do [scramble the reels] at art houses, and it would seem that the more sophisticated the audience, the less likely that the error will be discovered.
--Pauline Kael, Zeitgeist and Poltergeist; or, Are Movies Going to Pieces?
Related
-- Deng Xioaping
Duplicate, but I like your translation better.
-Cleverbot
http://cleverbot.com/cleverness
Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles such as to admit of a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.
-Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption
While this quote isn't directly about rationality, it reminds me a good deal of Tsuyoku Naritai!.
~ Theodore Roosevelt, The Man in the Arena
(Edit: Just to clarify as some might misinterpret the posting of this to be a knock on rationality, the relevance of this quote is that what counts is trying to solve problem. While with hindsight it's easy to say how (to pick a mundane example) one might work out the area under a curve once you already know calculus, it's not so easy to do it without that knowledge.)
Attributed to Voltaire (referring of course to the Gregorian calendar reform) though evidence that Voltaire actually said or wrote any such thing seems scanty. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
--I, Claudius, "Poison Is Queen"
Because days is the Schelling point interpretation, and if gods are communicating with you they'll probably go for the Schelling point. Lightning implies Zeus-Jupiter, so Augustus should look into historical examples of Zeus talking to people to see if Zeus tends to be misleading in ways similar to those Fabius warns of; in fact the augur had probably already considered things like this before speaking with Livia. And Fabius should trust the augur, who is a specialist in the interpretation of signs and probably has more details of the case than he does. I mean seriously, what are the chances that the letter C would get struck by lightning? We are beyond the point of arbitrary skepticism. Deny the data or trust the professionals. (I'm not familiar with the series in question, I'm just filling in details in the most likely way I can think of.)
ETA: Wait, maybe Fabius is trolling Augustus/me? ...Nice one Fabius! I approve of your trolling. Downvote retracted. (Oh yeah and this is an excuse to link to the Wiki article on assassination markets.)
Fabius actually seems a little irrational in this quote. At first he objects to Augustus's interpretation because Augustus is not an expert on the interpretation of signs, which is reasonable. But then when Augustus does have an intepretation that's coming from an augur, Fabius still continues to question it, pitting his view against expert opinion like it was still just the opinion of Augustus. Since it is not established that Fabius would be an augur himself, this seems like motivated cognition / not properly updating on evidence.
Alternatively, it could be that Fabius doesn't actually believe in omens, but in that case first appealing to the need to get an expert opinion is pretty dishonest.
Of course, Alejandro's comment below does clarify that Livia is probably lying about the augur's testimony, but I'm going by the quote as it was posted (and as most people probably read/voted it).
Fabius does not want to argue with a fool more than it is necessary. He engages the heavy guns only when needs to, this time at the end of the dialogue.
My kind of a (dishonest you say) guy.
--B.F. Skinner
"A man's gotta know his limitations." - Dirty Harry
C.S. Lewis, Introduction to a translation of, Athanasius: On the Incarnation
Or, you know, some new books with a fresh outlook. Just saying.
Not written yet.
If I may continue it:
From http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/athanasius/incarnation/incarnation.p.htm
Not likely to be much help if the new outlook is built upon the old in such a way that the mistakes of the old outlook are addressed by the new, but the mistakes of the new were not raised to the point of being able to be addressed within the old.
True, on the other hand, I suspect people around here tend to massively overestimate how often that happens.
--Jean de la Bruyère
But we all die, so that makes death alright?
-William James
-- Milton Friedman
One of these things is not like the others, one of these things does not belong.
Lance Parkin, Above us only sky
This is less a rationality quote than a "yay science" quote, but I find that impressive beyond words. For millenia that was a huge and frightening question, and then we went and answered it, and now it's too trivial to point out. We found out where the sun goes at night. I want to carve a primer on cosmology in gold letters on a mountain, entitled something in all caps along the lines of "HERE IS THE GLORY OF HUMANKIND".
“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”
That would seem to be an odd notion of "faith"; is the translation untrue to the original or is Nietzsche just being typically provocative? (I also personally don't see how the quote is at all profound or interesting but that's a separate issue and more a matter of taste.)
Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.
