Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:
And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity. The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything.
Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Doctor Slithingly watched the readout on the computer screen and rubbed his hands together. ‘Excellent,’ he muttered, his voice a thin, rasping hiss. ‘Excellent!’ He laughed to himself in a chilling falsetto. ‘Soon my plan will come to fruition. Soon I will destroy them all!’ The room resounded with the sound of his insane giggling. This was the culmination of years of research – years of testing tissue samples and creating unnatural biological hybrids – but now it was over. Now, finally, he would destroy them all – every single type and variation of leukaemia. In doing so, he would render useless the work of thousands of charitable organisations as well as denying medical professionals the world over a source of income. He would prevent the publication of hundreds of inspiring stories of survival and sacrifice which might otherwise have sold millions of copies worldwide. ‘Bwahaha!’ he laughed. ‘So long, you meddling haematological neoplasm, you!’
Joel Stickley, How To Write Badly Well
You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going "a most judicious choice, sire".
-- Steven Kaas
Steven and most of the people here (including me) do indeed believe that "you are your brain" in the sense that the mind is something that the brain does. But Steven's epigram is using "you" in a narrower sense, referring to just the conscious, internal-monologue part of the mind.
In the fable of the fox and the grapes, it's the fox's brain that is the proximate cause of him giving up the attempt to get the grapes, but it's the "creepy vizier" part of his mind that makes up the "I didn't want them anyway" story.
(Edit: I should have said "most of the other people here" in my first sentence. In case you didn't know it, Steven Kaas is an LWer. He is kind enough to let me and others earn tons of karma by quoting his Twitter bons mots.)
It's illustrating the thing from psychology where your conscious self (the "you" in "you are" here) often seems to be more about making up narratives about why you do things you somewhat unconsciously decide to do, rather than fully consciously deciding to do what you do.
It's not terribly obvious normally, but scary stuff happens when you get a suitable type of brain damage. Instead of necessarily going "hm, my introspective faculties seem to be damaged and I'm doing weird stuff for no reason I can ascertain", people often start happily explaining why it is an excellent idea for the king of the brain who has been replaced with a zombie robot during the brain damage to start lumbering around moaning loudly and smashing things at random.
Yvain's post The Apologist and the Revolutionary from a couple of years ago had some fascinating and mind-boggling discussion of other bizarre things that result from particular brain damage.
"Our moods are so unstable because we are only chemicals in a saline solution - not entries in a ledger or words in a book."
Is this true? Naive Googling yields this, which suggests (non-authoritatively) that blood sugar and moods are indeed linked (in diabetics, but it's presumably true in the general population). However, despair is not noted and the effects generally seem milder than that (true despair is a rather powerful emotion!)
Blood sugar is very closely linked to self-control, including suppression of emotion. While this may appear to be a different thing, it isn't: when you include feedback loops and association spirals, a transient, weak emotional distraction can become deep and overwhelming if normal modes of suppression fail.
"He [H.G. Wells] has abandoned the sensational theory with the same honourable gravity and simplicity with which he adopted it. Then he thought it was true; now he thinks it is not true. He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four."
--Heretics, G. K. Chesterton
I was interested in the context here. Chesterton was referencing Wells' original belief that the classes would differentiate until the upper class ate the lower class. Wells changed his mind to believe the classes would merge.
The entire book is free on Google Books.
At the point where those are the two hypothesises being considered there may be larger problems.
The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem, in a way that will allow a solution
– Bertrand Russell
Just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.
"The truth is whatever you can get away with."
"No, that’s journalism. The truth is whatever you can’t escape."
-Greg Egan, Distress
Robert Morris has a very unusual quality: he's never wrong. It might seem this would require you to be omniscient, but actually it's surprisingly easy. Don't say anything unless you're fairly sure of it. If you're not omniscient, you just don't end up saying much.
[....] He's not just generally correct, but also correct about how correct he is.
-- Paul Graham
“I was just doing my job” or “I don’t make the rules” is not a defense if you have a history of deciding what your job actually is, and selectively breaking or bending rules.
