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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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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George Orwell
A stoic sage is one who turns fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
Nasim Taleb
-- Deng Xioaping
Duplicate, but I like your translation better.
--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"?
Terry Pratchett
--Alfred Korzybski
It seems most common to mix those two modes as convenient.
A latin proverb, and I think part of Roman law, it means no-one should be a judge in their own cause.
--Aristotle
--Aristotle
--William F. Buckley
John Hawks
-- Dave Gottlieb
--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.
-Gene Ray, The Wisest Human
http://www.timecube.com/timecube2.html
--Deng Xiaoping
-Cleverbot
http://cleverbot.com/cleverness
--H.L. Mencken
-- David Hume
If he didn't use the word "merely," this would be an even more amazing rationality quote than it already is.
--B.F. Skinner
"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 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
--James Anthony Froude
-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
-Kvothe, The Name of the Wind
osewalrus
"A man's gotta know his limitations." - Dirty Harry
C.S. Lewis, Introduction to a translation of, Athanasius: On the Incarnation
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.
Or, you know, some new books with a fresh outlook. Just saying.
Not written yet.
Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1691 (tr. Pamela Kirk Rappaport)
"A Confucian has stolen my hairbrush! Down with Confucianism!"
-GK Chesterton (on ad hominems)
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.
--Jean de la Bruyère
--(The Science of Discworld, Ebury Press edition, quotes from pp 41-42)
John Philips, 1781
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.
--Bruce Schneier
Second slide of this powerpoint by Stanford's Persuasive Tech Lab.
-William James
--Peanuts (Nov. 23, 1981) by Charles Schulz
--Mencius Moldbug
Remember sources please; "How Dawkins got pwned (part 7)", 8 November 2007
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.
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
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.
Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.
Francis Bacon
"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.
Can you elucidate the connection to rationality?
A few Google searches resolved this question for me, and proved very interesting besides. Vavilov was a Soviet botanist focused on the cultivation of efficient seeds to mitigate hunger. In World War Two, Vavilov's Leningrad seedbank came under siege by the Nazis, who apparently wanted to steal/destroy the seeds. Considering the supplies vital to Russia's long-term survival, several of the scientists swore oaths to protect the seedbank against German forces, starving foragers, and rats.
They succeeded in doing so. The scientist-guards were so loyal that many of them died of starvation despite being in a facility full of edible seeds, as well as potatoes, corn, rice, and wheat. The seedbank endured the siege and was replenished after the city was liberated.
Vavilov himself did not live to see the victory of his researchers, as he had been sent to a camp thanks to his disapproval of the scientific fraud of Lysenkoism and died (ironically, of malnutrition) before the war ended.
The Pavlovsk seed bank is at risk, but not yet doomed.
At first glance, it looks like a clear case of Bayesians vs. Barbarians to me.
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
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.)
Prompted by Maniakes', but sufficiently different to post separately:
Daniel Dennett, "Get Real" (emphasis added).
Bloody p-zombies. Argh. Yes.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
(Some discussions here, such as those involving such numbers as 3^^^3, give me the same feeling.)
I don't understand that quote. A good Bayesian should still pick the aposteriori most probable explanation for an improbable event, even if that explanation has very low prior probability before the event.
I suspect the point is that it's not worthwhile to look for potential explanations for improbable events until they actually happen.
I think it's more than that - he's saying that if you have a plausible explanation for an event, the event itself is plausible, explanations being models of the world. It's a warning against setting up excuses for why your model fails to predict the future in advance - you shouldn't expect your model to fail, so when it does you don't say, "Oh, here's how this extremely surprising event fits my model anyway." Instead, you say "damn, looks like I was wrong."
I don't, however, think it's meant to be a warning against contrived thought experiments.
It's Yudkowsky. Sorry, pet peeve.
Fixed.
Is Eliezer claiming that we aren't living in a simulation, claiming that if we are living in a simulation, it's extremely unlikely to generate wild anomalies, or claiming that anything other than those two is vanishingly unlikely?
Absolutely: I strongly recommend you not try to explain how 3^^^3 people might all get a dustspeck in their eye without anything else happening as a consequence, for example.
— Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (from the introduction)
-- Milton Friedman
One of these things is not like the others, one of these things does not belong.