--Bruce Lee
That seems rather applause-lighty. The reversal is abnormal; who would say "Use some things that don't work"? Maybe in some traditionalist cultures "Resist the appeal of using things that work but come from unworthy places" would sound wise, but on LessWrong it would likely get stares.
"Use only that which works" is obvious enough to be unhelpful, but "take it from any place you can find it" was pretty novel in the context in which he proposed it, and still is to a lot of people in a lot of domains.
The existence of the Traditional branch of Jeet Kune Do (as opposed to the Concepts branch,) which exclusively teaches the martial art as Bruce Lee practiced it at the time of his death, is testament to the strength of humans' tendency to behave counter to this advice.
Songs can be Trojan horses, taking charged ideas and sneaking past the ego's defenses and into the open mind.
John Mayer, Esquire (the magazine, not the social/occupational title)
--1 Corinthians 15:26
(I wonder what Eliezer would've made of it - as far as I know, he never read Deathly Hallows and so never read about the tombstone.)
--Mencius Moldbug
Remember sources please; "How Dawkins got pwned (part 7)", 8 November 2007
You have a thing for Moldbug too, don't you? ^_^
This sounds like bad advice. In Moldbug's application of it, for example, making things "obvious" corresponds to making bad arguments - arguments that, in some alternate reality, possibly made of straw, would correspond to some possibly straw person who found the argument very obvious. And then you say "well, obvious argument #1 is awful, so by process of elimination let's go with obvious argument #2! Q.E.D."
-- Eric Raymond
Don't shut up and do the impossible!
Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March.
--Frank Adamek
While you're there, enjoy the laddergoat.
--Aristotle
"Hit 'em where they ain't". --Douglas MacArthur commenting on his island-hopping strategy in WW2.
Science isn't just a job, it's a means of determining truth. Methods of determining truth that aren't trustworthy in the laboratory don't become trustworthy when you leave it. There is no doctrine of applying scientific methodology to every aspect of one's life, you either follow trustworthy methods of investigation or you don't, and "follow trustworthy methods of investigation" is the core of science.
~Desertopa, TVTropes Forum
osewalrus
Steven Pinker, Words and Rules
Invertible fact alert: I can't tell if Pinker means that as (mostly) a good or a bad thing!
I take it as ha ha only serious. Pinker knows that people are generally appallingly inaccurate and believe untruthful things, and that psychology is right to throw out every other belief and only depend on what it has rigorously verified; but he also knows the rigorous verification has been done on weird subjects and so psychology has thrown out a lot of correct beliefs as well. Accepting this tension is the mark of an educated man, as Aristotle says.
Given the history of psychology as a field, I'd assume he's praising the merits of experimental evidence.
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
--James Anthony Froude
"A Confucian has stolen my hairbrush! Down with Confucianism!"
-GK Chesterton (on ad hominems)
Lucio Russo, The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn
Some people will always have to take most of natural science on authority. Sure you can make that sound bad, but to me it sounds like "children take 9*9=81 on authority! spoooooky."
Ye gots to wiggle yer fingers when ye say it.
--Peanuts (Nov. 23, 1981) by Charles Schulz
In short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not oblige them.
Cory Doctorow talking about DRM, but I think there are some wider applications.
Reminiscent of one of my favorite Bruce Schneier quotes.
"Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake." -- Napoleon Bonaparte
(This has been mentioned before on LW but not in a quote thread. I figured it was fair game.)
Slavoj Žižek, Violence, emphasis added. Admittedly not the most clear elucidation of the subject of how urgency (fabricated or otherwise) should affect ethical deliberation, but see also his essay "Jack Bauer and the Ethics of Urgency" -- if you're into that sort of thing.
The truth is common property. You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true.
Paul Graham, Lies We Tell Kids
It would seem that if no other humans are behaving rationality and your group is behaving rationally then even Sesame St could tell you which of these things is not the same.
then you're probably insanely wrong.
Why do you say that? That doesn't sound true. Humans are monkeys - I should be surprised if a group of monkeys acts perfectly rational. I suggest that any insanity that however insane I may be this issue is straightforward.
Trust in me, just in me. Dude people are still doing karmassassination! Even without voting buttons on profile pages. Crazy.
Assuming infinite cognitive resources or something? What's your standard?