"Heads I Win, Tails You Lose" by Venkat Rao
What is the aim of philosophy? To be clear-headed rather than confused; lucid rather than obscure; rational rather than otherwise; and to be neither more, nor less, sure of things than is justifiable by argument or evidence. That is worth trying for.
Geoffrey Warnock
Already I had learned from thee that because a thing is eloquently expressed it should not be taken to be as necessarily true; nor because it is uttered with stammering lips should it be supposed false. Nor, again, is it necessarily true because rudely uttered, nor untrue because the language is brilliant. Wisdom and folly both are like meats that are wholesome and unwholesome, and courtly or simple words are like town-made or rustic vessels — both kinds of food may be served in either kind of dish.
Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
Any time we find that “math” disagrees with reality, the problem is never with “math”—it’s with us, for using the wrong math!
“I choose not to believe in any gods as an act of charity,” Marcus said.
“Charity toward whom?”
“Toward the gods. Seems rude to think they couldn’t make a world better than this,”
Daniel Abraham, The Dragon's Path
I am a physical object sitting in a physical world. Some of the forces of this physical world impinge on my surfaces. Light rays strike my retinas; molecules bombard my eardrums and fingertips. I strike back, emanating concentic air waves. These waves take the form of torrents of discourses about tables, people, molecules, light rays, retinas, air waves, prime numbers, infinite classes, joy and sorrow, good and evil.
--W. V. O. Quine
... People usually don't know why they vote for the candidates they choose to vote for, and are not particularly good at assessing how something influenced that vote -- let alone how some hypothetical future event would influence them.
...if you ask voters, it turns out that some will tell you that they would be more likely, and a somewhat larger number will tell you that they'll be less likely, to vote for someone with a Trump endorsement. Hey, reporters: don't believe those polls! You can take it as a measure of what respondents think about Trump, if you care about such things, but there's no reason to believe that this kind of self-reporting about vote choice is meaningful at all, and it shouldn't be included in stories about a Trump endorsement as if it was meaningful.
...The bottom line here is that polling is a really good tool for reporters to use in many cases, but remember: what polling tells you for sure is only what people will say if they're asked a question by a pollster.
Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which isn't there
-E.H. Gombrich
Any time you say something is "more likely" than something else, that an explanation is "improbable," or "almost certainly true," or "implausible," and so on, you are making mathematical statements. Any time something is "more" than something else, that's math.
I’ve very often made mistakes in my physics by thinking the theory isn’t as good as it really is, thinking that there are lots of complications that are going to spoil it — an attitude that anything can happen, in spite of what you’re pretty sure should happen.
Richard Feynman, in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, chapter entitled "Mixing Paints".
I may say that this is the greatest factor—the way in which the expedition is equipped—the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.
— from *The South Pole* by Roald Amundsen
Yeah, but that's not very useful to tell when you're taking sensible precautions and when you're just packing cans of shark repellent.
This is why science and mathematics are so much fun; You discover things that seem impossible to be true, and then get to figure out why it's impossible for them NOT to be.
-Vi Hart, Doodling in Math: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant- Part 3 of 3
Paradoxes, like optical illusions, are often used by psychologists to reveal the inner workings of the mind, for paradoxes stem from (and amplify) dormant clashes among implicit sets of assumptions.
Judea Pearl (Causality)
...A paradox arises when two seemingly airtight arguments lead to contradictory conclusions—conclusions that cannot possibly both be true. It’s similar to adding a set of numbers in a two-dimensional array and getting different answers depending on whether you sum up the rows first or the columns. Since the correct total must be the same either way, the difference shows that an error must have been made in at least one of the two sets of calculations. But it remains to discover at which step (or steps) an erroneous calculation occurred in either or both of the running sums. There are two ways to rebut an argument. We might call them countering and invalidating.
+To counter an argument is to provide another argument that establishes the opposite conclusion.