There are valid quibbles and exceptions on both counts. Some breeds of cats make vocalizations that can reasonably be described as "barking", and water will burn if there are sufficient concentrations of either an oxidizer much stronger than oxygen (such as chlorine triflouride) or a reducing agent much stronger than hydrogen (such as elemental sodium).
In the general case, though, water will not burn under normal circumstances, and most cats are physiologically incapable of barking.
The point of the quote is that objects and systems do have innate qualities that shape and limit their behaviour, and that this effect is present in social systems studied by economists as well as in physical systems studied by chemists and biologists. In the original context (which I elided because politics is the mind killer, and because any particular application of the principle is subject to empirical debate as to its validity), Friedman was following up on an article about how political economy considerations incline regulatory agencies towards socially suboptimal decisions, addressing responses that assumed that the political economy pressures could easily be designed away by revising the agencies' structures.
Relevant.
I was actually thinking in terms of 'cats can deliberately meow in an annoying fashion (abstract) like human infants and this behaviors seems perfectly modifiable, so a transhumanist could have a decent reason for preferring cats to bark than meow; and this is really stupid anyway, since we can change cats easily - we certainly can demand cats bark - but we can't change physis easily and can't demand water burn'.
pfsch. You can burn water if you add salt and radio waves. Or if you put it in an atmosphere containing a reactive fluorine compound. Etc etc etc.
-- H. L. Mencken, describing halo bias before it was named
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.
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.
Rose water is used for flavoring, sometimes. Roses have essentially no nutritional value, though, and cabbages are widely held to taste better than they smell.
--Piet Hein
Lesswrong!
This has been quoted by Yvain before, but not here.
I was very surprised to see this was not a dupe; checking, the copy in my Mnemosyne was simply taken straight from a collection of his grooks. A missed opportunity.
--William Ransom Johnson Pegram
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".
Is it excessive nitpicking to point out that the daily disappearance and reappearance of the Sun has to do with the Earth's rotation on its axis, not its rotation about the Sun? (Probably not, as the first comment on Parkin's blog posting points out the same.)
Is it excessive nitpicking to note that not only did he misuse the word "ultimate", he used it to mean basically the opposite of what it actually means?
No. Thank you for inspiring me to look up the word and learn its true meaning.
Do you mean cosmology or astronomy?
Both. Cosmological content: "stuff goes around other stuff"; astronomical content: "this applies to the stuff we sit on"; philosophical content: "finding this out proves we are awesome"; gastronomical content: "here's a recipe for cake to celebrate".
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.
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.
Depends on how immediate and/or dramatic the benefits of the rational behavior are.
Not actually true. I'd like it to be!
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.
It's been a while since I read that essay. I can't tell whether that quotation's meant to be an example of a lie we tell kids, or one of Paul Graham's own beliefs! (An invertible fact?)
It is Graham's own belief.
-Saint Thomas Aquinas
I wish I would have memorized this quote before attending university.
*This comment was inspired by Will_Newsome's attempt to find rationality quotes in Summa Theologica.
Summa Theologica is a good example of what happens when you have an excellent deductive system (Aquinas was great at syllogisms) and flawed axioms (a literal interpretation of the Bible).
Aquinas probably meant something different by "literal interpretation" than you think. For instance, I'm pretty sure he agreed with Augustine that the six days of creation were not literally six periods of 24 hours.
Out of curiosity, where did Augustine say that? It's interesting that anyone bothered doubting that the six days were literal before the literal interpretation became embarrassingly inconsistent with established science.
The first three "days" happened before the sun and moon were created, so a literal interpretation was problematic even then.
Eh, there's an easy hack around that: God already knew what the length of a day was before it created the sun and the moon.
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)
"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
"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.)
Just make sure to only apply this one to your actual enemies, and not to people who generally wish you well but disagree on some key point.
Interrupting even neutral associates when they are making a mistake does not necessarily have good outcomes for you either. Being the messenger has a reputation...
"Hit 'em where they ain't". --Douglas MacArthur commenting on his island-hopping strategy in WW2.
Sun Tzu said it better; VI, 'Weak Points and Strong':
--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.)
Well, he knows about the Hallows themselves via wiki-readings. I think he would have written the story the way it is whether he knew about the tombstone or not, but I put fairly high probability that he does know about the tombstone and how fantastically awesome an endcap it's going to be on the story.