Does it matter? If the standard chosen is such that humans behave perfectly rationally according to it then they are completely free of bias and 'rational' has taken on a bizarre redefinition to equal to whatever humans are already achieving. The time to be particular about whether rational means 'optimal use of cognitive resources' or 'assuming infinite cognitive resources' is when the behavior in question is anywhere remotely near either.
This idea of rationality is somewhat broken because we lack baselines except those we get from intuitive feelings of indignation or at best expected utility calculations about how manipulable others' belief states are. We have no idea what 'optimal use of cognitive resources' would look like and our intuitions about it are likely to be tinged with insane unreflected-upon moral judgments.
Um I don't think we significantly disagree about anything truly important and this conversation topic is kinda boring. My fault.
Apparently they stopped after downvoting about 30 comments. Maybe it was too much work.
No? You don't even try to be trustworthy here!
Of course I do. I barely ever lie here in the morally relevant sense of the word lie. I'm not even sure if I've ever purposefully lied here. That would be pretty out-of-character for me.
The evaluation of whether it is sensible to "trust in you, only you" isn't based only on whether you are lying. When you aren't even trying to communicate on the object level the interpretation of your words consists of creating a probability distribution over possible meanings vaguely related to the words that could correspond to what you are thinking. I can't trust noisy data, even if it is sincere noisy data. I mean, given the sentence "Trust in me, just in me" I only had 60% confidence that you meant "I attest that the next sentence is veritable" (more now that you are talking about how you never lie).
Trustworthiness isn't just a moral question. Choosing what to trust is a practical question.
For what it is worth of course I believe that you are likely experiencing karmassassination. I noticed that some of your non-downvote-worthy comments are taking a hit.
It takes the assassin a few more clicks. But if they want to assassinate I don't expect that it would stop them. Actually that feature removal is just damn annoying. I often read through the comments of users that I like/respect/find-interesting. Naturally I'm even more likely to want to vote up comments from such a stream than I am when reading the general recent comments stream. So now I have to go and open up each comment specifically and vote it up.
Upvoted, good point re noise and trust.
I'm so glad that "re" is a word.
If no other groups of humans are behaving as rationally as yours is, then it's likely no other humans are capable of easily identifying that your group is the one with the high level of uniquely rational behavior. To the extent that other groups can identify rational behaviors of yours, they will have already adopted them and will not consider you unique for having adopted them too.
You can signal the uniqueness your group by believing and doing things that are both rational and unpopular, but to most outsiders this only signals uniqueness, not rationality, because the reason such things are unpopular is because most people don't find them to be obviously rational. And the outsiders are usually right: even though they're wrong in your particular actually-is-rational case, that's outnumbered by the other cases which, from the outside, all appear to be similar arational group-identifying behaviors and rationalizations thereof. E.g. at first glance there's not a huge difference between "I'm going to get frozen after I die", "I don't eat pork", "I avoid caffeine and hot drinks", etc.
"if we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition – even when it seems to be doing a little good – we abet a general climate in which skepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. Figuring out a prudent balance takes wisdom.”
– Carl Sagan
Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in everyday life that you don't notice. Words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them break if you push them far enough.
--Paul Graham, How to Do Philosophy
[surprisingly not a duplicate]
-- H. L. Mencken, describing halo bias before it was named
Do roses make for good soup? They make for good chocolate.
I've had rosewater flavoured ice cream.
I bet cabbage ice cream does not taste as nice.
I like the pithy description of halo bias. I don't like or agree with Mencken's non-nuanced view of idealists. it's sarcastically funny, like "a liberal is one who believes you can pick up a dog turd by the clean end", but being funny doesn't make it more true.
The point is that idealists suffer from a halo bias around their chosen ideal.
–Elizabeth Anscombe, An Introduction To Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959); apropos of a recent Scot Sumner blog post
--Steven Kaas
-Anon http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-have-an-understanding-of-very-advanced-mathematics#ans873950
(emphasis mine)
--Piet Hein
Lesswrong!
Do not accept any of my words on faith,
Believing them just because I said them.
Be like an analyst buying gold, who cuts, burns,
And critically examines his product for authenticity.
Only accept what passes the test
By proving useful and beneficial in your life.
-- The Buddha, Jnanasara-samuccaya Sutra
Good instrumental rationality quote; not so good for epistemic rationality.