+To invalidate an argument, we show that there is some step in that argument that simply does not follow from what precedes it (or we show that the argument’s premises—the initial steps—are themselves false).
If an argument starts with true premises, and if every step in the argument does follow, then the argument’s conclusion must be true. However, invalidating an argument—identifying an incorrect step somewhere—does not show that the
The tendency toward generalization doesn’t bother me in an of itself, rather, I’m focused on whether the proposition is true. But the hypocrisy gets tiresome sometimes, as people will fluidly switch from a cognitive style which accepts generalization to one which rejects it. A stereotype is often a generalization whose robustness you don’t want to accept. Negative generalities need context when they’re unpalatable, but no qualification is necessary when their truth is congenial.
--Razib Khan, here
Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
H. Jackson Brown
(The second-last paragraph of The Power of Agency by Lukeprog reminded me of it.)
..."Stay, 'tis just a figure!" Root laughed rather winningly, reaching out to touch Locke's shoulder.
"A faulty one," Daniel said, "for you are an alchemist."
"I am called an Alchemist. Within living memory, Daniel, everyone who studied what I—and you—study was called by that name. And most persons even today observe no distinction between Alchemy and the younger and more vigorous order of knowledge that is associated with your club."
"I am too exhausted to harry you through all of your evasions. Out of respect for your friends Mr. Locke, and for Leibniz, I shall give you the benefit of the doubt, and wish you well," Daniel said.
"God save you, Mr. Waterhouse."
"And you, Mr. Root. But I say this to you—and you as well, Mr. Locke. As I came in here I saw a map, lately taken from this house, burning in the fire. The map was empty, for it depicted the ocean—most likely, a part of it where no man has ever been. A few lines of latitude were ruled across that vellum void, and some legendary isles drawn in, with great authority, and where the map-maker could not restrain himself he drew phantastickal monsters. That map, to me, is A
I was pondering whether to cut the quote at this point, or to include the rest of the dialogue between natural philosopher Daniel Waterhouse and alchemist Enoch Root. I decided to cut the quote here firstly because otherwise it would be too long, and secondly because the rest of the dialogue does not have the same stirring, "yay science!", "yay modernity!" feeling of Daniel's tirade. But it is thought-provoking, so I include it below, with some reflections after it:
..." 'Tis a noble pursuit and I wish you Godspeed," Root said, "but remember the poles."
"The poles?"
"The north and south poles, where your meridians will come together—no longer parallel and separate, but converging, and all one."
"That is nothing but a figment of geometry."
"But when you build all your science upon geometry, Mr. Water-house, figments become real."
Daniel sighed. "Very well, perhaps we'll get back to Alchemy in the end—but for now, no one can get near the poles—unless you can fly there on a broom, Mr. Root—and I'll put my trust in geometry and not in the books of fables that Mr. Boyle and Sir Elias are sorting through belo
On the Outside View:
"Of course, if you want to, you can always come up with reasons why the lessons from the Neo-Sumerian Empire don't apply to you."
To explain: the Outside View is a powerful tool, but one sometime should reject it based on even more powerful factors from the Inside View, where one can be sure that one is in a new (or at least, different) reference class from the one being used in the Outside View. Of course, one may want to reject it based just on one like one's views...
This sometimes leads to a back-and-forth series of arguments over burdens of proof dubbed 'reference class tennis' where the two sides argue over what is the correct reference class which will either support or undermine a particular claim (is AGI in the reference class of "additional incremental innovation", which would undermine claims of significant danger/reward, or entire "regime changes", which would support the same claims? This is the game of reference class tennis which Eliezer and Hanson are arguing their way through in the link and related links).
Kaas is humorously parodying a side using an Outside View involving the Neo-Sumerian Empire, replying to the other side making the commonsense position - yours too ('what lessons?') - that the quasi-literate agricultural Neo-Sumerian Empire from 3000 years ago is not in a...
It may be expecting too much to expect most intellectuals to have common sense, when their whole life is based on their being uncommon -- that is, saying things that are different from what everyone else is saying. There is only so much genuine originality in anyone. After that, being uncommon means indulging in pointless eccentricities or clever attempts to mock or shock.