Mm. Maybe: http://predictionbook.com/predictions/5122
I think there's a close to 100% chance that the tombstone will be alluded to, because even if Eliezer DIDN'T know about it before, he will by the time the story ends (because I will have questioned and informed him about this), and after that I just can't imagine him making such a terrible mistake as to NOT include the tombstone's quote.
I do think a simple bet of "did he already plan this?" is feasible. We can just ask him. (I put odds at 75%).
(By "close to 100%" I mean maybe 95. I can think of scenarios where he hadn't originally planned for the tombstone and where it would be hard to integrate it)
Oh fine: http://predictionbook.com/predictions/5124 But you'd better ask him now!
I was already aware of the quote. It's on James and Lily's tombstone (in canon).
I see; but the predictions/questions wasn't were you aware of it at all, but were you planning to incorporate it ex ante, and did you ex post.
If it's incorporated it will have been planned beforehand.
You and your silly hatred of spoilers. (The recent experimental evidence, BTW, suggests spoilers are not harmful but helpful for enjoyment.) But I guess that statement works.
For what it's worth, there are stories where I've appreciated going in with no knowledge except for some reason to think I'd like it (the movie Hugo 3D is a recent example, for Mieville's Un Lun Dun I just had a reasonable guess about genre).
I think I lost some of the impact of A Deepness in the Sky because I knew what Focus was before I started reading.
-Anon http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-have-an-understanding-of-very-advanced-mathematics#ans873950
(emphasis mine)
Teaching, for me and several other people I know, serves the purpose of reveling in your mastery. In fact, Feynman said it best:
Teaching helps me a lot in this respect, because I become very insecure sometimes when I do my research.
Lucio Russo, The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why it Had to Be Reborn
A "preview" electronic version of this book is available through the translator's website here: http://www.msri.org/~levy/files/russo/
I enjoyed the book a lot. It's true that the author reads Hellenic scientists in the most favorable possible light while reading Renaissance scientists in the least favorable possible light. But he gives extensive quotations from the available sources, so that you can judge for yourself whether his interpretations are stretched.
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.
-- Eric Raymond
Don't shut up and do the impossible!
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.
Why do you say that?
"Proving useful in your life" (but not necessarily "proving beneficial") is the core of instrumental rationality, but what's useful is not necessarily what's true, so it's important to refrain from using that metric in epistemic rationality.
Example: cognitive behavioral therapy is often useful "to solve problems concerning dysfunctional emotions", but not useful for pursuing truth. There's also mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for an example more relevant to Buddhism.
I suppose that is a tension between epistemic and instrumental rationality.
Put in terms of a microeconomic trade-off: The marginal value of having correct beliefs diminishes beyond a certain threshold. Eventually, the marginal value of increasing one's epistemic accuracy dips below the marginal value that comes from retaining one's mistaken belief. At that point, an instrumentally rational agent may stop increasing accuracy.
On the other hand, it may be a problem of local-versus-global optima: The marginal value of accuracy may creep up again. Or maybe those who see it as a problem can fix it with the right augmentation.
There is no tension. Epistemic rationality is merely instrumental, while instrumental rationality is not. They are different kinds of things. Means to an end don't compete with what the end is.
Upvoted for this
It is useful for pursuing truth to the extent that it can correct actually false beliefs when they happen to tend in one direction.
This sometimes comes at the expense of other truths, just as pursuing evidence for your preferred conclusion turns up real evidence but a less accurate map.
Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March.
— James Clerk Maxwell
“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.)
I apologize for practicing inferior epistemic hygiene. Thank you for indirectly bringing this to my attention. I knew that the quote was commonly attributed to Nietzsche, but I had never seen the original source. It would seem to be a rephrasing of this quote from The Antichrist:
Ah, that sounds a bit more like the Nietzsche I know and kinda like! Thanks for digging up the more accurate quote.
I'd parse the quote as meaning "Believing in something doesn't make it true", in which case it's something that pretty much everyone on this site takes for granted, but that the average person hasn't necessarily fully internalized. Yudkowsky felt the need to make a similar point near the end of this article, and philosophers as diverse as St. Anselm and William James have built entire epistemologies around the notion that faith is sufficient to justify belief, so obviously it's a point that needs to be made.
