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- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB.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.
Loading…
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (462)
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.
Following the crowd is often rational, but not so often that you can just state it universally. Sometimes the crowd is simply wrong, and you're better off buying a bike. People, they crazy.
Recomputing everything/random things/currently unsatisfying things is expensive and error-prone. The standard for new good ideas may be to look at other cultures. For example, public transport was my first thought (I've lived in large cities in Western Europe). If nobody anywhere has implemented your awesome suggestion, maybe it's a rare problem so few solutions have been tried, maybe everyone got stuck in poor local optima, or maybe it sucks.
I agree that such looking ought to be one's first recourse, for exactly the reasons you cite. I note, however, that one should look at subcultures for ideas as well, not just at the mainstream cultures of different geographical regions. For example, if I were to look at methods of solving the issue of shelter mentioned in the quote, I would not just look at how regular people lived in the cities of Japan or the countryside of North America, but also at how, say, people in the frugality movement or soldiers in the military dealt with it. Maybe some historical cultures, too, if I could easily find enough information about them.
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
There are types of valid evidence that aren't scientific. In particular science is also partially a social process, whereas you trying to find the truth for yourself is not.
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]
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.
I think many cited quotations sound applause-lighty. They are meant to by pithy encapsulations of LW themes, after all. And I don't think that's necessarily a problem; applause lights are a problem for things that might be taken as reasoning, like posts.
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.
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
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.
The professor's hypocrisy isn't (non-negligible) evidence for or against the connectedness of his arguments to reality. Instead, it is evidence that there is divergence between the professor's stated beliefs and his actual beliefs (assuming he that he cares about his daughters eyesight, believes an optometrist can help her eyesight, etc...).
True, good point.
"A professor from Columbia University had an offer from Harvard. He couldn't make up his mind--whether he should accept or reject... So a colleague took him aside and said, 'What is your problem? Just maximise your expected utility! You always tell your students to do so.' Exasperated, the professor responded, 'C'mon, this is serious.'" -- Gigerenzer
Dupe and bad paraphrase of http://lesswrong.com/lw/890/rationality_quotes_november_2011/5aq7
Fixed, thanks!
The professor isn't arguing a different point to his wife than he was lecturing to his students; he's just responding to her from the viewpoint of the philosophy he is teaching. Interestingly, some of what he says isn't that different from LW ideas. His problem is that he forgets that his view of reality should add up to normality. Just because people can't see things directly but must instead look at copies of things within their own brain does not make vision "mere" or mean that fixing his daughter's eyesight is somehow less important (as his wife amusingly reminds him).
–Elizabeth Anscombe, An Introduction To Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959); apropos of a recent Scot Sumner blog post
Another great quote by Sumner in that same post:
--Steven Kaas
--Frank Adamek
-Stephen Crane
More accurate:
A man said to the universe: "Sir, I exist!"
The universe says nothing.
Right, because Eliezer Yudkowsky wasn't addressing it.
groan
There's no Universe; there's only a set of things which Eliezer Yudkowsky allows to exist !
Note from a "sympathetic outsider": I know you are joking, but the sorts of things like this subthread sometimes come across more creepy than funny.
I was making an allusion...
There's a whole page of them too!
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
-- Democritus
How are those things "convention"? Did all sentience have a pow-wow some time back and decide to experience such and such sensations when confronted with such and such physical things?
I read it as saying they're conventional in the sense that the lines between categories of sensory experience are drawn by consensus, lacking direct access to the experiences of others.
We of course lack direct access to the atomic-scale world as well, but I imagine that's the point -- atomism was a lot more abstract to the likes of Democritus than atomic theory is to us. The underlying physical reality is in a certain sense abstracted away from us, and we reflect that by talking about physical experiences in a conventional way, but those experiences are still rooted in the reality of atoms and space -- or distributions of probability density, if you prefer.
Including three kinds of light sensors, including one for around 700 nm electromagnetic waves (also called "red"), is a common design convention for humans (for reference, see "Further Random Experiments with Photoreceptors in Furry Legged Things", in Proceedings of the Council of Azathoth, 63 million y. BC)
Three types of cones, plus one type of rod....
woops I indeed forgot the "Enhancements for Night Vision" part...