--Thomas Sowell
"Today we will be dragoons, until we are told otherwise"
"Where are our horses, then?"
"We must imagine them."
"Imaginary horses are much slower than the other kind."
Neal Stephenson, The Confusion
"Imaginary horses are much slower than the other kind." Pretending to have horses doesn't allow you any of the benefits of having a horse, such as going faster.
I wouldn't say that "stretches the known limits of rationality." If imagination can help physical development, I desire to believe that imagination can help physical development. If imagination does not help physical development, I desire to believe that imagination does not help physical development.
When people talk about the importance of democracy, it is never democracy as it has ever actually functioned, with the politicians that have actually been elected, and the policies that have actually been implemented. It is always democracy as people imagine it will operate once they succeed in electing "the right people" — by which they mean, people who agree almost completely with their own views, and who are consistent and incorruptible in their implementation of the resulting policies.
--Ben O'Neill, here
Considering the above quote can be used to criticize nearly any popular political position I don't think it is inherently mind-killing. Also since we all agree democracy is a good thing this isn't even very political. The original article and context obviously does make it somewhat political.
Paul Graham has written quite extensively of why some things are considered "threatening heresy", and other things mere eccentricity. Ultimately, he concludes that in order for something to be tabooed, it must be threatening to some group that is powerful enough to enforce the taboo, but not powerful enough that the can safely ignore what their critics say about them. Democracy is currently so entrenched in western civilization that it doesn't have to give a fuck if a few people here and there criticize it occasionally.
The same is true of people who call for a dictatorship or any non-democratic form of government. They also always imagine it will be governed by "the right people", and imagine all the things "the right people" could accomplish if freed from the need to listen to the "ignorant mob".
Probably a duplicate, but I can't find a previous version:
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken
"...When I was still doubtful as to his [Wittgenstein's] ability, I asked G.E. Moore for his opinion. Moore replied, 'I think very well of him indeed.' When I enquired the reason for his opinion, he said it was because Wittgenstein was the only man who looked puzzled at his lectures."
--Bertrand Russell, pg 178 Last philosophical testament: 1943-68
Wishing for something that is logically impossible is a sign that there is something better to wish for.
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
If we want to know if there has been a change from the start to the end dates, all we have to do is look! I’m tempted to add a dozen more exclamation points to that sentence, it is that important. We do not have to model what we can see. No statistical test is needed to say whether the data has changed. We can just look.
I have to stop, lest I become exasperated. We statisticians have pointed out this fact until we have all, one by one, turned blue in the face and passed out, the next statistician in line taking the place of his fallen comrade.
Any logically coherent body of doctrine is sure to be in part painful and contrary to current prejudices
– Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy p. 98
Bertie is a goldmine of rationality quotes.
The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called "sciences as one would." For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem to be occupied with things mean and transitory; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless, in short, are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding.
-- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (Aphorism XLIX), 1620. (1863 translation by Spedding, Ellis and Heath. You should read the whole thing, it's all this good.)
Humanity becomes more and more of an accessory every day; with increasing power comes increasing responsibility.
Latest news: Burning Man blames game theory for their failure to understand basic supply and demand, hugely underprices tickets, 2/3 of buyers left in cold, Market Economics Fairy cries.
That's not a fair assessment of the organizers' skill level.
They seem to have a nice firm grip on the effect of fixed supply, fixed price, and increasing demand:
And in those regards, the ticket selection system worked as planned — but it created other unforeseen problems, and most of them boil down to an unpredicted, overwhelming level of demand. The impact of that demand is beyond what we projected when designing the system; even if we knew there were destined to be some people missing out, we didn’t expect nearly so many.
What they didn't predict was that the expectation of scarcity would further increase demand, creating a positive feedback loop. In their words:
there was a fair amount of over-registration – those who said “I need one but I’ll order two…” or “I’m not sure I’m going but I’ll get one just in case.” We can now see that some of that happened simply because the perception of scarcity drove fear and action for all of us.