I dunno about St. Anselm but I found James's "The Will to Believe" essay reasonable as a matter of practical rationality. The sort of Bayesian epistemology that is Eliezer's hallmark isn't exactly fundamental, and the map-territory distinction isn't either, so I don't find it too surprising that e.g. Kantian epistemology looks a lot more like modern decision theory than it does Bayesian probability theory. I suspect a lot of "faith"-like behaviors don't look nearly as insane when seen from this deeper perspective. So on one level we have day-to-day instrumental rationality where faith tends to make sense for the reasons James cites, and on a much deeper level there's uncertainty about what beliefs really are except as the parts of your utility function that are meant for cooperation with other agents (ETA: similar to Kant's categorical imperative). On top of that there are situations where you have to have something like faith, e.g. if you happen upon a Turing oracle and thus can't verify if it's telling you the truth or not but still want to do hypercomputation. Things like this make me hesitant to judge the merits of epistemological ideas like faith which I don't yet understand very well.
This sort of taxonomy seems to deserve a more thorough treatment in a separate post.
Edit: authorial instance specified on popular demand.
More accurately, Yvain-2004
Is it more accurate to put it thus because Yvain-2012 disagrees with Yvain-2004 on this issue?
I don't know if there's enough of a specific, meaningful claim there for me to disagree with, but Yvain-2012 probably would not have written those same words. Yvain-2012 would probably say he sometimes feels creeped out by the levels of signaling that go on in the skeptical community and thinks they sometimes snowball into the ridiculous, but that the result is prosocial and they are still performing a service.
(really I can only speak for Yvain-2011 at this point; my acquaintance with Yvain-2012 has been extremely brief)
Well, even if Yvain-2012 does not disagree with Yvain-2004, it would be nice to have the year attached. I would like that the year-attachment convention for attributing quotes and ideas becomes more widespread. Right now, the default assumption that everybody makes is that people are consistent over time. In reality, people almost surely change over time, and it is unreasonable to expect them to justify something which their earlier selves said. So, it would be really nice if the default was year-attachment.
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.
I was impressed when a skeptic source (sorry no cite) admitted that most people who read astrology columns do it for entertainment rather than for guidance in how to live their lives.
I don't know why some people and groups damp out most or all of the ill effects of their arbitrary beliefs, while others follow arbitrary beliefs to the point of serious damage or destruction. I don't think I've seen this discussed anywhere.
Indeed. In fact there's a website: What's the Harm? that explains what damage these beliefs cause.
Victims of Moon Landing Denial
Marvellous.
That actually seems to be a victim of belief in moon landing by people who have landed on the moon.
The previous quotation would seem to speak in favor of more strong skeptics.
I would say that for instance I don't believe that most alt med stuff works but this is exactly the reason I care that others know this and how we know this. This attitude infuriates me.
The fact is that there are many battles worth fighting, and strong skeptics are fighting one (or perhaps a few) of them. (As I was disgusted to see recently, human sacrifice apparently still happens.) However, I also think it's ok to say that battle is not the one that interests you. You don't have the capacity to be a champion for all possible good causes, so it's good that there is diversity of interest among people trying to improve the human condition.
I totally agree if its not your cup of tea fine. What pisses me off is the line about " if you don't believe it exists it seems like a good reason to not be concerned with it"
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.
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]
--I, Claudius, "Poison Is Queen"
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.
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.)
For everyone who knows that Livia is the Magnificent Bastard of the series (which is made clear from the first episode, so no spoiler there), the highest probability mass goes to the hypothesis that was lying about having spoken to an augur or about what he told her, and that she wanted Augustus to question her and only feigned to resist. And "everyone who knows" at this stage probably includes Fabius, and every other character but Augustus.
So the leader of the relevant transhumanly intelligent entities is on the side of the Magnificent Bastard? If I was Augustus I'd seriously consider being nice to the Jews and asking YHWH for guidance.
(Rationality: it works even better in magical universes! (Like, ahem, the one we're in.))
I shall henceforth call you Robert Anton Willnewsome.
EDIT: I mean this affectionately.
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
--Frank Adamek
While you're there, enjoy the laddergoat.
--Steven Kaas
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.
Bruce Lee was a martial artist, and martial arts is a field where a lot of people go by tradition rather than checking on what works.
awesomely relevant video: Joe Rogan on MMA and Kung Fu