Yes. (Democritus was at least essentially wrong about the atoms and space thing upon a somewhat naive interpretation, but he was right about convention. And I say this as someone who dislikes Democritus.)
I'm not sure who originally said this but I vaguely remember the quotes from law school.
I like to say "there are such things as dawn and dusk, but the difference between night and day is like ..." - and here I pause just long enough for the audience to mentally anticipate me - "the difference between night and day."
--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.)
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.
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?
“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'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.
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.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 83, Article 1
Is that just a theist version of compatibilist free will? Or an assertion that somehow you could create something without being responsible for its future actions, either by creating the policy that decided them or making them dependent on a source of randomness?
The former.
As Jack says, it's the "theist version" of compatibilist free will, but you can replace "God" with "the universe" and the point goes through, Aquinas uses God because he's trying to build up a coherent metaphysics. And quite successfully! He gave the "right answer" to the "free will problem" off-the-cuff as if it was no big deal. This raises my confidence that Aquinas is also insightful when he discusses things I don't yet understand, like faith.
Aquinas gives all his answers off-the-cuff as if they were no big deal.
As far as early compatibilists go I prefer Chrysippus.
Bolesław Prus, "The Pharaoh" (translation mine)
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean.
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.
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"
More accurately, Yvain-2004
Is it more accurate to put it thus because Yvain-2012 disagrees with Yvain-2004 on this issue?
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.
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)
The previous quotation would seem to speak in favor of more strong skeptics.
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.
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.
It is useful for pursuing truth to the extent that it can correct actually false beliefs when they happen to tend in one direction.
-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.
Thornton Wilder, The Ides of March.
--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).
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.
— James Clerk Maxwell
-- Eric Raymond
Don't shut up and do the impossible!
"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':
I think Willie Keeler said it first. (I think I saw Babe Ruth, played by John Goodman, say it in The Babe, but that was a long time ago.)
-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.
If I was copying over rationality quotes from the Summa I'd have gone for way different stuff, Aquinas was a fucking beast of a rationalist. I was just testing LW. Karma is not nearly as useful as accurate beliefs.
I don't know about a beast, but in general philosophers from the Middle Ages are far underrated compared to, say, philosophers from the "Enlightenment".
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.
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'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.
Yes, a look at it in context in the essay confirms that — but isn't it a strange belief for someone like Paul Graham to have? It looks false to me (although "truth is common property" is ambiguous). I think a group could make itself very distinct by believing certain truths and doing certain rationally justified things.
Most groups of weapon developers probably hope to keep their knowledge distinct from that of other groups for as long as they can...
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.
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.
Apparently they stopped after downvoting about 30 comments. Maybe it was too much work.
The role of laziness in preventing bad acts rarely gets enough credit.
Words to model ones life around. Well I did anyway. Laziness and fear.
My original comment was meant to be a mildly elaborate adianoeta that is more than the sum of its parts (except that the addition of "insanely" was a regrettable and meaningless rhetorical flourish). So if I seem straightforwardly wrong then maybe something was lost in interpretation or I just didn't do it right.
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)
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?
Do you mean cosmology or astronomy?
--Piet Hein
Lesswrong!
--Piet Hein
Lesswrong!
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
-- H. L. Mencken, describing halo bias before it was named
Do roses make for good soup? They make for good chocolate.
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.
-- Milton Friedman
One of these things is not like the others, one of these things does not belong.
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.
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.
— Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (from the introduction)
— Bertrand Russell History of Western Philosophy (from the introduction, again.)
Prompted by Maniakes', but sufficiently different to post separately:
Daniel Dennett, "Get Real" (emphasis added).
Eliezer Yudkowsky
(Some discussions here, such as those involving such numbers as 3^^^3, give me the same feeling.)
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.
Sorry to be so ignorant but what is 3^^^3? Google yielded no satisfactory results...
A number so ridiculously big that 3^^^3 * X can be assumed to be bigger than Y for pretty much any values of X and Y.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_arrow
TheOtherDave's other comment summed up what it means practically. Also, see http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torturevsdust_specks/.
Ah thank you, that clarifies things greatly! Up-voted for the technical explanation.
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.)