So, they understand supply and demand (they just made a bad factual estimate of demand), and they didn't really understand game theory - but after they made their mistake they publicly admitted it, asked around to see what they did wrong, and proposed strategies for mitigating the mistake.
Why are we mocking them again?
In this particular case, not all attendees appear to be equally valuable to the event/other attendees. Giving priority to people who've organized cool things in the last few years may make sense.
Yes, this was my reaction - 'let the price float, and give transferrable vouchers to the people who do the most awesome stuff; if they object, well, that's why the vouchers are transferrable'. It's not much different from what they're already suggesting, telling the lucky ones to distribute excess tickets among people they like.
From the blog post:
No event organizer or ticket seller has solved scalping completely.
It seems pretty easy to solve: auction off all the tickets.
It improves the chance that further Market Economics will happen by rewarding people who produce it. It goes without saying that Market Economics is a terminal value to the Market Economics Fairy. If she was just interested in profit, she'd be starting a hedge fund instead of going around telling people about Market Economics.
Market Economics fairy should consider starting a hedge fund anyway and investing that money into a lobby group or other means of promoting Market Economics. I sincerely doubt emitting sparkles from her wand is where her comparative advantage lies.
What do you mean? The Market Economics Fairy is way better at emitting sparkles from her wand than anyone else, and has no special talent for managing hedge funds.
Well now you've proved that the Market Economics Fairy should quit her job and found a startup aimed at roboticizing sparkle production. I hope you're happy.
You're missing the unstated corollary to this, or any other discussion of scalpers: 'and prices have to be "reasonable" for whatever demographic we claim to serve or would prefer to serve'.
Hence, you get discussions of young girl singers unhappy that all these icky old men are paying hundreds of dollars for the tickets to her concert, even though the market doesn't clear at the $40 or $60 her preteen fans can spare. (And if an organization does let the price float to its natural level of hundreds of dollars, then you get shocked articles in the newspaper on 'ticket inflation' and angry letters to the editor about how in their day you could get in for a nickel...)
So there is the problem: The ideal of non-discrimination is not compatible with cases where the demographics of event-goers is itself a strong influence on the quality of the event for everyone involved.
Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now, it's complete because it's ended here."
~ Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib, Irulan, Herbert elder
I've never been able to make sense out of that. It sounds very tough and definite, but what does it mean?
Title should read: "Making Stuff Up Is Easy, Overcoming Cognitive Biases and Discovering How Things Really Work Is Difficult: An Exercise in the Obvious"
Reddit user sciencecomic, in response to a headline reading "'Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not'. Emory philosopher Robert McCauley suggests that science is more fragile than we think while religion more resilient – all for reasons coming back to humans' cognitive processes."
The world is a place
made of land and water
and even though it makes
sense in pictures
I do not understand it.
-a kid named Noah. (Hat-tip to Yvain.)
A poem about decision trees:
I think that I shall never see
A decision complex as that tree—A tree with roots in ancient days
(At least as old as Reverend Bayes);A tree with trunk all gnarled and twisted
With axioms by Savage listed;A tree with branches sprouting branches
And nodes declaring what the chance is;A tree with flowers in its tresses
(Each flower made of blooming guesses);A tree with utiles at its tips
(Values gleaned from puzzled lips);A tree with stems so deeply nested
Intuition’s completely bested;A tree with branches in a tangle
Impenetrable from any angle;A tree that tried to tell us “should”
Although its essence was but “would”;A tree that did decision hold back
’Til calculation had it rolled back.Decisions are reached by fools like me,
But it took a consultant to make that tree.
Michael Rothkopf
Rationality promotion:
However, I would advise our readers to be good Bayesian thinkers and consider how easily tonight’s evidence fits in to the perspective they had on the race going into Tuesday evening.
-- Nate Silver, today's 538 blog
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/g-o-p-race-has-hallmarks-of-prolonged-battle/
The original even linked to the wikipedia entry on "Bayesian".