George Orwell
A stoic sage is one who turns fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
Nasim Taleb
--Steve Sailer
Good chop, bro.
Bertrand Russell
Morton Blackwell
I might have upvoted the first sentence of this -- it's accurate, at least, if a little unproductive -- but out of context the rest is difficult to parse and might imply some seriously problematic attitudes. I take it political technology means something along the lines of "rhetoric"?
Sure, it probably does, on the part of Blackwell. He is something of a fairly mindless conservative, not much of a libertarian, and he supports central bankers. But this part of his philosophy is worthy. He believes that if you're in a fight for your life, you should fight hard. ...Similar to Penn Jillette's advocacy of evangelism, even evangelism that he personally disagrees with. If the stakes are high, then even those on the wrong side of the stakes should value their position enough to fight for it, or change their opinion.
Not necessarily so. Rhetoric is far from the only means of shifting a vote. It is one tool, there are many, many others. In fact, almost any vote can be shifted, given enough effort. Enough effort can be directed at nonvoters to mobilize them, etc...
So, if you're trying to do something important (such as end slavery, release the victimless crime offenders from prison, etc...) you should learn how to win elections, since that's easier than engaging in violence commensurate with the level of importance attached to the issue.
At some point, vital issues of life or death decay to violence (Civil War), if there is no political solution forthcoming. ---The victimized eventually refuse to stay victimized, or worse, the victimizers refuse to settle with too little victimization. (And then you have the Hutus outlawing Tutsi firearm possession, and hacking them apart with machetes.)
Terry Pratchett
-- William of Baskerville, Played by Sean Connery, Name of the Rose (1986)
Reverend Theo: Wow, you really do think you've become a God.
Petey: I'm just trying to do what I think a god would do if he were in my position.
Schlock Mercenary MONDAY JULY 31, 2006
--Alfred Korzybski
It seems most common to mix those two modes as convenient.
--Aristotle
John Hawks
--William F. Buckley
-- Dave Gottlieb
But warm fuzzies are bullshit.
Why?
I haven't once in my life made a good decision based on feel good thinking. Naturally I may be an outlier but overall models of the world that "feel good" are generally wrong models. I value having a accurate map even if it isn't useful (yes having a wrong map can be instrumentally valuable, and a positive outlook actually often is).
Also warm fuzzies are one of the easiest way to manipulate someone. When someone tries to shower me with them I nearly indistinctly try to counterbalance them. Hm, now that I think of it that pattern matches to being a cynic.
I would have expected things to go your way every now and then simply by chance.
But... feeling good for non-bullshit reasons is desirable, no?
(I do the counterbalancing thing too, but with the aim of editing praise so that it falls where I truly deserve it.)
What about people who want to reject the claims of religion but still want warm fuzzies? Maybe atheism wouldn't get such a bad rap in the public eye if it felt more welcoming for people who want truths but also want the sense of community provided by religion.
Paganism? It seems like one of the more accepting groups, and you don't need to actually believe to celebrate/be in a community.
So true, I totally think that way.
--Mencius Moldbug
Please remember sources; this is from "How I Stopped Believing in Democracy", 31 January 2008.
Is it conventional to add sources when it is an on-line? Sorry didn't know that was expected, since it wasn't in the posting rule set. Will remember to add sources in the future.
BTW gwern sometimes your attention to detail is as unnerving as it is helpful and impressive.
I thought it was, but then, I may be interested only because it makes it easier in the future to track down citations if there is a title and URL (and because if I click on a URL, it goes into my archive bot).
It's just time-wasting... Heck, I time-waste on my time-wasting, I'm supposed to be adding citations on how people are biased against spaced repetition even when their scores are better with SR to my respective article.
--Deng Xiaoping
--H.L. Mencken
-Winston Churchill
The rest of the story is interesting; from http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches/quotations
An apt comparison would be Napoleon's reconstruction of Paris with broad straight streets, I think. (Code is Law.)
"We are shaped and fashioned by what we love." — Goethe
Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1691 (tr. Pamela Kirk Rappaport)
John Philips, 1781
--(The Science of Discworld, Ebury Press edition, quotes from pp 41-42)
--Bruce Schneier
Second slide of this powerpoint by Stanford's Persuasive Tech Lab.