"The Enlightenment is the moment at which explanatory knowledge is beginning to assume its soon-to-be-normal role as the most important determinant of physical events. At least it could be: we had better remember that what we are attempting – the sustained creation of knowledge – has never worked before. Indeed, everything that we shall ever try to achieve from now on will never have worked before. We have, so far, been transformed from the victims (and enforcers) of an eternal status quo into the mainly passive recipients of the benefits of relatively rapid innovation in a bumpy transition period. We now have to accept, and rejoice in bringing about, our next transformation: to active agents of progress in the emerging rational society – and universe."
David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity
Consider for a moment the first primitive amphibian that crawled up out of the sea around 400 million years ago. A contemporary biologist, had any existed, would certainly have classed this species as a rather unusual type of fish, for it would be far more closely related to certain kinds of fish than any other extant species. It is only in hindsight that we can see that it was not a fish, but the first representative of an entirely new class[41] of [vertebrates], the amphibians. But intelligence and tool-using are developments of comparable scope to the ability to breath air and move about on land. I therefore argue that human beings are not primates; we are not even mammals. Homo sapiens is a radical evolutionary phenomenon, the first representative of a new class of [vertebrates].
(The brackets around "vertebrates" are just for a spelling correction.)
Once, as a junior doctor, I was walking through the hospital grounds when I noticed a patient sitting on a bench slashing his wrists with a broken bottle of vodka whose contents he had just drunk. I asked him to come into the hospital where I could sew him up (sobering him up was beyond my powers). He refused and I went to fetch a porter to drag him in by force.
By the time we returned, he had climbed up the fire escape (it was a Victorian building) and clambered over the railings on to a narrow ledge three storeys up, on which he was swaying drunkenly. The porter and I went up the fire escape: the man threatened to jump if we came nearer. We decided we had to make a grab for him; as we did so, he jumped. We held him suspended by his arms three storeys up. First he shouted, “Let me go, you bastards!” and then, “Help, I’m falling!” – a metaphor for the whole of human life, when you come to think of it.
...It's easy to just say, "They're crazy, who can explain crazy people?" and be done with it. It's easy to act like there's a separate species of people that naturally believes only wrong things, like dogs chasing squirrels, or rabbits digging holes.
It's harder to think that these are human beings who probably don't arbitrarily decide on a hobby of being wrong about things because it is fun, and that they're being driven by basic human qualities that we also have, like fear or ego. Or that they feel the need to make larger-than-life monsters and he
Once the demands of acting - and hence deciding - in a time-pressured world are factored into our vision of rational thought, we get a model of the mind vastly unlike the model typically (and dimly) imagined by rationalists in the in the great tradition of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant.
Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room, (Control and Self-Control)
Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever, if but a man.
--Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
..."The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from one point of view, simply silly. From another point of view it is worse than silly, it is vile. When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; ... what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness — then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things fro
What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge. This foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation . . . the dispositions of the enemy are ascertainable through spies and spies alone.
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War
quoted from here in that particular form
... Let us think about the future! Not only praise it, not only worship or shrink in terror from it, not only dream of it or fear it — let us think about it, invent it, prepare for it!..
— Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
...A good test for getting rid of anything is: if we didn't have this, would we need it? For example, let's say you have a ratty old armchair. You love your chair, you do. It was a new chair once and fine, it reclines, and you have spent many cool evenings ensconced in it, drinking Henry Weinhard's and munching Pringles, maybe indulging in a few controlled substances and watching Liquid TV (yes, the chair is that old). But many Pringles and not a little Henry's have made their ways into its funky blue fibers, which are not, in any way shape or form, washable
Everything after "If so - definitely, keep it. If not..." is (a) context-dependent and (b) debatable.
There is no magical unreliability attaching to results just because they are results of single trials.
John Leslie, The End of the World, p. 242 (paperback)
(He is not talking about about trials in the "randomized controlled trial" sense but rather in the sampling sense.)
When someone says they want to annihilate you believe them.
Douglas Murray describing advice from a Holocaust survivor.
Perhaps this should be checked by comparing the number of people who say they want to annihilate a group to the number of attempts at annihilation.
True, but you should first assign appropriate weights to the two categories you mention based on the expected cost of having an incorrect belief.
Many of us spontaneously anticipate how friends and colleagues will evaluate our choices; the quality and content of these anticipated judgments therefore matters. The expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one's decision making at work and at home.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.
— Will Durant, Life, Oct. 18, 1963
...To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one
I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.
-- W. Somerset Maugham
I think if you do anything patiently people mistake it for being genius [...]
-- Nicholas Gurewitch (creator of Perry Bible Fellowship)
Terrible video game: Science was my religion. Now, religion has become my science.
Michael "slowbeef" Sawyer: Oh, that's deep, when you switch the words.
The Sphinx: To learn my teachings, I must first teach you how to learn.
[...]
The Sphinx: He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.
[...]
Mr. Furious: Okay, am I the only one who finds these sayings just a little bit formulaic? "If you want to push something down, you have to pull it up. If you want to go left, you have to go right." It's...
The Sphinx: Your temper is very quick, my friend. But until you learn to master your rage...
Mr. Furious: ...your rage will become your master? That's what you were going to say. Right? Right?
The Sphinx: Not necessarily.
[...]
[Mr. Furious tries to balance a hammer on his head]
Mr. Furious: Why am I doing this, again?
The Sphinx: When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack.
Mr. Furious: And why am I wearing the watermelon on my feet?
The Sphinx: [looks at the watermelon on Mr. Furious' feet] I don't remember telling you to do that.
“It seems to me that often dumb people believe x, smart people believe y, really smart people believe x.”
-- Attributed to Gregory Cochran
[A] single qubit that you understand is better than a thousand qubits that you don’t.
-- Scott Aaronson, in this blog post, reaching out to the pointy-haired bosses of the quantum computing world.
Man gives indifferent names to one and the same thing from the difference of their own passions; as they that approve a private opinion call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy: and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.
--Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
"Shut up and multiply" works for practical purposes too.
(One of my favorite shut-up-and-multiply results: automatic dishwashers cost less than 2 euro per hour saved, so everyone should have one.)
A few from M:TG flavour text.
When nothing remains, everything is equally possible. ~One with Nothing
"Believe in the ideal, not the idol." -Serra ~Worship
"War glides on the simplest updrafts while peace struggles against hurricane winds. It is the way of the world. It must change." ~Commander Eesha
Sometimes, you can spend an expensive five hours hunting on the web for data that a research librarian could retrieve from a reference book in minutes.
~ Pat Wagner
Which occasions? If this were a rationality kata I would immediately ask, "What trigger condition does the person need to recognize that chains into using this technique?"
The strategy was really easy on the paper: no driver mistake, no pit stop mistake, no mechanic mistake, no engineer mistake ... it is so easy to write these things, but it is almost impossible to make it happen.
Dindo Capello, as quoted in Truth in 24 (2009 film).
When learning, you must know how to make the clear distinction between what is ideology and what is genuine knowledge.
There is no such thing as good and evil. There is what is right and what is bad, what is consistent and what is wrong.
-- "Behaviour Guide (in order to avoid mere survival)", Jean Touitou
BEHAVIOR GUIDE (in order to avoid mere survival) Intended for younger generations by JEAN TOUITOU
That is the entire original quote, but not all felt like it belonged here. It's all part of the same, I think.
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
No no, it's not that bad if you try to figure out where the commas go:
Not only are most eccentric opinions that have been held not accepted, those that gain the benefit of the eccentric opinions on their way to being accepted, are not necessarily those that first hold them.
So to rewrite with fewer negations:
Most eccentric opinions are not ultimately accepted. And when those rare eccentric opinions get accepted, their original accepters don't benefit much; but instead, the credit or rewards are reaped by those who accept them later in the acceptance process.
...the other, to change thy opinion, if there is anyone at hand who sets thee right and moves thee from any opinion. But this change of opinion must proceed only from a certain persuasion, as of what is just or of common advantage, and the like, not because it appears pleasant or brings reputation.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.
We produce 30-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer --- our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify that I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but absence of awareness of it.
Nassim Taleb
Now you're looking for the secret. But you won't find it because, of course, you're not really looking. You don't really want to work it out. You want to be... fooled.
--John Cutter, The Prestige
The context in the movie is a bit different, but it's a nice illustration of how people can let themselves be seduced by mysterious answers to mysterious questions, even when they purport to be "looking for the answer."
What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions
The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.
--Albert Einstein
Mandatory for science, generally advisable for anything else.
It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know - and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything.
--Joyce Cary
If you were smart enough to earn a Ph.D. in math, you should be able to learn how to program, once you overcome a possible psychological block. More important, let's make sure that our grad students are top-notch programmers, since very soon, being a good programmer will be a prerequisite to being a good mathematician.
-- Doron Zeilberger - (see also)
You can only become intellectually an adult, so to speak, if you break through domain dependence.
Taleb runs an interesting Facebook, but if you don't want to get a Facebook account, I expect that a lot of this material will be in his upcoming book about anti-fragility (systems which get stronger when stressed).
I just realized that his domain dependence is equivalent to Rand's "concrete-bound mentality"-- in both cases, it's getting stuck on a single example rather than seeing general principles.
Work with people who want to work with you and who are relatively sane.
Time and Robbery by Rebecca Ore
This quote hasn't gotten any karma yet-- it isn't funny, and it seems so obvious as to almost not be worth saying.
Still, I suspect that a lot of trouble is caused by ignoring that advice.
...We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. ... We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs know
I needed reinforcements. "Look," I said, "four billion people believe in some sort of God and free will. They can't all be wrong."
"Very few people believe in God," he replied.
I didn't see how he could deny the obvious. "Of course they do. Billions of people believe in God."
The old man leaned toward me, resting a blanketed elbow on the arm of his rocker.
"Four billion people say they believe in God, but few genuinely believe. If people believed in God, they would live every minute of their lives in supDelenn: They will join with the souls of all our people. Melt one into another until they are born into the next generation of Minbari. Remove those souls and the whole suffers. We are diminished, each generation becomes less than the one before. Soul Hunter: A quaint lie, pretty fantasy. The soul ends with death, unless we act to preserve it.
-- Babylon 5, "Soul Hunter"
...Methodologically speaking, we must be careful to prevent valid insights from degenerating into fantasies and superstition, and not develop the tendency to see an occult background everywhere and at all costs. In this regard, every assumption we make must have the character of what are called "working hypotheses" in scientific research - as when something is admitted provisionally, thus allowing the gathering and arranging of a group of apparently isolated facts, only to confer on them a character not of hypothesis but of truth when, at the end o
Within ten days thou wilt seem a god to those to whom thou art now a beast and an ape, if thou wilt return to thy principles and to worshiping of reason
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.
The intended listener must be doing an awful lot of stuff they already know is wrong. Ten days is a pretty short period of time to impress people as a god, and it usually requires more training and practice to get there. Heck, I still only impress people as a god around 10% of the time, and it took me 17 years to get here from when I first dedicated myself to rationality.
I know that we're different
but we were one cell in the sea
in the beginning
Alison Sudol (singer/composer) The Minnow and the Trout
Delenn: They will join with the souls of all our people. Melt one into another until they are born into the next generation of Minbari. Remove those souls and the whole suffers. We are diminished, each generation becomes less than the one before.
Soul Hunter: A quaint lie, pretty fantasy. The soul ends with death, unless we act to preserve it.
-- Babylon 5, "Soul Hunter"
I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.
-- W. Somerset Maugham
Ohh man, that would be convenient... Actually, given my current schedule, it'd be pretty irritating. I'd spend my mornings sitting in class, fuming that I couldn't just leave and go write all day.